Come Someday

My fellow blogger Paul, the author of http://www.onemansjourneywithmelanoma.blogspot.com/, recently wrote a very thoughtful post about his struggle to resume his old life before cancer, after completing treatment and entering the “watch and wait” phase of life with melanoma that just might return someday with a vengeance. He wrote that he feels like the subject of a wildlife documentary who’s been shot from a helicopter with a tranquilizer dart and then wakes up groggy after being released back into the wild, wondering what in the hell just happened.

I wish I had some sage advice to offer, but I surely don’t. I’m approaching my eight-year anniversary of completing biochemotherapy and am enjoying good health. But I’m still working on adjusting to a new reality and accepting that life will never be the same as it was before my diagnosis. Not worse by any means, just different, and in so many ways richer and more rewarding and satisfying-- because this damn disease led me to first reexamine and then reorder my priorities in life. I no longer believe there will ever come a “someday” when life goes back to “normal”, and have slowly but surely come to understand that this is a great blessing. And I think that Paul has figured that out much quicker than did I.

Paul is, I believe, a parrothead, so I’ll end these rambling thoughts with a new version of Jimmy Buffett’s “Come Monday”, remembering my own first year of a new life at the Hotel Melanoma…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DnBwdBhS3c&feature=related


Headin' up to the Pavilion
For some clinic day checkup fun
I've got my best game face on
I guess I never have met more cancer docs so
droll
And cancer I didn't know
That I'd be hatin' you so

Come someday, it'll be all right
Come someday, I'll enjoy normal life
I spend four crazy days in a chemo round haze
And I just want control of my plight

Yes, it's been quite a summer
Two new scars and scanned my brain
And now it’s time for infusions
Something docs failed to explain
And cancer how I hate you so
That's the reason I must let you go

Come someday, it'll be all right
Come someday, I'll enjoy normal life
I spend four crazy days in a chemo round haze
And I just want control of my plight

I can't forget cancer
It’s that much a part of me now
Remember that day in the clinic
When docs said there was no room for doubt

I hope I’m becomin' cancer-free
I’ve heard some statistics that scare
I must get poisoned for four days
The cure I've heard is quite rare
Biochemo has made me quite thin
I just can't wait to grow some new skin

Come someday, it'll be all right
Come someday, I'll enjoy normal life
I spend four crazy days in a chemo round haze
And I just want control of my plight

I spend four crazy days in a chemo round haze
And I just want control of my plight