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Writer's pictureErin

When Life Gives You Lemons (Coping with a Cancer Diagnosis)

Updated: Jul 17, 2023

"You can take the sourest lemon that life hands you, and make something out of it that resembles lemonade, then maybe one day you can provide another man hope.-Dr. K, This is Us



Some of the best memories I have with Ty are of the two of us sitting on our couch late at night, watching This is Us together. It was our show and got us through those seemingly endless days of parenting young children together, knowing that if we successfully got all kids to sleep, a homemade Old Fashioned and cozying up on the couch would be our reward. I'm not sure what exactly we loved about This is Us so much, but it makes me wonder if God somehow put that show in our lives front and center because He knew we'd be given the sourest lemons life had to offer, just like the characters in the show.


I am currently sitting at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara waiting for my guy Ty to get done with surgery. I exist in a strange sense of being right now, where my mind keeps having to look around at my surroundings and send messages to my body to just keep moving forward, one step at at time. The only way I can explain this sensation is as if my mind is still confused about this recent turn of events and keeps trying to go back to what it thought our life should be like this summer.


My brain: "Um, hey Erin? Where are we? Looks like that hospital again and I'm just wondering what the heck we are doing here?"


Other part of my brain: "Ya, so the plans have actually changed a bit so why don't you sit back and relax and just do your job of making her legs keep walking forward because she keeps wanting to just drop to her knees and curl up in ball instead. Oh, and can you please send her messages to her mouth muscles so they can still form a smile even when she doesn't feel like it?"


My brain: "Okie Dokie, but when should I start making the mental list of what to pack for our European adventure? We are supposed to leave in just two short months ya know!"


Other part of my brain: *exhales* "Okay, I can see you are still in denial here so I'll let you keep staying in ignorant bliss a bit longer until you're ready to join me in reality. But here's some advice, brain. I think we've learned by now that we have no control over where life takes us sometimes, and we've been dealt some really bitter and rotten lemons the past few years, but we know what to do, right?

We hold tightly to our faith and our loved ones and turn those nasty lemons into something good."


Friends, as you can imagine, our family is living a nightmare right now, but we refuse to let this nightmare consume us. Cancer is not something anyone deserves or wants to experience, but we dig deep down and find the courage and strength to keep moving forward, showing our children and the world that we can do hard things.


Even when we don't want to, even when we feel like giving up, we can't and we won't.


The past few years have felt nearly impossible to get through for our family, and it seems like every time we finally find solid ground to stand upon again, life throws a sucker punch from behind and knocks us back down.

I'm not gonna lie. I was angry, and I am angry. I keep asking God why we keep having to endure these health challenges, especially when we were sooooooo close to making our lives whole again. Ty was taking Sabbatical and I gave my leave of absence at UCSB and we were in the midst of planning to live abroad in Europe for the next school year. Many years ago, Ty and I made a plan that we would do whatever we could to make Fall 2023 the date we would follow our dreams and pick up our lives to live somewhere else for a while.


We specifically selected Fall 2023 because we knew it would be when Ty had maybe earned his Sabbatical time at UCSB and when it would be least disruptive to our children's ages and stages of life. Noah would be entering Junior High (and we all know that's the worst stage ;), Charlotte would be in 5th grade so she would be back in time for her anchoring 6th grade year, Mason would be in 1st grade and I was confident that I'd be able to teach him all the curriculum myself. The plan was we'd return back from our adventures abroad just in time for Molly to start Kindergarten, which is a precious year that I don't want her to miss.


However, as you already know by now, our own carefully curated plans were squashed and splattered even before they began.


Cancer has an evil way of ruining peoples lives, and this bad news of cancer in Ty's liver really had the worst timing.


It's funny, one of the first reactions our family had when we learned the recent scan was not clear, was "What? Couldn't the cancer have at least waited a year to come back until we got to catch our breath in the clear air of Switzerland and healed our bodies with the clean Mediterranean diet in Italy?"


For the first few days after the diagnosis, I felt like my brain was trying to wish it all away, gripping tightly to the plans we had rather than the plans that were being forced upon us.


So friends, as I sit here in this lovely outdoor garden so beautifully designed in the center of Cottage Hospital, I will tell you that I still don't know how to turn these sour lemons into something sweet, but I have zero doubt that together we will make this into the most amazing lemonade you've ever tasted.














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