The Countdown to Surgery Begins
I am so sorry that I haven't written in a while. I have been travelling a lot for work and for pleasure. First, I spent a week in Los Angeles for business. I had a ton of meetings and finished the week at the Kid's Choice Awards. It was an amazing event and I was thrilled that the show received the highest ratings and most kid votes (91MM!) in the show's history. In addition to attending the awards show, highlights of the week for me were going to a live cast reading of SpongeBob SquarePants and sitting at a restaurant near Turtle from Entourage. You gotta love LA!
While I was there, I worked at the local Equinox (down the street from my hotel). I was so excited to see one of the General Managers who I had met earlier in the year. He wants to bring Cycle for Survival to the West Coast which is very exciting.
Then, I spent a wonderful week in Arizona with Dave's family. It was absolutely beautiful and so much fun to just relax and hang out with my nieces. We had a great time! I realized
when I slowed down, that it had been a long time since I was able to focus on me and the upcoming surgery. Unfortunately I found that when I had some down time, I started to think a lot more about the surgery and got a bit sad. For me, the hardest part is never the surgery (although it is extremely painful). The hardest part is not knowing what is to come after. My guess is that the doctors will tell me to go back to a period of "watchful waiting" where I get CT scans every 3 months and we hope the tumors don't return. For me, this has always been the hardest part.
But, I refuse to spend a lot of energy thinking about what's to come and I will chose to focus on "now". I just found out that two of my friends who I met through cancer treatments at MSKCC will be having surgery the same week as me (1 the same day and the other the day after). So, I guess it will be a social surgery! Since it is so hard to walk after surgery (they cut my stomach down the middle and then sew me back up), I told my friends that my goal will be to get to their side of the hallway by the end of the week :)
I will write again soon!