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There’s a meteor shower starting tonight, in a couple of hours or less, to be exact. I want to watch it. It’s been so long that I could attach a good memory with falling stars. Someone once told me that falling stars are angels that are speeding past Earth. I’d like to believe that.
Sadly, right now, all I have to view the stars with is Stellarium, a program that shows the night sky in real time, on my computer screens. Let’s face it, even if they make a 30″ computer screen, and I become insane enough to actually convince myself that I need it, it will never be the same as watching the pure white stars, or tiny stars falling from the sky. The night is perfect right now. It’s dark. It’s cool. There’s a light breeze. There are frogs and crickets singing a tune to the twinkling stars. The stars invite….
But I can’t walk.
I cannot make the trip to the back yard or the front yard to view the shower, and that truly sucks. The pain is that bad.
I’m in remission. There are no known cancer cells in my body right now, but I am crippled. Cancer didn’t take away my life, but the treatment did.
Earlier today I found a video of Dracula from the ballet group I danced with a couple of years ago. I watched the graceful movements of my pregnant, bloated body as it pranced across the stage. I was eight and a half months pregnant, but I was still able to dance. I thought back on other memories that were just a couple of years old and how I raced across the court yard to the Pharm building to get to my interview. It was hot and I was dressed in street clothes with my pregnant belly hanging out. But I could walk. I remembered when Chris and I play jousted with our umbrellas in the rain. I remember how scared I was that I would slip and fall on the slippery pavement. But I could stand up then.
Cancer didn’t take away my life. I’m still here on Earth. But it took away my ability to live. I can watch others and replay the memories in my mind until the end of time, but I can never do those again.
My doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with my leg. Shortly after the appointment, the other side started to go. I am faced with over dosing on narcotic pain medication for the last couple of nights. My evenings are memories of nauseated blurs. I am dizzy. I have memory loss. I have severe headaches. Sometimes I think that maybe it would be for the best if the cancer had killed me. If I had laid down and let it win. Lord knows it’s been a long, hard, painful road, and it’s only going to get worse. I can fight it more, even though my body is tired of fighting. I want to lay down, but the battle isn’t quite over yet. If I don’t try, I’ll never know if I could have succeeded. And that would be worse than all the pains I have suffered through.