What is it about hospital beds?

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and it's because it's been a while since I have had any semblance of clarity about things, and believe it or not my latest moment of clarity came laying in a hospital bed again a couple of days ago; no, nothing scary (I assume...), just waiting for the radioactive sugar that they pump into your veins to make it's way through your body before they do a PET scan. It's part of the post treatment monitoring regimen but it can make you downright buggy. Yet in the middle of a somewhat stressful process I found myself in a familiar and vaguely comforting place, lying in a hospital bed... It was a little bit of "wow, I went through a lot of heavy stuff recently" and big portion of "wow, and I went THROUGH it...". I was able to plug back into the knowing that everything is going to be alright, no matter what, an awareness that I had, frankly, not felt in a while. Part of the learning process attached to this disease is trying to find the right balance of how much the consciousness of cancer needs to remain a part of your life. What role should it play? The doctor said to forget cancer, can't do that, but dwelling on it is definitely not good. I don't have cancer, I had cancer. I have to monitor myself to make sure it's not back but just as importantly, I have to work on making sure it won't by taking care of myself in ways that I always failed to before. After being done with all the treatment there's an impulse to completely erase the experience from your mind, to just forget it all, but you can't erase it to the point that you go back to risky behavior, and by risky behavior I mean diet and exercise (or lack thereof). There's a lot of learning to do, and every time you are smart enough to make the right food choice or do something good for yourself in the back of your mind you are thinking "oh right, I forgot, I'm eating this because it's a good anti-cancer food", or some statistic you have read about green tea or walking or eliminating sugar pops into your head, so I don't know how much erasing you can do really.

I trust that there is a happy medium that you arrive at someday, the right balance between remembering and forgetting, a way to maintain the good things that came out of a difficult experience, and a way to trust that just because something bad happened once doesn't mean it's predetermined to happen again. And oddly enough, that hospital bed brought me back to a place that I learned is not all that scary, to the place where you realize you are all alone in an experience, and being alone is OK, because we always are really. Only you on your own can feel what it means to live your life, and really living your life in that awareness is a gift.