Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Friends

There comes a time in every person’s life when they have to realize that just people someone was your friend once, doesn’t mean they will always be there. Just because you spent hours on end laughing and talking and enjoying one another, they will one day probably move on. As a high schooler, I am faced with that reality on an all-too-frequent basis. The people my age have no concept of the future; they have no idea that the choices they make today will affect them for the rest of their life. They just see the here and now, not what is to come.



It’s kind of funny, though, the people you meet at certain points in your life, and the people who you grow closest too. This semester I have been taking my prerequisites for the nursing program at our local community college, while also taking my high school classes, and have grown very close to two of the girls that have all the same classes as me. I love these girls dearly, and we have been through a lot together this semester. Neither one of these girls are people who would have been part of my group of friends. Not because I had something against them or anything, they just weren’t the type of people that would fit with my friends. Because of the circumstances, though, we have all created friendships that I hope will last us for years to come.



Because of these classes, though, I have not been able to hang out with some of the friends that I love the most. I have been swept away by the current, while they remain there in the past, and it is very hard to swim upstream. I try hard to retrieve the things that I have lost, try to maintain those stretched friendships, but it is just so hard. If I’m not in class, I’m working. If I’m not working, I’m at church. If I’m not at church, I’m at home, studying. If I’m not studying, I’m sleeping. There is just very little time for anything else in my daily life. So, the people that I don’t see on a daily basis end up being abandoned, and I end up with very few friends.


As my first semester of my last year in high school draws to a close, I know that I will very soon be losing a lot of what I hold dear. I will no longer be seeing these people on a regular basis, I will not be walking from class to class anymore. I will not have 'school friends' anymore. The people I see at work will become basically the only nonfmaily members I will see on regular basis. And, this saddens me.





Ryan Clark, who I am currently looking at, wishes it to be known that he is awesome and a wonderful potato farmer. He is one of the people that I will miss dearly, with his randomness and always-drumming-on-my-deskness.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Daddy

This past January, my dad was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer. I tried to start this post many different ways, but there’s really no good way to tell someone that your father has cancer. Like, think about it. You walk up to someone you haven’t seen in a while, and you start talking with them. You talk for a while, asking how things are going and how their family is. Then, they ask the same things of you. What do you say? “Oh, pretty good. Except for the whole cancer thing. That kind of sucks.” Yeah… no. There’s really no good way. Dropping the cancer hammer is hard, and sometimes almost impossible.


After a surgery to remove 6 or 7 inches of his colon, Dad started chemo therapy to rid him of the many tumors on his liver and lungs. The kind of chemo he was on is a rough one, causing a lot of pain and nausea. He actually only lost very little of his hair, mostly on his arms and legs and chest, while retaining most of the hair on his head and face. He then went through 12 rounds of that chemo, with very little results. The doctors we were seeing gave us very little hope, and we had gotten to the “focused-on-time-and-quality-of-it” phase, away from the treatment one. God intervened at this time and sent us to Louisville, to a wonderful surgeon there, who was able to completely irradiate the cancer in his liver. At this point we did not believe the spot on his lung was actually cancer, just a spot on his lung, since he smoked for 20+ years. In the recent weeks, though, we have discovered that he does have cancerous activity in his lungs, and he will soon be starting chemo again for that.

It is impossible to know what it is like to have a family member with cancer, until you actually have one. Daily life is strange, and very rarely constant. At one point, while Dad was on chemo, we were to a point where we did have a sort of schedule. One weekend, Dad would feel good and be doing great, and then the next weekend, after his chemo, he would not be doing as well. It was to the point where we would ask, “If Dad feels okay…” before we would speak to Mom. It was a hard time, a time that I don’t like to speak about much, because I really don’t know what to say. We were still a family. We still laughed together, we still cried together, we still watched TV together. Our lives went on, they were just riddled with cancer.

I have returned, with open arms.

It has been a long time since I have written a blog post. It has been a long time since I’ve been able to put all of my thoughts into one coherent place. The past year has been a hectic one, to say the very least. I have experienced things I never thought I would experience. I have lost people I thought I would never lose. I have made friendships that I never thought possible. Everything that could have possible gone wrong went wrong. And yet, I am happier right now than I have been in a long time. It has been a long, hard road. But, somehow, I have made it.


It’s hard to know even where to begin. I last posted here over a year ago. At that time, there was very little going on in my life. I had an awesome home life, filled with much fun and laughter. I had an awesome boyfriend, who I loved more than should be allowed. I had an awesome group of friends, who I loved hanging out with. I had an awesome youth group, who I thought would be together through everything. There is no way for me to post about everything all at once. So, I have prepared a few posts for the next few days, to update you on my life. I know I will begin with a very small reader base, but I hope to increase it as time goes on. Share it with your friends: Sarah is back.


I have been broken. That is the only way I could ever describe what has gone on in my life for the past year. I have been shattered completely; broken in a way I wasn’t aware that I could be broken. So many things have gone on, I could never even being to accurately describe what is has been. If it was possible, I would recap every day for the past year for you, but I just cannot. It is not even a feasible thought, too much has happened. I will attempt to give you a taste, though.


There is one subject, though, I will not touch. That is my relationship with The Boy. We dated for a year. It ended. I was crushed, to the point that it was harmful to my health. That, in essence, is all you need to know. Do not hate him, as I know my long time readers will, because I do not. That is all I will say on the subject, because it is old news, and I don’t really feel like upsetting myself over it again. I have recovered, and have let other guys into my life. I am okay.


I will end this post for now, but you will have another tomorrow, and another a day or two after that. I do hope you will add me to your favorites list once again, and will come back to visit with me soon. I have dearly missed my readers, almost as much as I have missed writing. I beg of you right now, let me back into your routine, as I hope you have missed me as well.