Calendars…  There is something magically delightful about new calendars, day planners, and datebooks.  Each empty page awaits new plans, ideas, challenges, and opportunities.  Looking back over the last year, my day planner tells a tale of milestones…

My last appointment with the plastic surgeon after my revision surgery.  I really grew to love that woman.  She would open the door to my exam room looking beautiful, hopeful, and interested.  Interested in not only how I was healing physically but emotionally too. As I thanked her at our last appointment, she smiled and said what an honor it had been getting to know me and my husband. Before she left the room, she turned to me and said, “Someday we’ll party together in Heaven and you will be a size Double D.”  She always made me smile, and I seemed to feel stronger when I left her office.

A year of blood tests with amazingly boring, normal results.  A year of visits with my surgeon, Dr. Brenda, and her staff. They became my friends- although we could have become confidantes in a much less painful way.

The year anniversary of my diagnosis and my surgery.  That date felt empowering and unbelievably peaceful.  The date of my chest x-ray- no more mammograms for me!  Hearing Suzanne, Dr. Brenda’s nurse practitioner, pronounce the x-ray to be “clean” is a date to circle.

A year of Pilates classes and therapeutic massages that soothed my muscles and my mind.  A year of talks with Lynn as I sorted through everything that happened. A year of swallowing 20 mg of Tamoxifen every day with lunch. The first pill taken with trepidation as I researched all that might go wrong because of this small, round medication.  A year later, it is taken almost without a second thought.

And now the last day of 2014…  I am preparing to put my 2014 datebook away.  My 2015 planner is smaller, more colorful, and deliciously empty of appointments.  This year is the beginning of my second year of being cancer-free, anxiety-free, regret-free.

May it be a year of loving extravagantly, forgiving lavishly, and living joyfully…

Happy New Year!!!