Journey Out of Pink

Life is moving forward at an alarming rate. Things haven’t quite yet returned to “normal” and I’m not sure they ever really will, but life goes on. Yesterday, I had an appointment with the oral surgeon. I had two teeth that needed to be extracted. I wasn’t looking forward to it by any means. Dentists, of all kinds, scare the Bejeezus out of me!  My dental fear began in my childhood. When I was young, we didn’t have a lot of money for unnecessary things. Often times, even necessary things had to fall by the wayside because there just wasn’t enough extra income to take care of those things. One of the things that got pushed to the back was routine dental visits. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t want to give us the best care we could get, it was just simply that we couldn’t afford it. We did get yearly checkups. My mother made sure of that. She knew it was important for teeth to be taken care of, but when you have 3 little mouths to see about, even those annual visits could add up ra

Hiking. It’s one of my favorite loves of all time. Being out in the wilderness is so refreshing. I love walking under the huge trees and feeling the fresh air surround me. When I’m in the woods, all of my troubles disappear. It’s the best feeling in the world. I think I was born to be in the outdoors! My love of nature began as a small child, thanks to my mother. She loved the outdoors, too, and made sure I learned to respect all of the woodland creatures. She would take me by the hand and show me various animals and tell me about their habitats. When I was growing up, it wasn’t strange to walk into the kitchen and see Mama feeding an orphaned squirrel from a teeny, tiny bottle. Mama loved to bring the outdoors in and never balked when she’d find rocks or feathers or other mementos of nature in our pockets while doing laundry. Rocks and dirt were part of my childhood and I’m so thankful they were. But back to hiking… My love of hiking began when I was in the Girl Scouts. My mother

It’s been 19 months since I first heard the words, “You have cancer,” but it seems a life time ago. So much has changed since that fateful day in June 2014. Today I’ve decided it’s time to say goodbye to breast cancer. It’s time to put it behind me and move forward. I know…you’d think I’d have already done this by now, wouldn’t you? But it’s not as easy as you think. For the past 19 months, cancer has pretty much dominated my life. I never intended it to be that way. Cancer just kind of came into my life and took over…an unwanted interloper, but now I’m kicking cancer to the curb. It’s time to only see pink in the dust as I move forward from survivor into thriver. I’ve chronicled my entire breast cancer journey since the day I was diagnosed. I wanted to make sure my family and friends would have an accurate record of every step I took. I wanted them to see and feel and understand how cancer decimates, demeans, and destroys. I also wanted them to know how a woman of faith responded