fighting for your life, is, in so many ways, easier than just living it.
this week things have been going very well. the weather is great. the training is fun and hard, long, but rarely boring. however, i guess the fact that i am trying to kick my fundraising into gear is giving me flashbacks about what it is i am fundraising for and the experiences i had while battling cancer. andthese have been flashing through my head during my workouts.
imagine being in third year medical school and being told you have a tumor growing in your chest, right next to your heart. sorta rocks your world and is out of the course of what one might expect from life at that point. imagine night sweats so bad that your whole bed is soaking wet each morning and you are not sure why. imagine six months of chemotherapy, nausea, mouth ulcers, burning veins, low blood counts, delirium. imagine radiation burns under your arms, electric sensations down your spine, hair falling out, the energy being sapped from your body. imagine all food tasting metallic because of radiation. imagine a fever followed by days of your skin burning on fire. imagine going into shock during a test and almost dying. feeling your body temperature dropping, sensing your blood pressure bottom out, your consciousness fading, until the IV adrenaline kicks in and a warm hand on yours starts to bring you back.
all of this is not meant to be depressing. but perhaps to help the reader better understand why i am doing what i am doing, where i have come from and why i am volunteering for such a strange and masochistic battle. maybe even it explains why i am craving another battle which pushes me to my limits.
going through cancer treatment is hard, yes. but easier than the phase which comes after in which you have fought your battle, you have paid with your pain, and now, you are launched into the great unknown....remission.
in spite of all its difficulties, ironman is a fight that is preferable to the limbo of doing nothing except just living and hoping for the best...remission. i wonder if finishing will leave me with the same sense of fear of the mundane that finishing cancer treatment did. oh well, there are always other ironmans....(sorry P).
remission is a dog from hell because there is no fight. there is just living....and hoping for the best.
in some strange way, we are all in remission. like the two characters in that famous french existentialist play, we are waiting for godot to come....hoping for the best. aren't we all in the same boat? aren't we all in remission in some kind of metaphorical way?and isn't it the moments when we face a battle that we become the most alive?
i have so many ideas for blogging over the next few weeks. i promise that this blog will become what i have always hated, a mindless exercise in show-me-ism. look what i did. look what i am doing. look what i used to do it. look how hard i trained. i am great. (or not), but just look at me...
i wonder what exactly it will mean to cross the finish line at ironman. will it be a giant FU at cancer? will it be a day of grandiose thumbing my nose at time, decay, illness? will it be the ultimate actualization of my inner hero? or....will it be about those moments of pain, boredom, weakness, stomach upset, sore ass, toying with mechanical on the bike...etc. will it be about keeping going in the face of a whole pile of shit that could stop me if i let it? will it be about whispering, steady and long, instead of shouting loud and proud?
someone once wrote that ironman is about who whispers the loudest.
that's the hard part to grasp. real grandiosity, real heroism, arises from a loud-enough, yet consistent whisper. it is life in the remission zone, not a grandiose fight. it a consistent application of force, not against some monster, but just in the cause of life itself. i guess it is like a hum, a mantra, the eternal ohm.
please donate to the leukemia and lymphoma society. there are many who need to shout loud and fight their battle before they return to the land of remission and the land of living great through a whisper and they need your help.
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