>There are too many things on my mind tonight for a coherent post. Or maybe not. I’m off to a conference tomorrow in a neighboring big city, and I spent a great portion of my day preparing plans for the substitute teacher who will teach my class tomorrow. We had a staff meeting after school with some pretty heavy issues to deal with. After supper and after helping Amigo with homework, I corrected four — count ’em, 4! — stacks of papers to be added to my gradebook when I get back on Thursday. If my sub corrects the work that’s done tomorrow, I’ll only have a few things to score on Thursday night. If she doesn’t, well, I’ll pour some apple cider for my sore throat and settle myself in for a long haul. I’m overdue for a doctor’s appointment and overdue for a haircut, too.
One of my dearest friends, a wonderful woman who had a mastectomy about 18 months ago, is undergoing more reconstructive surgery tomorrow. I promised her I’d wear pink and send positive thought waves in her general direction while I’m at the conference. What else can a person do? She’ll be in surgery for a minimum of five hours, spend a little while in recovery, and then go right home. Don’t even get me started on the injustice of the drive-through surgical center mentality.
This is someone, however, with an amazing amount of resilience. She sported a “Bad Boob” sign on her right breast the day after she announced the diagnosis. She sewed scarves in a multitude of colors to match her outfits while she lost her hair from chemo. It was a red-letter day when she realized that she had enough hair to have a Bad Hair Day! She began exercising regularly and walked her first marathon roughly one year after her radiation ended. And through it all, she was always there for the rest of us when we needed someone. She also loaned me the feather boa to wrap around the banana — but that’s another story altogether.
Tomorrow, the doctors are re-doing the reconstruction of her right breast and making the left one reasonably equal in size.
With that in mind, my over-due haircut and my sore throat are small potatoes. Mind spinning? Yes, it still is, but it’ll spin a lot less when I know she’s out of surgery and feeling better.