My thoughts raced in a hundred directions. I’m only forty-four, too young to leave behind the people who love me. And my five Labradors, my Jack Russell — what about them? Would they feel as if I’d abandoned them? Wonder what they’d done wrong?

For the past year, I’d been dealing with my mother’s battle against her own inoperable cancer. Then, a week before my surgery, my father was rushed to the hospital for an emergency procedure, a complication from his colon cancer.

I’d blinked, and suddenly we were all struggling for our lives.

I wondered: Why me? A ridiculous question when you think about it, really, because there’s no logical answer. Cancer is what happens to other people, people who don’t take good care of themselves, people exposed to insidious carcinogens or deadly asbestos, people living under power lines. People just like me.

I heard voices. Not the kind that come from an unbalanced mind — just the opposite, because these voices came with clarity, and that was the problem. The truth had never been an issue for me. I’m a curious person. I’ve often been criticized for trying to make sense of the senseless. But this cancer coming out of nowhere, I realized, would be my toughest test of all.

I tried to accept the challenge but didn’t get far. If there was a lesson, I just wasn’t learning it. If there was a blessing, I didn’t feel it. There was no inspiration, no revelation. No matter how hard I tried to make things fit, I couldn’t. At the end of the day, I still had cancer and no suitable explanation.

Was I going crazy? Had the stress from my diagnosis forced some sort of break with reality? It seemed possible. On the outside, my world was in turmoil. It would have been easy to fall apart, but instead, I did the opposite. I pulled everything together.

Facing my own mortality forced me to prioritize.

I heard something, nothing audible, but it was very clear and very powerful, and there was no mistaking the message: Cancer wasn’t just about me; it actually involved everyone else. My world began shifting toward a more universal consciousness. In life, there are no bad experiences, only lessons. It’s easy to get caught up in a crisis, but if you’re only watching the ball, then you’re missing the game. Shifting your focus beyond the obvious is the real game and I was somehow learning how to play.

How many times in the past had I looked at a problem and found the outcome to be more valuable than what caused it in the first place? A light bulb began to blink above my head. Isn’t how I react to disorder ultimately what will free me from it?

The tougher questions lay beneath the surface: if I didn’t survive this, would my life have been everything I’d wanted it to be? Would there be apologies left unsaid? Forgiveness denied? Had I done everything I could to leave the world a little better than it was before I got here?

On the flipside — and perhaps most important — if I survived this, would I make a daily commitment to those same principles?

They removed the cancer early enough and even saved my kidney. That’s the good news. The bad news — if you want to call it that — is that it may return. 

CT scans will likely become a way of life for me, something I’ll have to live with for a long time, but I refuse to see them as constant reminders of the deadly intruder lurking within my cell structure. For me, they are reminders of something else, something much more important. They remind me of time, my most priceless commodity. It’s not about how much of it I have. It’s about how much I do with it.

Living each day like it’s your last is like climbing the tallest mountain in the world. It doesn’t matter how long you get to look down. Just being able to see it makes every second priceless and every step well worth the trip.

I didn’t really know that before. The disease has changed that.

The way I to respond to cancer will reveal its true meaning for me. I have moved past my tragedy and found its significance. The further I have gone, the clearer it has actually become.

Each day is a one-time offer.

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