When It's Just Not Your Time

 

Sometimes inspiration and advice can come to you when you least expect it. This past weekend, my inspiration came from a store manager at a local flooring shop! Wrapping up a week that included a long day on Wednesday at Dana-Farber for the second of four quarterly ADT injections, along with all the routine blood tests and such, I was out running errands over the weekend. One stop involved picking up tile and flooring materials from a local flooring shop for a bathroom remodel project we're about to start. 

My wife and I had been dealing with the manager of the flooring shop, I'll call her Mary, for a few weeks now. Mary was great, she really knew her stuff and helped us both with the design and purchase planning. As we've recently come to appreciate, redesigning a bathroom involves a lot of planning and going back and forth with both the builder and suppliers. For example, it's not like you just pick one tile and you're done. There are separate tile designs for the bathroom floor, shower walls, shower floor, bench, and all of the associated edge pieces and thresholds, etc. 

Mary knew what she was doing and had a very straightforward and direct style. Besides having great design skills, she was meticulous in putting all the pieces of the puzzle together and tenacious in making sure all of the "I's" were dotted and "T's" were crossed. This involved a few meetings and a bunch of follow-up calls and texts. 

As our order started to arrive at the shop in phases, I got texts from Mary asking "when are you going to pick up your order, we have a small storage area". The messages were terse and direct, but this didn't surprise me. I had come to appreciate Mary's style by that point.  The first pick-up last week involved loading up the SUV with enough tile and flooring products to weigh down the vehicle. And Mary wasn't just standing around supervising me loading the car. She was lugging as many of the heavy boxes from the storeroom to the vehicle as I was. 

It was on my second pick-up trip that I was taken aback. I had backed up the car and was getting ready to load more boxes of tile. Mary matter-of-factly stated, "you know I'm a cancer survivor". This came out of the blue! I wasn't expecting it for a couple of reasons. First, I didn't recall that I had even mentioned that I had cancer to Mary, but then remembered that I must have mentioned during our first visit that I was making frequent trips to Dana-Farber in Boston. The second reason her admission came as a surprise was because she seemed remarkably fit and strong. She was lifting and carrying very heavy boxes like it was nothing! And this was after she let me know that she was the same person who unloaded them from the truck that delivered them from the warehouse. 

Mary then proceeded to take a minute to tell me her situation, which totally amazed me. She told me that she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013 which was actually her second bout with cancer. A previously treated stomach cancer from years earlier had metastasized to her lung. Her doctor told her to get her things in order, she had about 6 months to live. Mary was having no part of that and collected all of her medical records and headed to a large hospital in Boston for a second opinion. Her new doctor informed her that her situation was dire but that he felt he could operate. The approach would be to try and remove the tumors and if that didn't work, part or all of the lung would be removed. She ended up having half of her lung removed and a lot of follow-up therapy including radiation and chemo. But she came out the other side completely cancer-free 8 years later. She still goes for routine scans and follow-ups.

She told me that she knew deep down, despite the dire first prognosis, that it "just wasn't her time". She couldn't even process the prospect of an early demise. And she looked at me and told me that she could tell it wasn't my time either. Loading tiles could wait, Mary and I were having a moment and it was very uplifting. She went on to give me a few other tips as well. 

Mary advised me to stay away from support groups – she was not a fan. Since she never thought of herself as a cancer patient/survivor, she didn’t see much value in being part of a group whose primary focus was to talk about the disease. She wanted to only focus on the positive. To a certain extent, I can see her point. When I first joined a few Facebook cancer groups, the first few stories I stumbled upon all just happened to be positive. Stories of people reacting well to treatments and largely putting cancer behind them. But then I started reading accounts of cancer patients who were not so fortunate and in the late stage of the disease. These accounts can really make your heart sink, and if not careful, can also cause you to get discouraged and lose your compass. My own view is that in order to get the most out of support groups one has to find encouragement from the success stories and to be ready to offer support and compassion to those in difficult situations, rather than being discouraged by their stories. We are all human after all.

Lastly, she told me about her visualization technique. At various times during the day, she would meditate by picturing healthy cells in her body, "gobbling" up the cancer cells. She used her hands to demonstrate in a way that almost reminded me of Pac-Man. 

I left the tile shop that morning, car loaded down with another load of tiles, with hope. I will continue to focus on the positive and remember that it's just not my time now.