At least I know..

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place ? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."
-- Rene Daumal This quote is very good, I had to read it a few times to really capture its meaning in full but thought how well it summed up my feeling about my experiences over the past 3 years. Since I am blogging I have been thinking a lot about what I have wanted to share with others about the things I have been through and where I am going. Cancer is not something anyone wants to hear that they have. It changes your WHOLE life. It is not just a illness but it’s a lifestyle. Its cloud of loneliness that seems to infiltrate every pore of your being. Cancer. I have always said it cannot define who a person is, but it does. It defines every aspect of the persons life so it does define who you are. In the above quote its basically saying after you have conquered the mountain you will never forget it. You don’t know what’s going to happen before you get to the top, but you know what you went through getting to that top. I want so badly to say I have hit the summit of melanoma, but I firmly believe that only the true angels who have gotten their wings are the ones who have crossed the summit of melanoma.
I want to expound a little about the cloud of loneliness. By loneliness I don’t necessarily mean that everyone has left you and your fighting this all by yourself. I mostly mean that there really are not many who really know what your facing. There just aren’t people who can relate to what your really going through. And when you have hit the part of brain tumors, well, that’s just another level of loneliness. So here I am going to touch a little on this subject so that those of you who may not know what a person with a brain tumor may be going through.
My brain tumors are in different places. I have one in my occipital lobe, which is your visual cortex, and I have 2 in my temporal lobe, which controls your moods mostly, but also behaviors. I guess that explains my behavior the past 2 years at least.. Joke… Well, I don’t have many side effects from the temporal lobe tumors, just the occipital one. I HATE it.. that’s even a understatement. It has effected so much. I have so many issues from it, and, they will never go away. They told me that if I were to have a craniotomy there I would be blind in the center focal area in both eyes. This area is the main area that I see visual changes in. Visual changes like the flashing colored circle which comes on when its active. Now , its stable but upon exertion of any type like exercise, walking to fast, running, riding my bike, cleaning the house to vigorously, vacuuming, or just because sometimes I will get a circle area that looks like a oil spill in my eye, not black, but the colors and everything meld together. I hate it. Recently, I have been seeing this thing only at night now when I close my eyes to sleep, its totally different, it looks like a rattlesnake tail, how it shakes, but its this pulsating light that pulsates like a rattlesnake. I hate that too. Its like its saying…. HA HA… I’m still here, you will never be the same. Its really annoying. I feel that its important also to tell you that I “look” like I am just fine, and I’m thankful for this, but at the same time those people who don’t know why I have that handicap placard look at me like I’m trying to cheat the system. I wish I was.
Going back to that saying in the beginning, One climbs, One sees. I love that. I am seeing all sorts of things, not brain tumor wise though. I am seeing how I must make this into a good thing. I must be able to turn this around, but if you know my life story I do feel cheated. Before I got Cancer, I was just embarking on my career. I had went back to school later in life, after I had gotten a divorce and I knew I couldn’t make it as a single parent on one income( I know differently now), I had pursued my dream as being a Dental Hygienist. I worked in the Dental Field for almost 15 years before I had gotten my Degree in Hygiene. I was a Assistant and I always wanted to be a Dentist but chose Dental Hygiene because at my age, going to Dental School was out of reach. I LOVED it…I Loved how people actually asked me questions and I could answer them with all my knowledge. I could make recommendations to them on the best coarse of action and they would listen to me because I knew what I was talking about. I felt like I was contributing to society. I was helping others. I know that hopefully someday I will be able to do that again but as of right now with the tumor in my Right eye and the visual changes with my brain I could not easily scale or do a good job, nor would I want to put someone in danger. You say, well, you could work doing something else right…wrong. The slipknot I have tethering me is called insurance. I am in a world where I cannot move up or down. I HAVE to have insurance so that those MRI’s and cat scans are covered. The only way to have insurance is to stay on Disability, which means that I cannot make more than 900 extra dollars a month. I then think about life. What does one do when they cant move? They eventually accept. This is where I am. It took awhile to get used to this. I mean I would have never thought that all my hard work to get a degree would be trumped by Cancer. I am finding my new normal. I am finding acceptance with what I have been given. I just need to find what is pushing me to keep scaling that mountain. I will leave tonight with this saying because it is another that means so much when I think about what has happened and causes me to try to find my purpose in this life. Be well. I will write more soon…J 　

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
―
Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit