“We are, ourselves, creations. And we are meant to be creative beings.” —Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way
With this post, I am beginning a series about my “Year of
Making and Healing.” In early 2023, I was not expecting to find myself confined
to the US for over 15 months. But by May, here I was in New Orleans with no
idea when I would escape to foreign climes again.
This post is the
backstory of how this accidental year came about.
I am a planner. I especially enjoy working on the nitty
gritty details of travel plans—as many of you who follow me at Cathleen’sOdyssey know.
But, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft
a-gley” (Robert Burns).
Covid was, at first, a challenge. But as “pivot” became an everyday word in our lexicon (that I hated, by the way), I did indeed figure out how to find alternate pathways for my life—as most of us did. By 2023, Covid was over, but the powers that be were not finished with some of us. Back in about October 2022, I noticed something a little “a-gley” about my right breast. I brushed it off. While in Istanbul in July, I had broken a rib above my breast and I attributed the deformation to that. Now, in October, I was in the country of Georgia, ready to launch a fabulous three-month train journey from there to Spain.
As the months wore on, the deformation niggled at me, but not enough to make me abandon my travel plans. I completed the train journey in February, walked a couple weeks on the Camino de Santiago, and then made a beeline for Scotland, where I stayed until late April. I would have stayed longer in the UK, but decided I should probably come home and have this issue checked out.
Several tests, scans and biopsies later gave me my expected
diagnosis. In June, it was confirmed: I did have breast cancer and it had begun
to invade my underarm lymph nodes. I will save you all the details of the
cancer journey. I was a lucky one (as usual) and it was really not a very tough
ordeal for me. Not even any chemotherapy was required. (I cannot talk enough
about the advances in breast cancer research of the last 40 years!) I was fortunate (again) to have a great team
of practitioners at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans to guide me through the
process step by step. Today, I am still healing, but getting stronger every
week. It has been a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of journey, but the
light is shining at the end of the tunnel, and I am looking forward to
beginning my travels again by Fall 2024.
I have not been idle. I cannot stand to have my hands and
brain idle. This last week I began making a list of all the projects I have
completed in this year of healing. It contains over 50 and I keep discovering some
I completed but had forgotten.
So brace yourselves…upcoming posts will tell the stories
about many of these projects: My Year of Making and Healing.
