Ironwoman

I recently read an article about a woman that I find to be very inspiring.  Her name is Kristin McQueen, and here's her story:

Ten years ago Kristin was diagnosed with metastatic thyroid cancer.  Since then, she has had fifteen major surgeries and has undergone various cancer treatments including radiation on her brain.  To date, she has finished seventeen marathons and nine full Ironman competitions.  She has continued to train during her fight with cancer, she says, because when she's out there on the road she is in control, not cancer.  I think that's pretty badass. 

“Ironman is so much more than an endurance race," she says. "It is not about simply propelling myself 140.6 miles for kicks, it’s about challenging my limits and seeing what’s possible. It’s about reclaiming my body after five neck surgeries, two rounds of radiation, ten brain surgeries, and a slew of acquired physical challenges. It’s about not giving into all the limitations that cancer and its buddies have imposed on me, but viewing them as challenges that ultimately make the race even sweeter by overcoming them. It’s about going from not being able to open my eyes without getting sick, having difficulty sitting upright and being too weak to stand by myself to completing one of the ultimate tests of human endurance. It’s about raising money so that nobody else has to go through what I have. It’s about remembering those who have passed and honoring those who fight every day to live a 'normal' life despite a disease that tries to tear them down.”

As anyone who follows Ironman competitions knows, the Ironman Championship is held in October each year in Kona, Hawaii, and participants in the race have to qualify to enter.  It's "the big one," the granddaddy of all triathlons and one of the most rigorous events in sporting.

This year, the World Triathlon Corporation is giving seven athletes the opportunity to race at Kona though a program called Kona Inspired.  Each entrant in the contest has uploaded a 90-second video showing how their story relates to the theme of the contest, which is "Anything is Possible," and those who get the most votes will get to enter the race.  Kristin wants one of those slots.

If you are also inspired by this Ironwoman, here's how you can help, in three quick and easy steps:

1. Watch this video.
2. Vote for Kristin every day between now and May 7, 2013.
3. Share the info on Facebook and Twitter and any other social media feeds you have - and email the link out to others who may not be into social media.  Ask everyone you know to vote for Kristin!

Kristin, sporting a "SUCK IT, CANCER" message during a race

For at least a dozen years before he got sick, my dad always called or emailed me ahead of time to alert me to whenever an Ironman triathlon was coming on TV so I could watch, and many times he called me on the phone during the race so we could talk about it.  Every single time I have watched an Ironman on TV, I have cried.  I don't mind admitting it; I find not only the talent but also (and probably especially) the dedication and just the raw guts that it takes to go the distance so awe-inspiring, but it's the stories of the back-of-the-packers that get me going every time.  Even if you're not an Ironman fan (an Ironfan?), you know the storyline: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. I'm not sure which trumps which: the tears of the competitors who realize they will not be able to finish - or the tears of those who are crossing the finish line.  Either way, I can't imagine watching the race without being affected by those stories.

My dad wanted so badly to finish an Ironman competition; just a few days before he got sick - which was just a couple of weeks before his debut Ironman - he said he hoped to finish the event in less than twelve hours but that he would be happy just to finish at all.  After months of training and miles and miles on the road and in the pool, his chance to compete in the Ironman-North Carolina in 2010 was stolen from him by cancer, so unbelievably sad and so damn unfair.  As Kristin says, "Cancer is bullshit!"

Kristin has succeeded in finishing an Ironman - in fact, nine of them!  Most people feel they are giving their all when they finish a 5K, even if they are 100% healthy; Kristin has far surpassed that, while battling cancer. By any standard, she is already an Ironwoman, worthy of great respect and admiration for her athletic accomplishments.  The championship race in Kona, though, is within her reach, and I can't think of anyone who better embodies the idea that anything is possible.  With our help, she can make it there.

Good luck, Kristin; cancer can indeed SUCK IT!  I look forward to watching you amongst the other participants in the race on TV in October.  I can guarantee that I'll be watching - and crying.

Lucid Dreaming

I've recently started sleeping to the sound of a white-noise program called Brain Waves, which is available as an iPhone/iPad app.

The program is supposed to influence one's state of mind according to the setting selected by the user by playing sounds that are perceived by the brain in such a way that normal brain waves that occur in various mental states are simulated to promote those states in the listener.

The setting I've been using is called Lucid Dreaming.  (You can probably see where I'm going with this.)  Since starting to use this program, I have had lots of dreams, many not really that interesting - but also a few about my dad.

Last night I dreamed that he and I were running together along a country road, counting telephone poles that we passed as we ran, and at some point my dad said, "I guess you can just go along thinking about how many more poles you have to pass before you get to the finish, or you can stop counting and enjoy the scenery instead."  The rest of the dream ended up being pretty monotonous,  with just the two of us running together in silence enjoying the run, but I woke up thinking about what he'd said to me in the dream and the application of those words to my life these days: rushing from deadline to deadline, working to get past one event to the next, thinking mostly about how I can pass through the things that bring me stress or that make me focus more on my grief.  The point is clear: I can choose to continue doing things that way, or I can choose to focus on the good and enjoy each day along the way.

                Good run, Dad; thanks //

Struggling

Since my dad went on ahead almost two years ago and especially over the past year, I have been struggling with the fact that the way I see him in my mind is as he was when he was sick, but today when I happened upon a picture of myself helping him walk using his walker I was struck by the fact that he looked even more frail than I remembered.  So now I’m troubled by the fact that apparently I don’t clearly see him as he was well or as he was sick, although maybe the latter is for the better.  

It was excruciating to watch Dad struggle and to witness the physical and psychological effects of his illness as it progressed, especially because I felt that we had all but been promised that there would be improvement after he had gotten the "Magic Bullet drug," Avastin. My heart broke for Dad as I watched him struggle to grasp the severity of his illness, time and time again.  As long as I live, I will never forget the look in his eyes when he was struggling to get around on his walker one day not long after he got out of rehab and he stopped for a minute, obviously deep in thought.  I was holding onto the waistband at the back of his pants, and he looked back at me with tears suddenly in his eyes and said, "Am I handicapped?"  

"No, Dad!" I responded. "You've been through a lot, and you're having to work on some things, but you're going to get better."  I was so sure, and, from my perspective, so was everyone else around us, maybe not that he would be cured but definitely that his physical skills would improve with effort and with time.

But that didn't happen. He didn't get better; in fact, he got worse, and little by little his independence and then his life slipped away.  Or maybe I should say they were stolen, or ripped away from us, because saying they slipped away implies that we weren't holding on and fighting tooth and nail every step of the way, which we were, Dad included.

I don't think he realized that the end was very near for him those last couple of weeks; likely, the invaders in his brain - the cancer, the trauma from the seizure and the surgery, the chemicals in his body that collected as his organs were shutting down and could no longer filter out the toxins, and the array of medicines he was taking - clouded his knowledge of his rapidly worsening condition. I hope so - Dad didn’t deserve to be given a death sentence.  It was heartbreaking enough that the rest of us had to know what was coming down the pipe all too soon.  

Silver Linings

"Grief is not just the absence of a loved one: it's the complete and total changing of one's life." ~ Shelley Bosworth

On this day two years ago and over the course of the next few days after it, I learned firsthand how life can change in an instant.  My relatively peaceful life was suspended when I returned from an out-of-town business trip and was told that it had been discovered that there was a large mass in my dad's brain.  

As my family and I started down the road of Cancer and grief and all the things that come with both of those things, we clung to Hope, not just because we wanted to but because we HAD to.  And, following Dad's lead, we got through it by trying our best every step of the way to emulate his glass-half-full perspective by consciously looking for Silver Linings, an outlook that has also served to carry me down some of the darkest alleys of my grief since his passing only ten weeks after his diagnosis.

If there's one thing that can keep someone in the midst of tragedy from falling to their knees in desperation, it's the realization that, in any pretty much any situation, things could always be worse.  There could be so many more things that could be going wrong, things like lack of insurance coverage, poor access to health care, or insufficient family support.  I will never understand why the things that happened with my dad happened, but I can clearly see that we could have encountered so many more obstacles along the way in taking care of him, and I am grateful for the blessings that we had in the midst of what we experienced.

In talking about cancer and death and loss with other people over the last two years, this point has been reiterated time and time again.  Despite the horror and the unfairness and the awful blow of what happened, I still feel lucky, for so many reasons, largely due to the perspective that I was given by my dad.

With that outlook, it's easier to see those Silver Linings, the things that might not have happened otherwise, or at least things that I probably wouldn't have been in a position to notice and/or appreciate.  I believe that Silver Linings exist in almost every situation; we just have to choose to recognize them along the way.  And, to be clear, I'm not saying that I think that Silver Linings can take away the pain or the sadness in a given situation, but I do think they can provide balance and perspective, two things that we may need in grief more than ever before.