Life as I know It

A Getaway To Remember

As I’m writing this, we are experiencing an amazing Victoria Day weekend at a cottage in Turkey Point. My son in law decided to treat his dear wife, children and myself to a vacation without conditions, work commitments, obligations or pressures.

Absolutely divine. 

In getting ready for this weekend, I realized how much I miss life being normal, being excited about the everyday, including…

Gratitude breaks through the darkest moments...even when the darkest moment is living with an extremely rare, hard to treat cancer.

Gratitude.

Without it, we are left lost in our criticalness, negativity, sense of doom, hopeless victims of our circumstances and/or other’s harm.

Gratitude has the powerful energy to break through the darkest of moments. Even cancer.

I liken it to light in a dark room, illuminating the moment with a different perspective. Like being in a tunnel, we only see what is right in front of…

Appendix Cancer: the rare of rare

Nothing prepares you for the worst.

Being diagnosed with cancer rocks and changes one’s world. Regardless of whether it’s a common or more complex cancer, the process to accept the reality feels very much the same.

Cancer is, by nature, unpredictable and a robber on so many, many levels!

Treatment protocols vary and outcomes are not guaranteed as each is dependent on the unique…

As I sat in the waiting area for the technician to release me to go home with the words that there wasn’t a pulmonary embolism on my heart scan, I kept looking at my phone to hear from my daughter, anticipating her text saying she was ready to meet me at the hospital as had been preplanned.

But there was an eery silence. 

Instead she was across town at a different hospital having her…

Living Life/Facing THE Challenge

It’s been several years since I’ve last written a blog post. Lots has happened as I’ve broken free and am living life; some of which I will share in future writings, including plenty of lovely things like remission from my cancer, twin grandsons being born, two knee replacements and tons of incredible experiences. 

As you’ll notice, I’ve changed the title to Living Life/Facing THE Challenge. 

Happiness is…..

I so wanted figure skates. Living in Edmonton I spent a great deal of time at the Laurier Heights community centre plus my school had its own rink so skating was an integral part of life. Every winter you would find me eagerly glued to our black and white tv watching national and world championships. Figure skates were on the very top of my christmas list. I was pretty sure I was going to get…

Pushing reset, changing shoes and carrying loads

Sometimes you just have to push the reset button on life.

Not that we can have a clean slate and start all over but it certainly helps to stop, think it through and reset yourself on a wise path again.

Albeit my last few months have had some tough moments and the perfect storm I’ve alluded threw me off course, they were all part of my story intertwining with others. Frankly, almost all of it was…

The Wind taken out of our sail

I had an extraordinarily lousy last quarter of 2015.

Mind you, most of the year had some unpredictable and unfortunate challenges but it was the perfect storm I wrote about in October which set the last three months on a tailspin.

The wind was (figuratively) taken out of my sail.

  Albeit the sun has been shining in my world through some amazingly wonderful turn of events, other parts of the…

I have seldom felt sad at Christmas. Certainly, there have been difficult times in the past but not the kind of sadness that takes over the season.

This year is different.

And that’s okay.

It’s not that the reason for the sadness is okay, because it’s not. I had a loss this year I hadn’t seen coming so when I listen to christmas music, I can feel a sense of grief welling up from inside that…

Post-chemo humour and stress management strategies for "pulling your hair out" frustrations.

After complimenting me on my haircut from across the room, she walked right up to me, grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled, asking me “Is this your real hair?” Stunned, I looked at her with shock and sputtered in response, “Yes, it came back this way after my chemo treatment.”

Seriously?!! Are you kidding me?

Certainly a questionable thing to do to any cancer survivor, especially considering…

Today I give those who suffer with war related PTSD my full respect and regard. I honour you for not only living day by day with PTSD, knowing that traumatic memories are ever present in your mind/body/spirit, but I respect you for enduring the daily struggle to live. May we take our turn, stand up and fight for you today; that more resources can be made available so you, too, can be free of PTSD's grip. Thank you for giving us freedom. May we partner for yours.

As always true for any ‘significant day’, my newsfeed is blowing up with Remembrance Day/Veterans Day posts.

Everything from commentaries on how we need to refrain from Christmas decor until the 12th in order to honour those who diligently stood for our freedom, to amazing tributes about personal heroes/family members to satirical pictures depicting the irony of honouring one faction of those…

Silence is one of the greatest gifts in life, yet as Westerners we have difficulty unpacking and embracing this vital commodity. In my own life, when silence is missing or seasons of inconsistency due to external demands (like over my recent weeks), life can quickly move from calm to chaotic as the urgent overtakes the quiet. Best to consider how to integrate silence into our busy lives by making a deliberate and intentional choice to prioritize it into our daily schedules. For the sake of your health!

For the last seven weeks my life has moved at lightening pace. Since my perfect storm in late September, taking the time to breathe long enough to expend quality time writing a blog post worth submitting, let alone just sitting in silence and inhaling the moment has been scattered and inconsistent as the next immediate thing pops up for my attention.

I’m not complaining. In fact, it’s been a…

Many of us struggle with a sad heart. This could be due to grief, or chronic depression or seasonal affective disorder. Like the beautiful autumn leaves falling to the ground our tears fall from our sad hearts. For some this means a dark winter season; for others we glide through each season unaffected. Regardless, we need to walk alongside each other's hearts with TLC.

Why are you so downcast? What has affected your heart so much that your eyes tell the story of disheartenment? For some, this is their ‘normal’, sometimes referred to as chronic depression. Others have specific episodes of SAD during the darker days of the year, Then there’s the occasions when the heart is hurting or broken and the grief lasts for a season.

Whatever your ‘sad heart’ is about, we…

A sad heart….

Why are you so downcast? What has affected your heart so much that your eyes tell the story of disheartenment. For some, this is their ‘normal’, sometimes referred to as chronic depression. Others have specific episodes of SAD during the darker days of the year, Then there’s the occasions when the heart is hurting or broken and the grief lasts for a season.

Whatever your ‘sad heart’ is about, we…

I've always wondered what a baby 'sees' in those first few hours after birth. In this post, ‘a story worth seeing’, I consider what I might have seen if I had eyes to see after my own birth. To live authentically is to ‘see' with the eyes of the heart. Gratitude (a timely subject for this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend) lives and communicates out of a grateful heart. My story, albeit full of complicated, difficult and heartbreaking stuff, also is ripe with wisdom and insights gained over the years. It’s my hope that in reading my ponderings, you will look and ‘see’ into your own story. It is, after all, a matter of the heart.

I recently had my birthday. The amazing part is that I never expected to reach this age or beyond. When I was young I decided the likelihood of reaching this number was never to be part of my story. Don’t ask me why. I was just convinced that it wasn’t in my destiny.

On some scale, I had already written my last chapter with that belief.

I was pondering my baby picture, the one taken a few hours…

"As the proverb in the ancient biblical text states, ‘guard the heart for it is the wellspring of life‘. It carries the life blood of our entire self and if not kept clean and purified, we will end up with similar problems (metaphorically) as the physical heart. In fact, since our body is so connected to our psyche, it is now well proven that one directly affects the other. The emotional heart, like the physical heart, can become ‘plugged’ with hardness due to unresolved issues, where resentments pile up causing an interruption in the steady flow of love going in&out of our heart; even altering the health of our physical heart in the process. With this in mind, it’s imperative to consider the condition of our emotional heart." With a checklist this post reviews the need for a 'check-up', where we 'check for' specific underlying issues, maintaining a regular 'check-in' to be sure to 'check-out' of toxicity, and put the supports in place to ensure an emotionally healthy heart.

Since my heart showed abnormal beats following my last surgery, I needed to stay hooked to a monitor for 48 hours. Likely due to the anesthesia, it reacted to the assault of a foreign substance; something I am coming to find is typical for my post-chemo ‘normal’.

           Just as our physical heart has a beat so does our emotional heart.

As we absorb psychological stress, the impact affects the…

So much can be said about a broken heart but when you have one, it helps to remember that the grief is very real, appropriate and the broken pieces of the heart can be repaired and restored to wholeness. "How do you mend a broken heart" is the song lyric stuck in my head as I've listened to many a story and experienced my own heart breaks. The next series of posts will talk about the heart, its grief and its joys, its natural beat and sharing its love with vulnerability and authenticity.

The other day I was speaking with someone about their broken heart. The conversation came out of nowhere but when she started to speak, I felt my heart break as she told me what had happened. I’ve heard many stories like hers and certainly have experienced my own heartbreaks. Several in my lifetime, to be honest. Each time the song (written by the Bees Gees in the early 70’s) “How do you mend a…