It’s hard to mix optimism and Metastatic Breast Cancer.
Even for people who are more naturally optimistic like Dan.
Today we head back to the Mayo Clinic to find out if Cassie gets to lose the horrible back brace she has been in for ELEVEN weeks! It’s been a particularly tough stretch that has made us feel like our already condensed lives were even smaller. The brace has a huge negative impact on Cassie’s quality of life — both of ours actually — and we’ve grown to loathe it with a passion.
As this day approached, Cassie said “I don’t think we should get our hopes up.” To which Dan immediately replied” “That train has long since left the station.” We are both hoping so much that today is the day. As we’ve noted before, our home is filled with a lot of dark humor and we’ve both recently taken to joking about how much we want to get back to the “good old days” when all we were dealing with was a terminal cancer diagnosis. So we hope and pray that the brace comes off.
But we are not optimistic. How can we be when it seems like most visits to the doctor brings a different form of bad or hard news? You have MBC. You might be paralyzed. You need to wear a brace. Your cancer is growing again. Optimism is in short supply. Even cautious optimism. But that doesn’t mean we’ve lost hope. It just means that our hope now comes with a generous dollop of pessimism.
So here’s hoping that in a few hours we are in Winona for the first time in months and cracking open a good bottle of wine to toast a return to life without the brace. We are not counting on it, or expecting it but we sure are hoping for it.
