Normalcy?

Today I showered before noon, dried my hair (sort of while not moving my left arm too much) and applied make-up. I took Lucas to his babysitter and went to work for five hours. I've started my return to normalcy.

And it is weird.

My sore arm/incision area is my reminder that things aren't normal. And, I don't know if I'm ready for them to be normal. What is normal anyway?

I need to tell you my story. To tell you about all the thoughts and feelings I had in the hospital and at home. But it is so overwhelming. And, there's every day to keep thinking about and writing about, too.

I mean, yesterday Lucas realized I was a girl.

He was telling me to sit down because I was a "bad boy". (Waaaayyyy past his bedtime and he was very grumpy.)

Abel said, "Lucas, Mama is a girl."


"A gir-rel?" (I'm really bad at phonetic spelling, but think rhymes with squirrel if you make squirrel two syllables)

Yes. A girl.

Then, the rest of the night Lucas called me "gir-rel Mama".

Very cute.

And normal.

And I want to tell you these stories. But I also want to tell you about how that first night in the hospital. I didn't sleep. Not a wink. Well, maybe 20 minutes. I was drugged up and my body was totally relaxed but my mind, it was racing a million miles an hour. And I composed the most beautiful perfect tell-the-Internet-I-have-cancer post. And I realized why I love to blog. It is because composing (no matter if it actually gets typed or written) is how I organize my thoughts. I've always done it. The many late nights I've spent tossing and turning composing complaint letters in my head. Or, love letters. Or, wonderfully creative stories. Or, the perfect most masterful fundraising letter in history (did you know that's my day job? non-profit fundraising?).
You know what else I composed that first night?

Cancer comic relief posts.

Yeah, I had this perfect one all lined up in my head for July. Remember July? When I cut off inches and inches of my beautiful long hair to donate to Locks of Love? Well, as far as I was concerned that night, I had cancer and so would be starting treatment soon and that would mean that chances were pretty good that this July I would be bald. How's that for irony? Oh, yeah, and I'm MoH in a wedding in July, too. That night I was shaking my fist at karma, I'll tell you that.

So this isn't my tell-the-Internet-I-have-Cancer post and it isn't my comic relief post. What it is, though, is the start of getting back to normal. So bear with me if I ping pong a bit between the mundane here-and-now and the hellishness of the past two weeks.