Where's the Tastier Tasting Food and The Smellier Smelling Flowers? What am I missing here??

I read an article recently that was titled something like, "10 Things I've Learned From People Who've Had Cancer."  It was about what you'd expect:  stuff like, "People who have cancer cherish every moment of every day.  People who have cancer don't mince words they tell you what they really mean.  People who have cancer don't care what other people think.  People who have cancer notice that flowers smell smellier and food tastes tastier."

I've decided to think of my experience with paranganglioma--since thus far mine has been/is localized--as  'pseudo-cancer.'  I didn't do chemo and there's a lot of fuzziness about the benign/malignant classification in general, but it was a tumor and I will always be looking for recurrence and metastasis.  Pseudo-cancer is how it feels.

So anyway.  I've read some of these articles and I've read things from other survivors who I really admire and I hear this theme emerge.  It's the smellier smells, tastier tastes, more colorful colors theme.

One of the reasons I feel like I haven't found my story is this:  I haven't had this major epiphany that other survivors have.  I still spend too much time on Facebook.  I still take my kids and my husband for granted too often.  I still forget to stop and smell the roses.

And so I kind of feel like:  What's wrong with me?!

Why haven't I had this experience of enlightenment?  Why am I not blissed out all the time just basking in the blessings I've been given?

Am I the most ungrateful brat of a Pseudo-cancer survivor that anyone has ever met?  Is that it?

Throughout the experience I really have tried to focus on gratitude.  And my family is pretty darned important to me and while my kiddos can and do tromp all over my very last nerve on a regular basis I adore them and I'm surprised by my delight in them daily.  Still, I get bogged down in the banal and frustrated with the tiny and frankly I don't feel like I've had a major shift in my experience and perception of life.  The changes that I sense in me aren't nearly so inspiring and touchy-feely.

My sense from these articles and from the stories of some cancer survivors that I've read about though is that they keep themselves in that head-space of sweetness and ultimate perspective.  I don't feel like I've developed any heightened sense of that perspective and I am easily led astray into being stressed out about my dentist appointment (two fillings today...  ouch!) or my lost keys or whether or not I paid the credit card bill last month.

I feel like there must be something wrong with me for not reaching this zen post-pseudo-cancer experience place of clarity.

I don't know.  Maybe I'm just not there yet.  Maybe it comes after some of the shock and fear and the initial looking over your shoulder and just plain tiredness start to wear off.  Maybe it's part of the reality that we all 'feel and deal' differently.  Or maybe it's part of the overly idealized cancer survivor story culture that has been created.  I'm just not sure.

I think that part of me is afraid that I've missed a big God message here.  Was there a sign in the sky that I was missing to tell me what the positive nuggets of this experience were supposed to be and how my character and my world-view should have been transformed?  Did I miss the boat?  Because instead of having this new higher-level perspective I just feel more boring.  I don't laugh as easily, I'm more serious and sober.  I don't quite do 'just having a good time' very well anymore.  I'm no Eeyore.  I am still looking for the 'gratefuls' and holding onto faith while I "Count It All Joy," but my happy-go-lucky got up and went elsewhere.

So...  Am I missing something?

I hope that God will fill in the gaps, if the gaps do indeed exist.  I hope that He will continue to help me make sense of it all as I process all this.

In the meantime, if you know the trick to making your food taste tastier and your flowers smell smellier, could you let me in on the secret password?  This experience was big and hard and scary enough....  I don't want to have to go through a hairier one to get that point!

How do I get to "Normal" from here?

I stumbled upon this article today with a sigh of relief.

You mean I'm not the only one?!!!  Paraganglioma not quite exactly being cancer notwithstanding, I find that I'm relating strongly to stories of how people feel after surviving the Big C.

We evicted Tomas in February, had our follow-up in March and in the meantime we've kind of been marinating in this new space.

I wish I could tell you we were marinating in normal.  But I don't feel normal.  I mean...  Tomas is gone and we finally got the genetic testing results and they were unbelievably--NEGATIVE?!--at least for the two most highly suspected mutations.  And yeah I've got little nodule Tomasito on the neck but here we are in a holding pattern which means that I should just be sprinkling fairy dust and rainbows of happiness behind me with every step I take, right???

Oh.  I wish.  I just don't work that way.  I mean....  I can be whimsical, but I've never been light enough in any sense of the word to do the whole Tinkerbell routine.  It's just the truth.

Don't get me wrong I've got the important kind of joy:  The kind that is unshakable in the face of even things like Tomas and worse because I know that I am Abba's beloved and He cares for me.  But I find that outside of that particular stream of joy the rest of my emotions can be rather variable.

I'm a girl who battles depression off and on.  And this was a tough year.  A really tough year.  And as I mentioned in the previous post there are still plenty of loose ends.  By and large I just keep waiting to feel happy and relieved and instead I find I just feel discombobulated.

I can't just "Go back to normal," because I'm a different person now.  I'm a person who has not just been hit with a serious illness as a family member, but now the dragon of cancer or at least pseudo-cancer has come knocking at my own door.  No, I didn't go through radiation or chemotherapy, but from diagnosis to surgery it was 8 full months.  Plus the post-op infection and now...  Tomasito.  That's a long time to live in the shadow of an illness.  I didn't come out unchanged.  Neither did my family.  We know now for better or for worse--and yes, some of it is definitely for better--that ANYONE can be that 1 in a million person.  We just can't take it for granted that the crazy story or difficult misfortune won't happen to us.

(On the flip-side, we're now more likely to sign ourselves up for drawings and take those surveys they give out at restaurants with the potential promise of gifts and good-fortune....  You gotta make the Zebra luck work for you once in a while!)

But I've survived.  I am surviving.  I am a survivor.  And isn't that a happy thing?

Yes of course!  But it's a sober kind of happy.  It's a deep breath, long sigh, look over your shoulder kind of happy.

I resonated so much with the article, but especially with this:

  Time to celebrate and move on, right? At least that’s what I was hoping, but it didn’t work out that way. I was glad the cancer was gone, but instead of feeling elated, I was like, “Now what?”...... Everything had changed, and I had no idea how to get back to “normal.”

I looked different. I felt different. Yet I was told to “move on.” Certainly everyone around me had done so, and they wanted me to as well. But I didn’t know how. I was confused and had no one to talk to. I felt guilty holding on to my cancer experience when everyone else was elated at my “survival,” but when it came down to it, I had nothing else to hold on to.

I can't tell you how emphatically I nodded at these paragraphs.  I mean, you could hear the proverbial BBs rattling around the boxcar of my brain I was nodding so hard.  It's hard to explain, and yet she did.  I feel guilty holding onto my experience while everyone else has moved on or is in, "You should celebrate," mode.  But I haven't made sense of it yet.  I haven't processed it.  I take a looong time to process things and I don't do a good job of attending to that job when I'm *in* something.  I need time and distance to start looking at things and figuring out how they integrate into who I am.

I subjected myself to a Mary Kay makeover done by a very good friend, yesterday.  As my girlfriend chatted about the importance of eradicating the wrinkles and 'lines of emotion' on our faces, a small part of me couldn't help but think, "Hey look--I may only be 30 and I may be Queen Frumpy who specializes in Goobie Headed fashion, but Darn it, I earned these wrinkles!"  I feel like an old 30.  A sober one.  Life has piled up high in it's sweetness and it's goodness but also in it's difficulty and it's travail.  If I have wrinkles and grey hairs already, it's because I've earned them.

I'm not saying it's all long-faces around here.  I try not to be TOO morose.  I've learned to whistle in the dark and talk in humorous terms about things that are serious, and quite frankly, scare the pee-wadding out of me. I've been told I've even elicited a giggle or two out of this-here blog.  All that said, I'm still not necessarily sprinkling fairy dust over here.  I may be even more thinkative than before--if that's possible!  I am processing life with yet another pair of lenses.  They are lenses of survivorship, but maybe survivorship isn't so much about feeling invincible after facing a challenge.  Maybe it is more about knowing your own vulnerability and the vulnerability of the ones that you love and walking on anyway.  That kind of thing is heavier than pixie-dust, and doesn't look as smiley sometimes, but I think it's still good stuff.

So I'm working on finding my way to Normal (I'm told it's a town not far from my Sister-in-law's place in IL....), but I know from previous walks through difficult times that it will be a new normal.  I can only hope that I will like the Val of the new normal a little better and that God will use the hard stuff--has used it, is using it, will use it even if there is more to this story--to His glory.