Spark– Part One-Dana

Before you get sick, you take things for granted. Take coffee for instance. It’s just one of those simple pleasures that you indulged in without thinking. You would just get up in the morning and brew a pot, gulping it down in between getting dressed and making phone calls. Or maybe you wouldn’t have it at home at all; you’d grab a cup on your way to the office or even use your caffeine addiction as an excuse to go to a cafe and gossip with your friends.

It isn’t until your taste buds are killed by chemo and the mere smell of the stuff is enough to send you to the bathroom and land you with your head in the toliet, that you realize that it wasn’t that you didn’t appreciate coffee before, you simply drank it without giving it a second thought. Suddenly, you long for it. Dream about it, even. And one day you can have it again without it being instantly rejected by your stomach and it is…heaven. Your mouth salivates at the aroma and man oh man, the taste. The silky smoothness of that richness sliding down the back of your throat. You doubt anything can be that good, that is, until you can have ice cream again. That’s a entirely different ball park.

You realize you repeat this process with alot of things. Flowers. Sunrises and sunsets. Babies. Animals. The list seems endless. You begin to question if you’ve spent your life with your head in the sand. Because it’s as if you’ve never noticed how beautiful things were. Were they that way all along or were you just oblivious? You recall the play everyone is forced to read in high school, Our Town, The girl in that play didn’t see the beauty in the simple things until she was dead and could not have them anymore. You couldn’t possibly understand when you were a kid, because you were invincible, but now you think you do. Everything in your life is seperated into two catergories; life before cancer and life after cancer. And boy, life before cancer seems awfully shallow. All of what you considered to be vitallly important are meaningless, given the situation thrust upon you. A career, physical beauty, money, relationships that were fun but emotionally unfufilling…you want to smack yourself because you got it all wrong, When the chips were down, what did you have left when you couldn’t have any of those things?