Radiation Termination

Since I last wrote, which is quite a while ago, my mother has had to undergo a month of radiation to her breast and left hip. Because of the infection she had in her blood from the port the chemo is administered through, she was unable to receive any chemo for about a month while she was on antibiotics. When this type of cancer (stage four inflammatory breast cancer/ carcinoma) is not treated continuously, new growths and damage to healthy tissue can occur throughout any part of the body, hard or soft tissue (e.g. the brain and the bones, the breast and the hip). Because this happened, my mother needed to be treated with more aggressive means than the relatively mild cocktail of Herceptin and Navelbine that she receives as weekly preventive chemotherapy. The least painful way of dealing with the problem was radiation, so she had a daily dose for about a month. She was luckily able to go to the hospital by herself every morning because she is much stronger now than she has been for many months. I held down the fort.
Now we're back to just the chemo and will be going into the hospital tomorrow, as it's Friday.
Otherwise, I've begun teaching yoga classes, which I'm really enjoying. I would like to do more. I've been learning so much about people and the ways in which they learn, and also how to just let go of my own ideas about how something is or should be.
I had an interesting conversation with a client today, who happens to be a devout Christian. He mentioned to me how happy he was that I was able to see the opportunity within the challenges that I have faced in recent months and continue to face. It was so wonderful to actually hear someone acknowledge that aspect of this whole surventure. Yes, it has been tough, definitely the toughest time of my life and there have been some others that were pretty tough themselves but don't touch this. My whole world as I knew it is destroyed as far as I'm concerned. Yet, in its place, I've found much more happiness. I can't really imagine what it was like to live inside the skin that I did for so many years now that it has been ripped off of me. I find myself exposed to my own self and I'm able to look myself in the eyes and trust that person looking back at me.
I've realized that I can't live my life based on someone else's idea of what a 'decent' life is supposed to be. I have to pursue what genuinely makes me happy rather than what conventional wisdom states. It sounds trite, however so much of my life in recent years has been based around conforming to some sort of ideal. I have no regrets about it and I'm sure I learned a great deal, but something has profoundly shifted. I've spent the years from about 14-22 conforming in subtle ways. Wearing jeans, doing SAT IIs and APs, teaching English, drinking wine with dinner, going to college, and so on. It's not that there's anything wrong with any of these things and I'm really glad I did them, it's just that many of them were done with the specific intention of going to an imaginary place. The exams had nothing to do with what I want to be learning about. They were hoops and then more hoops. It was a rude awakening to be pulled out of that lull, that safety. But I feel like a fish that's been flung back into the rushing stream.
The line between good and bad in life has changed for me. What appears to be a catastrophe can bring new life. Destruction seems to be the natural partner for creation. It all is making up this layered painting; the new experiences are painted over the old, one coloring the next and it all just looks so beautiful to me. The tragic and the joyous mix together, harmonizing. I want it all. I want to get my hands muddy.
I still feel embryonic, though. I can feel that much bigger shifts are in the making, I can feel my viscera preparing for something I can't quite touch yet.