Part Fifty: I Did It

            On Tuesday, I did it:  I drove to Tulsa by myself to get my BiPAP for sleep apnea.

            On Wednesday, I did it:  after spending a fun morning in downtown Pawhuska at the Pioneer Mercantile and a few smaller shops with friend Mona, I ate at Murphy’s for the first time, though I did not try their specialty, a hot hamburger.  For all my non-Bartian friends out there, a hot hamburger is a hamburger covered with fries and smothered with gravy.  (And a Bartian is a person who lives in Bartlesville.)

On Thursday, I did it:  I picked up my flute for the first time since last spring.  I played for less than five minutes and sounded awful, but it is a beginning.

These, perhaps, are not world-class exciting events, but they were important to me.  I needed to prove to myself that I can drive to big city Tulsa by myself since I may be doing precisely that five days a week for radiation therapy.  Plus, getting my BiPAP is exciting.  In case you don’t know, a BiPAP is like a CPAP, except that it delivers two different air pressures: one for inhalation and one for exhalation.  What that means for me is that now I breathe all night, which is way better for my health than stopping breathing 26 times in a single hour without even knowing it.

Going to the Pioneer Mercantile was a big deal because the Pioneer Mercantile is a new business established by Pawhuska’s own famous cookbook author, Ree Drummond.  I love looking at all kinds of pretty stuff I will never buy; plus, the cheese Danish I had upstairs in the bakery was awfully good.  And the other big deal about the day was that this was the first time Mona and I did something just for fun that was not tied to a medical appointment.

And playing my flute even for a few minutes reassured me that I will gradually get back to playing my flute again.  I’ve been so wrung out physically and emotionally through this long siege of cancer treatment that it was not an option.

I need a little bit of fun and lots of reminders that God will see me through radiation therapy.  It was easy once I was through with chemotherapy and surgery to “forget” about radiation.  I find that I am very tired of being a cancer patient—I guess I’m a patient with diminishing patience.  I want to be done, but I am realizing that when it comes to cancer, you are never completely done.  But I want to get to the place where cancer does not dominate my life.

Then I can say “I did it!” and be mostly done.