The last of the Halloween candy is long gone - save for a stray Jolly Rancher and a couple of obscure flavors of Laffy Taffy. The Thanksgiving leftovers have all been eaten (so why are we still saving some gravy and cranberry sauce?) The Christmas Eve wads of tinfoil-wrapped exotic fishes have finally been eaten to the bones, or tossed - though herring does seem to have a 5-year shelf life. And there isn't even a small Tupperware of the Christmas lasagna (the kind with the little meatballs) stashed in the back of the fridge anywhere (BTW: Why is it that Italian food gets better with age? Seems to be some kind of leftovers taste enhancement phenomenon.)
The two-month holi-daze season has drawn to a close and now it's time to De-Christmas the house. That annual ritual of taking down all of the holiday decorations (finding their respective boxes, bags or assorted containment vessels) and neatly putting them back into hibernation for another 10 months. But as the tagline of this posting challenges me: what's that got to do with Cancer? As stipulated in the mission statement of my blog, I promised to share my odd-servations, for whatever connection or value they may offer.
Some times I'm not even sure what the correlations are between the things that I see/think and my ongoing cancer journey. I could blame the disorientation or uncertainty on my every-other-day tiny maintenance dose of Revlimid (chemo pill), but that would be too easy of an excuse - for a mind that wasn't all that fettered or well-directed before cancer reared it's ugly head. But there just seems to be some sort of feeling of association between putting away all of the seasonal decorations and moving on into the next new year, and putting the challenges of my disease "away" and moving on with my post-treatment cancer life. In both seemingly unrelated instances, we are confronted with the need to: clean up a mess, compartmentalize a lot of stuff, and then move on toward the future - with hope for health and harmony. But there are no guarantees, right?
Who knows what joys or challenges the holiday season of 2020 will bring to us (nor all of the months preceding). And who knows what my cancer life will bring in the future (though a cure for MM seems to be looming on the horizon in test labs around the world - according to Dr. S). So I'm putting the mess and the stress and the duress and the depress of the past two years away ("behind me") and moving on to the next season - of living.
