Thanks for Clapping

This weekend I noticed I'm still losing my eyebrows. Slowly but surely, they're looking more like Chemo Girl instead of less. And then, I go for a check-up this week. And I want so badly to just not. I've said it before, but the thing that scares me about cancer isn't the death but the dying. So irrationally, right before checkup time, I always think that if it's back, I just don't want to know.

The thing is, it won't be back. It almost definitely won't. They cut it out with surgery, they blasted it with chemo - something so potent it killed my eyebrows, for goodness sake. And, dudes, I had eyebrows. So in all likelihood, Lord willing, for all intents and purposes, if there be one shred of luck left in life for me, should God smile... at about 2 p.m. this Tuesday, I'll breathe a sigh of relief so loud you should hear it wherever you are. And I'll throw back my shoulders and raise my head and walk forward, because I'll know that for at least a few more months I'll be living.

It will be like the moments just before this photo when I walked with other survivors in the first lap of the Relay for Life in our town. They played Rocky music while we marched, and people applauded. They applauded the whole time we walked, as long as they could see even one of us, they were clapping. And it was the most wonderful sound and the happiest support and the coolest reward to bookend one really lousy couple of months.

That's the feeling I'll think of when I get the You're Okay. The feeling of fighter music, of never walking alone, and lots and lots of applause.