just like any other tuesday...

this morning, i forgot how to get to the hospital. having been here more times than i care to count in the last ten months, i could probably find my way here in my sleep, but this morning i got in the car, closed the door, buckled my seat belt, turned the engine on...and had absolutely no clue where i was going. funny how your brain shuts down in the moments that you need it the most.

my sister is having a mastectomy today. it's her second one since being diagnosed with breast cancer ten months ago, and although this one is more for preventative reasons, i still find myself sitting here in the eerily quiet hospital waiting room thinking that there is just no way my sister has cancer. i remember the day last year when she called me in a panic, claiming to have found a lump in her breast - i was dismissive and told her it was nothing because niki tends to be a little dramatic and of course it was nothing. it had to be nothing. had it been me, i would have ignored it, or not had time to deal with it, but niki went to the doctor the next day. they wanted to do some more tests but she was scheduled to go on a three week work trip to kenya, so the testing had to wait. she emailed me while she was gone and asked me to help her set up her appointments, which i did with an eye roll because a) leave it to niki to need me to take care of something when she is 7,500 miles away and b) of course it was nothing.

when she was back home, she followed up with the doctor, but even when i accompanied her to the biopsy they had ordered for her, i wasn't worried. they were just being extra careful. nothing is wrong with my sister. this is all just standard procedure. right? a few days later i got a phone call while i was at work. it was niki's number, but her boss' voice on the other end of the line, and she didn't need to say it, because i already knew.  it wasn't nothing.  "you need to come get your sister. the doctor just called. it's cancer. she's a wreck." at some point during the cab ride over to her office from mine, my brain decided it wasn't emotionally equipped to handle this news, and so, it stepped out of my body. i'm pretty sure that is the only way i managed to stand in the lobby of my sister's building, hold her in my arms, and assure her that everything was going to be fine. it's the only way i was able to take the phone from her when she got too choked up to call my parents to tell them the diagnosis. and i know it's the only way i could have possibly kept it together after hearing my mother's reaction. because my brain still stubbornly insisted, nothing is wrong with my sister.  oh, the power of denial.

in the months since that first phone call, a lot has changed for my family. but a lot more has changed for niki. i will never understand how she's been able to deal with all of this without the least bit of bitterness or anger. sure, she's had bad days here and there, but she's never dwelt on it or lingered on the question why did this have to happen to me?  if anything, her reaction has been more like, let's get this over with because i am really busy and all these appointments are eating into the time i want to spend letting my dog lick me in the face.  after we hung up the phone from telling my parents that day, niki told me she'd asked her doctor if she was going to die.  we didn't know yet what stage the cancer was in, how aggressive it may or may not be, or what kind of treatment she'd be looking at, but once she heard the news that no, she was not going to die, i think she made up her mind then and there that she was just not going to let this be that big of a deal.  even sitting in chemo class with her, i'm raising my hand and asking questions and taking notes and writing down things to research, and niki is busy being worried about the girl across the table from us, who looks like she is about 6 months pregnant.  so many people have it worse than me, she says.  and that is just like her, to think about everyone else.

there are days when my brain still refuses to acknowledge all of this.  looking back at the last year, and how niki has faced it all with humor and grace (yes, i just used the word grace to describe my sister.  it probably won't ever happen again.), it makes me wonder how she's done it all.  i've been there as much as i can - gone to appointments, held her hand during not-so-pleasant medical procedures, bathed her stupid hedgehog because her doctor told her not to touch it during chemo - but i can't go through this with her.  i can't understand how she feels or what's going on in her head (not that i could do that on a normal day), and i've struggled with that.  but niki being niki, she doesn't really give me much of a chance to worry about that.  she's busy getting on with her life, and with this surgery down and only her reconstruction left to go, she's well on her way to proving me right - nothing is wrong with my sister.  only it's not denial anymore.  it's just the way things are.

mid year's resolutions

so, let's skip the part where i come up with a bunch of lame excuses for why i haven't posted in two years. let's just say i've been really busy doing a whole lot of that "life" thing and let it go at that.

i've had a lot of time to spend with my thoughts lately (and really, i'm never sure if that's a good thing or not), and although i know we've already passed the mid way mark this year, i have my own little mental tradition of checking in with myself around the end of summer to see how i'm doing in terms of keeping my new year's resolutions going. considering that i can't even remember what i resolved to do this year, i'm going to go ahead and call the 2014 lindsey improvement project kind of a wash, but it doesn't really need to be january for me to work on cleaning up my act. so, thanks to some serious time logged in planes, trains and automobiles lately, i've had lots of time to think about what it is i'd like to work towards before 2014 slips right out of my hands (just like every year before it has).

so. first and foremost, i resolve to spend less time with my phone and more time with the people in front of me. i resolve to not measure my worth in likes, follows or retweets, and i resolve to invest more in personal connections than in those offered by the lure of social media. the friends and family in my life are there because they are invested in me, and i owe it to them and to myself to not spend the precious time we have together distracted by the seductive glow of my smartphone.

i resolve to say "no" with reckless abandon and to learn to be selective with what i give my "yes" to. life may be long but it's entirely too short to spend it doing things i feel obligated to do, rather than the things that are actually important to me. i resolve to remember that my time is just as important and valuable as everyone else's and that at the ripe old age of 34, i should finally learn to start treating it that way.

i resolve to work on filtering out all the noise around me and tune in on the music life can make when you're really listening. i also resolve to stop agreeing with the voice in my head when it tells me that my words don't have much weight or that what i have to say doesn't really matter, and i resolve to tell that voice exactly where it can go the next time it tries to convince me not to try something because i might fail. my mom taught me to never tell anyone to shut up, but i think in this case she'd probably tell me to say it a little bit louder.

i resolve to submit to my wanderlust and my curiosity until i end up in the poor house or an early grave. whichever comes first. i'll be broke and/or i'll be dead, but either way when the time comes for my life to flash before my eyes, it'll be a damn good show. maybe even with fireworks. but not clowns. no one likes clowns.

lastly and perhaps most importantly, i resolve to find the gift in every day. i resolve to take an extra minute to be grateful every time i wake up and have a whole new chance to get it all right, and i resolve to work on being ok with the fact that i probably never will. sometimes life gets messy. sometimes it really hurts. but i spend a lot of time trying to avoid the bad, and because of that, i probably miss out on a lot of the good, so - i resolve to learn to appreciate the sour for the way it makes the sweet taste even better. oh, and i also resolve to be more resolute about my resolutions.