Passion Bucket

Hello Everyone and thank you for those of you who have been posting on my blog! It really gives me a boost every time I hear from and of my fantastic friends and family members. Currently it is 5:25 AM and I have been awake since about 4:50 AM. Many times I find my best ideas about what to write come to me in the dark of the night when the world is sleeping. It becomes easier to clear your thoughts when you are the only one awake. Here are my thoughts this morning that kept me awake.

On Friday I was told that the treatments are working but I will need to go through additional Chemo to finish up the job and be rid of this terrible disease for good. I would be lying to you if I said that I was overwhelmed and excited about this news initially. I thought about the fact that I would have to spend my beloved Hawkeye Football Saturday's hooked up to an IV receiving more Chemo. I thought about the weddings coming up in the next few months where I wouldn't be full strength and where I wouldn't be able to all of the wedding dancing that I love to do. I thought about how after each Chemo treatment you get a little be weaker physically and it seems to get harder to do the daily tasks that seemed so easy before such as house work, laundry, exercising and being able to do my job to the best of my abilities.

I thought all of these thoughts and then I realized that all of them had one thing in common, the word I. I couldn't do this or I couldn't do that. I was stuck on just me and how these extra treatments would effect my life. As I sit here in the Oncology ward it occurred to me that many of other patients and friends wouldn't be told that there treatments were working as good as mine and that they would be overjoyed if the doctor told them that they had a disease that was curable like mine. I realized how selfish I had been and quickly changed my views about the extra treatments that I would be receiving. Once you take the "I" or "me" out of the situation and think about others that aren't so lucky you see how little the "I" or "me" means in Life.

My degree is in teaching and one of the teaching sayings that would come up all of the time while I was at UNI was "Students will remember a fraction of a percent of the actual material that you teach them throughout there lives but they will remember 100% of the way that you made them feel." I think that this is true not just in teaching but in life. Making others feel good and special is the true meaning of life. In my moment of clarity I realized just how lucky I was that the treatments were working and that I had to work even harder to beat this not for me but for my friends, family and those less fortunate in the Cancer ward with tougher road to hoe.

In conclusion I am now fully ready to kick this 5th round of Chemo's butt and my Passion Bucket for life is overflowing!!!

"Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it."
~Ed Thomas (the late great coach of the Parkersburg, Iowa Football Team)

I am humbled,

Brian

P.S. I cried when I wrote this sitting in my hospital bed at 5:25AM in the dark alone with my thoughts and it felt good to get it out.