Blog

We are both big baseball fans. The Twins and the Cubs are our favorite teams and we are more than a little heartbroken that they both had early exits from this year’s playoffs (though given that the Cubs won the World Series in 2016 and then Trump won, maybe their early loss this year is a good thing?) 

Dan’s dad was a HUGE baseball fan. He often used to say that baseball is a great analogy for many parts of real life. That observation has felt especially relevant to both of us recently. 

They say that the hardest act in all sports is hitting a baseball. It’s hard to prepare yourself for the different pitches because you never know what’s coming. Fastballs are probably the easiest to hit but then there is that damned curveball.

We’ve been talking about curveballs a lot lately. It seems like each time we feel that we are beginning to settle into a groove with this whole Metastatic Breast Cancer thing (learning to hit the fastballs) along comes some new crazy curveball.

The latest unexpected curve doesn’t even have anything to do with Cassie’s cancer. About a year ago, she began to experience bad pain in her back. After ruling out further cancer metastasis, it was diagnosed as a herniated thoracic disc. While it’s pretty uncommon to have a bad disc in that region of the back the doctors still thought it would cure itself as do most similar injuries.

Well it didn’t. The pain has only gotten worse and after a number of further consultations, and a second opinion at the Mayo Clinic, the recommended course of action is surgery. Yes, even surgery for someone with Metastatic Breast Cancer. It’s suggested because the risks of NOT having the surgery are potentially severe including what the doctors termed “a real possibility of paralysis” if we don’t act. 

And of course it’s not just any surgery. It will be a complicated procedure likely necessitating multiple days in the hospital and a long and hard recovery. So once again we feel like we have been hit by a truck, or rather to torture the baseball analogy, like we have been hit in the head by an errant curveball. We are worried and frightened. We feel isolated (thanks Covid) and overwhelmed. We keep saying “enough already” and it’s “too much” but then one of us always says — “yeah but it doesn’t get to be too much” and we just have to deal.

So that’s what we are trying to do. Even though, like almost everybody else in the midst of this pandemic and election season, we are exhausted and depleted. We don’t get to pick and choose the curveballs that come at us, we only get to decide how we react to them. To us that means remembering that every day we get to make a choice between hope and despair. Most days we choose hope and we move forward. And on the days that we can’t choose hope, where it all just feels too overwhelming, well on those days we remember that we get to make the same choice all over again the next day.

This latest curveball sucks. The surgery is going to suck and the recovery will probably suck as well. But all that said, we choose hope because that’s the only bat that will allow us to hit this curveball and the next. And who knows, a little more hope may even get the Twins and Cubs back to the World Series one of these days. 

My birthday was last weekend. On a birthday morning walk with a close friend, I found myself saying: “It’s just 53 not at all a significant birthday.” Then I almost immediately contradicted myself by adding: “But if we have learned anything recently it’s that there is no such thing as an insignificant birthday.” 

There is no such thing as an insignificant birthday. So simple but also a new mental frame. Who cares if the birthday doesn’t end in a zero or five? Every year we have is special and worth celebrating just because we have it. For me and Cassie, every birthday is a now poignant reminder that we are each still alive and choosing  to live our lives as fully and full of love as we can.

Early on, after Cassie’s Metastatic Breast Cancer diagnosis, a number of people said something that I found strange at the time. They remarked: “Well any of us could die anytime — I mean we could be hit by a bus tomorrow…” I still don’t know why people felt compelled to say that to us, but I found myself thinking about it a lot. Sure any of us could die at any time but most of us don’t live our lives that way. We don’t focus on the things that matter most or allocate our time as if we only have a limited amount of it left. Why not? 

I think it’s because while we say it we don’t really believe it. We think (especially well-off white people) that we are almost guaranteed to live to a ripe old age and to have all the time we need. Well for me that myth was shattered with Cassie’s cancer diagnosis. While I sure hope that all the data is wrong and that she lives for a long time yet, I am not planning on it. I want to live each day like we have limited time left because that’s likely the reality. I want to make the most of each day and each year and that’s why there are no longer any insignificant birthdays.