Door #2, please.

First off thank you. Thank all of you for the thoughts, prayers, warm wishes, finger-crossings, drum beatings, funny jokes, lovely letters and just for plain remembering to think of me. I deeply appreciate it.

I am a very private person. This is completely opposed to my personality, which is very outgoing. However there are things in my life (note the word there … “my” … as in “belonging to ME”) that I do not talk freely or openly about. My personal life (note there's that word … “my” … as in “STILL belonging to ME”) is one of them – and it disappoints me terribly when details of my personal life are taken from me and tossed around as fun crap to talk about or speculate on. And before anyone thinks they know any specific time or event that I’m referencing here, just take a breath and stop. Trust me on this – unless you are either of my parents or my sister, you don’t have a clue.

So I need to find a way to talk about the status of my health that *I’m* comfortable with but that provides enough details to let everyone who has been so kind to me know what’s going on. Do I owe anyone that? No – honestly, if you were really thinking that then you need to move on. Friends don’t “owe” other friends that way. However, we’re all humans here and if I were to say “I don’t wanna talk about it”, you might think that things weren’t so good. If I were to say “I’m fine – let’s move on”, you’d likely think that this was just a big ol’ nothing. And neither of those things are true so here we go …

Having been down the “nasty health news” road before, it’d be easy to go into reactionary “take care of it” mode. I’m sure a lot of people would. I just didn’t. Not this time. After my return appointment last week, I heard quite a bit of advice from a lot of highly educated, well-trained professionals who see patients like me every day. They have a “usual routine” of how they deal with each medical situation and they presented that routine to me. I took a few days to think on it, made an appointment outside of the circle of folks originally involved and got a good old fashioned second opinion.

It may be that I liked the second-opinion’s “usual routine” response better. It may be that I’m tired of being poked and prodded. It may be that I don’t like the idea of people playing “Where’s Waldo” inside my body. Or maybe I’m just tired of all this energy I’ve spent thinking about me. It was fine when I was 19 years old to believe that I was important enough to be my sole focus … but I don’t have those blinders on anymore. I’ve seen too much sorrow, met folks with REAL problems, and have been to too many funerals for people younger than my current age to operate that way. The me of 39 years old knows better. I am going to follow “usual routine response #2”.

That’s my update. The people in my life who are truly owed any further explanation have received it already. I hope it satisfies any questions or concerns you may have had because it’s all I’m comfortable in providing.

In other news, I’ve been asked (again) to continue my job until the end of June. I (again) turned it down. I suspect that I’ll start looking for a second part-time gig in April or May, likely in a “serving the general public” role. Betcha THAT’ll be fun to write about. :-)