I don’t know who Cali Rae Turner is but Turner once said “The best thing about having a sister was that I always had a friend.” I have three sisters and from my experience that is not completely true. But it’s true enough. I certainly know that one of my best friends in life has always been my middle sister. Her children are my age, but it doesn’t matter. She and I are the ones who are close and always have been.
My earliest memory is of her. I know it is my memory and not a family story because nobody else remembered it, even my sister, until I reminded her. I was 18 months old, had just had my tonsils removed (They grew back!) and was in the hospital in a crib. A nurse came to give me a shot and I kept running away from her, going from one end of the crib to the other. So the nurse had her grab me and hold me still. Betrayal!!! Obviously, I have forgiven her. Since our parents died, she has been my linchpin.
She was sick last year, a tortuous battle with breast cancer and brain tumors, but she got through it and has been back at work full-time for about two months. She just found out on the 8th that she has lung cancer. Don’t worry. She caught it early at Stage 1 and she should be fine, but it threw me for a loop. A bigger one than last year because I thought we were done with all that. It feels so much like being back at Square One. It is not, we know now that she cannot tolerate Doxorubicin and they won’t use it. This means she won’t have to go through the hell of neutropenia for months on end. So she’s ahead of the game. She is strong, a tough, stoic survivor who will do well. But I am still off balance, angry because this is so not fair–as if there is anything fair about cancer–and wishing that she could at least had a few more months before cancer took another run at her.
She joined Second Life® about a month or so after I did. I walked her through it. She’s on my friend’s list–Marit Lilliehook, though she has not logged in since 2007. We were going to have adventures in SL together, but she’s one of those computer users who accidentally unfriends her children and has to call my nephew to come over to her house to restore her browsers file menu when she makes it disappear. Second Life just overwhelmed her. She’s been using browsers on the internet for 15 years and I still have to remind her how to do a bookmark, so this time it’s not SL’s fault for being too hard. On the other hand, she has crushed the competition in Candy Crush.
She will be okay, I would bet on it. But I am a bit wobbly and may be a bit more erratic than usual with my blogging. However, it will be all okay in the end. I know my sister and if anyone can beat cancer twice, she can.
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