I have a Black Hole in my life. It is populated with bad credit, debt, chronic pancreatitis, constant pain, and an Irish born nurse and African born doctor who also populate the late night shift of the emergency room of the Baltimore veterans hospital.
As gnawing as this Black Hole can be at times it is but a tiny speck in comparison to the enormous bright light of gratitude I have for everything else in my life, including cancer. GRATEFUL FOR CANCER? You bet!
Everyone who knows me knows I love to laugh. If you lived my life you would have to laugh too. Loud and often. I seem to go from one crisis to another. Financial crisis, medical crisis, emotional crisis, family crisis, etc,, etc. . It's like living in a never ending Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton movie with me in the lead role. If I were standing on the outside looking in I would be in a constant tickle instead of constant pain, so I continually look at my life in that way and forever amuse myself.
As I grew older I also discovered the awesome power of gratitude. It really doesn't take much to realize, at least in my case, I have way much more to be grateful for than to be negative about.
I have probably done more in my life than most men could do in two. I survived growing up in a block that some cab drivers will not take you to to this day. By the time I was 15 I was playing music professionally and had opened a show for Motown by the time I was old enough to get a drivers license.
I made it through the toughest boot camp in the United States military (Parris Island) and survived a war. I completed a counselor training program at one of the finest schools in the country (Johns Hopkins) having never finished high school (I have a GED).
I honed my new craft in one of the harshest environments on Earth, the Alaskan bush. I spent 3 years traveling to the 17 Eskimo villages of the Bering Strait region where I had to communicate with people speaking 3 different languages and 11 dialects.
I fathered a baby girl there who I brought back to the lower 48 and raised as a single parent, all while living with 3 mental illnesses. I also have a son here in Baltimore. I deeply feel my mental illnesses prevented me from being the father I would have liked to have been, but in spite of that, I have 2 children who love me very much.
I am very proud of the adults my children have grown into. They are both fantastic parents in their own right despite their paternal role model. That alone fills me with enough gratitude to make me burst. The 5 grandchildren they have produced are so loving it almost brings me to tears just writing about them.
I have 5 living sisters whom I adore dearly and who reciprocate that feeling ten fold. Their children and grandchildren are just as loving towards me as my own. Gratitude here is a no brainer.
I work with the best group of individuals on the planet. My work with NAMI (National Alliance in Mental Illness) has exposed me to some of the most giving, loving, nourishing relationships anyone could ask for. The clinicians I work with at the Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Center in the VA hospital in Baltimore are a dream team of coworkers. They were unconditionally welcoming to me from day one and have always treated me as an equal. They all have respected my input and have each had at some point added a mentoring aspect to our relationships.
My first fight with cancer was as a result of exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Initially the doctors at the VA hospital told me it was so aggressive I pretty much had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel (not quite in those words). I agreed shortly thereafter to participate in a research project and 2 1/2 years later I went into remission. I've been in remission 6 years now.
That experience made me stronger in character, in spirit, mentally, and in many of my relationships. For that I am eternally grateful. Now you can understand why I am grateful to learn I have cancer again. A new cancer. A rare cancer. New opportunities for things to be grateful for. Hey, maybe even rare opportunities.
The worst that can happen is that I will lose this fight. In that case, I will be grateful to have a chance to get rid of that gnawing little Black Hole. A win-win situation. I will probably gratefully transition into my next stage of existence. Laughing all the way!