Riding The Wave – Multiple Myeloma

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.” – Horace 65-68 B.C. 

I have subscribed to a blog called Study Hacks for some years now. I’m a HUGE fan. This author doesn’t blog every day or even every week. But when he does, it is a turn your thinking on it’s head sort of experience. In a really good way. I have spread his blog around to many of my friends who have young children or kids getting ready for, or even in college. He writes it for the college kid, but really, for parents, it is a wonderful thing to read and rethink the cliches that pop out of our mouth. Things like, “find your passion and you’ll be happy” and so on.

Anyway, this morning I received his latest post. I was struck with how timely it was, given my recent support group talk and some of what I hope to convey through this blog about the overwhelming struggles we sometimes feel as caregivers and patients dealing with Multiple Myeloma. When I try so hard to bring you some calm, peace, point of view that might be different than all the years of what you thought about having cancer. Watching it happen to “other people” and how you thought about it. And now, here you are, dealing with this life changing obstacle that is burying you and stealing everything from you as you struggle to SURVIVE! Then you struggle to survive better because the treatment has changed your QOL! Oh I could go on and on…

I used to tell my children that life wasn’t just about their successes and their strengths. Their gifts, if you will. We all have them. We are all good at some things and really stink at others, and the rest well, we get by. When you are growing up, and sometimes even as adults, we compare ourselves to others and feel inadequate or less. We yearn for what they have. Their speed in a track and field race. Their ability to get A’s all the time in any subject with seemingly little study. Promotions at work. Then sometimes we begin to focus on their outpoints in order to make us feel somehow better. I urged my children, parents and friends, to understand that life is really about overcoming one’s inabilities, deficiencies, difficulties and weakness. That’s truly what builds one’s character. Goodness, gracious, remember Helen Keller! It is what I admire most in a person when I meet them and learn of “their story.” It is why I share my life with you so often. If you meet me and don’t know these things about me, you think “She’s LUCKY! She’s got it all.” Whatever, you might think. So when appropriate, I share… My father, my hero, my friend and mentor, died when I was 12! My mother became an alcoholic, and on and on. I have a lot of tragedy in my life. I wouldn’t assume I have it all, easy, or am LUCKY! But then again, I would agree with all of that. But not without understanding that I have it all in spite of the tragedies and difficulties in my life. All of these experiences, including myeloma, has given me gifts and treasures beyond the world’s view of riches. I CHOSE to focus on those and accept them with awe. It’s easy to wallow in why me or what next? It’s not so easy to look at it differently in the beginning of exercising your mind in this way. But the more you do it, the easier it gets, and then it becomes innate. Then people look at you as LUCKY! And you are.

Anyway, I drone on as usual, this blog post this morning hit me as being very applicable to us in our life as we struggle with cancer, insurance, schedules, side effects, keeping track of all of it, worrying about the road being shorter than we want. How do we deal with all of this? Take a look at this post which deals with a totally different subject and see how you can apply it to your life, any part of your life. I think you can.

Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocore: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player

Now go work on those difficult passages, in life, and change it up a bit! 🙂

When my daughter, Montana was about 13, we went to a diving meet where she was hoping to qualify for Nationals. It was the 13 and under group, so it was an important effort in her age group competition after years and years of dedication to her sport of choice. The pressure was immense. Her coach failed to notice a dive on her sheet was written incorrectly. Montana did the dive as she had always done, and it was disqualified. She was in line to make the cut to go to Nationals. She was upset. He was upset. All the parents in the stand were telling me what a jerk the coach was and I should have is head. One was even yelling at me! It was very stressful. I was in the stands and it was like seeing your kid hurt and you couldn’t get to them. It was just awful. The strangest thing happened though. I remained calm. It’s life. Montana has a responsibility to know what is on her diving sheet as well. She fills it out. Yes they both messed up, yes it was disastrous. What was so odd, was that for the first time EVER as a diving parent, I had written down all her scores of every dive. (Like a baseball parent who has those tablets and keeps track of every play of the team on those little diamonds?) I had never, ever done this. I always just enjoyed the meet. But I was nervous for her. I was hopeful for her. So to calm myself, I took to writing down all the scoring throughout the event. Up in our hotel room after she failed to make the cut, crying and angry. Nothing I could say was going to make this better. I said, “Come here. I want to show you something.” She reluctantly stomped over, “What!”. I said, “I want you to see what you did. Look, I kept track of everyone’s scores. You were in 2nd place, you dropped to 15th place and in 3 dives you climbed all the way back up to only one spot away from making the cut. You only missed by less than two 100th’s of a point. Look what you did!!!! I couldn’t be more proud of you than if you had won the whole shebang. What you did was miraculous!” She grabbed the paper from my hands and really looked at what she had done. She was a knowledgeable athlete. She knew what she was looking at, without a doubt. Wiping away her tears, she got an triumphant smile on her face, eyes widening, and threw her arms around me as she ran out the door to go meet her teammates for dinner. Whew! One of those “good job Mom!” moments – as I sat alone on the bed after she left, I cried, for her, and in relief that for some unknown reason I had decided to handle my nervousness by doing something I had never done before.

She spent the evening with her teammates and parents, accepting their condolences and many of them who told her what a champion she was. One parent even cried telling her how much respect and admiration she had for what she was able to do. With genuine acceptance of the situation, happy for those who made it, and KNOWING she was a true champion, my daughter at 13, made me the proudest mother in the room. Whether she was acknowledged for it with a trophy or not. SHE DID IT! But the most important part, was she KNEW it. It wouldn’t matter whether I knew it or not. She had to know it and feel it in order to accept what others would have viewed as a failure, as something quite different, VICTORY in the face of great disappointment. Granted, this is a kid’s sporting event, not cancer. But you get the idea. These are the things that shape the character of our children in age appropriate, safe ways. The things that help them later in life with bigger obstacles. The lessons my father instilled in me that helped me to cope with his sudden death and the rest of my life without him. It was HUGE to her at age 13, and therefore to me. She was my hero, and still is.

Tags: life, practice, study hacks