"You don't know it yet, but we're the lucky ones... "

I've been mulling this one over for quite awhile. And I still don't think I have it quite handled, but I'm fairly sure I am not thinking about this the same way Lance thinks of it.  Well, natch... I'm not nearly as fast on a bicycle as he is and besides, I'm just a *few* years older. 

Originally, I read this remark that someone sent to Lance Armstrong when his cancer diagnosis became widely known. At that point, Lance was far from coming out the other side of the experience. And when I re-read the book - "It's Not About the Bike" - the remark struck me anew and has been with me ever since.  I'm not the only one to take note, because a brief search shows several people quoting these words. How are cancer patients the lucky ones?  Hmm?

Well, let me digress for a minute.  Or maybe a couple of minutes.  I have friends who have been fighting much more serious battles than I have with this cancer. People who have reached the point of saying they weren't sure anymore why they're doing it. People who woke up in the morning and wanted to just die because they were (and are) so tired of the whole process. Doctors appointments, needles, pills, bills (OMG the bills!) and worse than the bills, insurance fights... all that in the midst of that having to give up their whole self-concept.  All of it.  And then re-define themselves.  It is another example of letting go of what we hold dear, willingly or not.  I only know the barest edge of that... and while I'm thankful for that, it humbles me and makes me wonder why I write as if I know?  Really, I was more concerned about the changes to my life than I was about the cancer (which several people close to me thought was outlandish...and rightly so!).  But here I am, writing anyway... and I won't stop. :-)  But back to the point of the post...

So what about it? What makes someone who has a life-threatening disease consider themselves lucky? Or more broadly, what is it about going through an intense adversity that changes people into thinking - and perhaps more importantly - feeling that they are somehow chosen?  Parallels abound once the question is made a bit broader and I find it begins to make sense within that context. Some of the parallels that come to mind - military experience (which I don't have), intensive training (which I know very well) - and now that I think of it, it seems the common thread is a sense of surviving something.  Going through a difficult passage and finding the result of the struggle has produced a different perception, a different approach, a different person still moving into the future, but now (as Eliot said) no longer at ease in the old dispensation. No longer living the same... perhaps more conscious, more aware than ever before.
There are spiritual examples as well, and our myths are full of the struggle, the passage, and the changeling that results from it all.

It has been good to write about this. And I celebrate the struggle even while lacking understanding of it and the mechanics of it.

And I celebrate being on the downhill slope of the radiation treatments. #17 done today.  Eleven more to go!  Woot!