Sometimes Doctors are Wrong

With Thanksgiving and Black Friday a few days ago, I wanted to pause and reflect with a blog post. I didn’t want to write a stereotypical “This is What I’m Thankful For” post, so I’m going to try not to do that. These holidays have a different meaning for me this year.

My doctors told me that I had less than two months to live. I told them that’s a lie. There were so many other things that I wanted to do, and that I wasn’t done with this life. Naturally, I made a list of everything that I wanted to do and I told them it didn’t matter what they said; I was going to do these things. First on the list was going to Europe. I had been wanting to go to Europe for a while, and every summer I would make up some excuse to put it off. I don’t have money, I will go next year. I just got a job, I will go next year. Until this year. I knew I might not have a next year, so I had to go this summer. I started to enjoy everything as if it was my last. At cancer camp, I came to the realization that this just might be my very last time at camp. I might not make it to next year; that is what my doctors tell me. This was my second year at camp, and since I had “two months to live,” I pretended this would be my last time at camp. I remembered to make friends with as many people as I could, and to try and take a picture with everyone, because I know if I died, that person would want a picture together. I have learned that we care less about taking pictures now, but when someone dies and you don’t have one with them, you regret all the times you should have taken a picture. I started treating my relationships with people much more differently. I stopped blowing people off or saying, “Hey, we should get coffee sometime,” but then never actually getting coffee. I made a point to get coffee with that person, because I didn’t want their last memory with me to be regretting all those times we never got together to get coffee. By treating everything as if this would be the last time I would see this person, it made the time we spent more meaningful. Granted, that person didn’t know that this is the way I thought. But having that mindset made our time together much more precious. It was a nice way to say “goodbye,” and if I saw this person again, it didn’t matter if I said my last goodbye, because to them I hadn’t said goodbye at all. I no longer had all the time in the word to get everything I needed to get done. Time is a very precious thing and it is best not to waste it. According to my doctors, I could die tomorrow. But instead of letting that bring me down, I am going to live each moment like it is my last. People say it all the time and it has become very cliché: “Live each moment like it’s your last,” but you never really learn the true meaning of that until you realize your time is limited and you aren’t going to live forever. Some people live till they are 100, and some people live till they are 50, and there are some of us who don’t have that much time left. We could all die tomorrow. Will we? Most likely not, but for me, I might. In April, my doctors told me I had two months to live. That was seven months ago, and I am still here. I think a lot of that has to do with my mindset. If I believed I was dying, I would have been gone by now, but instead I lived like I was dying. By doing that I truly learned how to live. For that I am thankful. I am thankful that instead of dying five months ago like I “should have,” I am still here. Life is truly precious and most of us won’t take the time to realize that until it is too late. Don’t wait for something tragic to happen to start living.