My story. I'm a 67-year old grandma of almost 10 (due any hour now) who lives in a 120-year old enchanted cottage on Crystal Bay with my two cats, Peanut and Izzy. I have a really fun story I'd like to share.
My first marriage - at 19 and pregnant -produced three babies and lasted an unhappy decade. At 30, I divorced and single-parented the kids while I went to college full time for over six years. Between cleaning office buildings, grants, scholarships, and a very small amount of child support, I managed to eventually earn two masters degrees. I remarried after a few years and had some help rearing kids, earning income, and running a family life. We were not at all well-matched, but like so many other women in my generation, was taught that you can't make it without a man.
Over the years of an unhappy marriage, I gained a lot of weight. Now, looking back, I think I let myself go because it helped keep me from feeling good or attractive enough to put an end to a relationship that probably should never have taken place. The kids, all successful and married, no longer needed much from me. My now-ex couldn't keep a job for many years, so it felt like having a child who graduated from college, came back home, but never figured out what to do with his life.
As I was about to turn 60, I asked myself this: "Is this the way you want to spend what remains of your life????" You could've heard my resounding "NO!!!!!" five miles away. I took the leap to a second divorce, something that takes a lot of courage, especially at this mature age. It wasn't messy or particularly contentious, helped partly by my ex's passive nature.
All alone, I had no idea how to build a new life, so I took a community ed latin dance class. Then, I tried free style dancing to rock bands locally. I found out at age 60 that not only did I LOVE this activity, I was really good at it! In the first half year of dancing by myself at local venues with live bands, I shed 40 pounds. I didn't even try, it just melted off, so I bought a whole new wardrobe. I also spent about four years discovering that the online dating scene is absolutely brutal for women over 49.
I'm a therapist in private practice and very passionate about my work. I love being a facilitator of going from surviving to thriving. My kids, grandkids, practice, friendships and dancing filled my life with abundance and I'd never been happier, more grounded, or in the present moment before.
Then came the phone call from my doctor; "Nancy, you have esophageal cancer".
I'd experienced difficulty swallowing pills and increasingly frequent painful spasms in my heart area for over a year. Finally, an endoscopy pin-pointed a small tumor at the junction of my esophagus and stomach. I immediately opened a Caringbridge site and, from day 2, wrote my heart out daily for the next several months. It was a lifeline for me, as was a growing circle of angels surrounding me - mostly women I barely knew from my favorite dance venue.
I went through six weeks of chemo and daily radiation and had not one side-effect. They surgically inserted a pic line into my vein which was attached to a 24-hour chemo pump worn around my waist. I danced every single week end with the pic line dangling from my arm. At the end of treatment, I brought in a singing card which played, "do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight" and spontaneously danced for the radiology patients, then the rad staff, then the front desk staff, then the oncology nurses, and - my favorite- my very introverted, soft-spoken oncologist. He was blown away and asked me to do it again. He pulled out his Iphone to record me swinging my ass and doing high kicks, then said he'd keep this the rest of his life. I thought that if chemo and radiation was such a breeze, the upcoming radical surgery would be a cake-walk, too.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
The mid-May operation at Mayo had the surgeons incising 14" up my front and 20" from under one breast around and up the length of my back. They removed my foot-long espophagus, one third of my stomach, and pulled the remaining stomach up to my throat where they attached it. My stomach is permenently in my throat. I had eight tubes placed all over my torso for a week. I wasn't allowed to even sip water for the first month. Every possible complication this surgery could trigger happened to me, starting with double pneumonia. Altogether, I was in the hospital for almost four months on a feeding tube. The worst hell on earth in this entire journey was six weeks in a run-down nursing home. The care was so terrible, that I was rushed back to Mayo for a full week of intensive hospital care.
During those months following surgery, I really thought I might die - not from the cancer or chemo, but from malnutrition. My already "just-right" weight plummeted down, down, down. I went from a size 4 to a 0 by the time my weight stabilized. I thought I'd lost my personality along with my body weight, energy, and spirit. There wer hours of days of weeks of months of barely existing.
Finally, I began to incrementally gained my life back. Slowly but surely my spirit returned. By this past September, I tried dancing again and collapsed after one minute. I was devastated that my body wouldn't do my mind's bidding! Two weeks later, I could dance for five minutes; then ten; etc. I'd be forced to sit down so many times, but eventually I could dance my normal four hours without sitting down once!
I am now 100% functioning and have never felt better. I've been to hell and back, but as Oprah's famous line in the Color Purple, "Sophie's BACK!!". I'm a legend in the western suburbs for my dancing and called The Dancing Grandma by all. I am incredibly grateful for my cancer because, for the first time in my life, I had no choice but to allow others to love and care for me. My cancer has a very high recurrence rate - around 90% - but my life is more abundant in a single day than many experience in a decade or even a lifetime. I am blessed with love and if I only live a couple more years, there is simply nothing I'd do differently than I have. Cancer only helped me realize this.
--Nancy
