Yesterday, I got to spend some time with a good friend of mine. I met this friend many years ago, through my now sister-in-law (another marathoner) on a 17 mile training run for the Boston Marathon. The training run happened to be on Valentine’s Day, and although the romance I was involved in at that time didn’t stand a chance, it was clear from the get-go this girl was a keeper.
I had a tear-filled dinner with my friend earlier in the week. It feels like there have been a lot of those recently. I have been really struggling lately – this whole thing is just feeling very frightening and overwhelming. My friend has been, well, a really good friend. At some point during dinner we got on the topic of gardening. Since getting sick, gardening has kind of taken the place of running for me – it gets me outside and doing something active. She wanted to do a little gardening herself and so we agreed that if I was feeling well on the weekend, I would join her for a trip to my favorite garden center and we would get her everything she needed to set up her patio for the summer.
I never know how I am actually going to feel from one day to the next, but on Saturday I felt really good, so off we went to the garden center. We had so much fun – we picked out several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, veggies to replace a patch of lettuce my dogs flattened, pretty pots for her patio and a bunch of other supplies we both needed. It was a beautiful day and we had just had such a nice time together, talking about absolutely everything except me being sick. I looked over at her as she was driving me home at the end of our outing. The sun was shining and she was smiling and chatting away. Her hair was up in a ponytail and she was wearing a pink yoga top and she just looked so happy and beautiful. And for this little slice of time….everything was normal, I was back to my old self and it was just a regular Saturday afternoon out with my running buddy.
a tale of two tumors 