A year after first seeing doctor about cancer, how much have I learned?

By David McElroy · December 31, 2012

It was a year ago today that I saw a doctor for the first time about what I was to discover was breast cancer.

I had been feeling a small lump for a couple of weeks and I finally decided — on New Year’s Eve — to call a doctor friend and go over to his house for advice. He took a look and told me that it could be benign, but there was a good chance it was cancer. He gave me advice about who to see.

Then we sat on his porch next to some woods and watched the last sunset of the year through the trees. (That’s a picture I took at the time.) It’s hard to believe that’s been a year.

The end of a year and the beginning of another one almost always leads to reflection. For me — this year in particular — it leads to questions about what I’ve learned and whether I’ve “spent” the year wisely. I certainly didn’t have any control over the way the year started. I didn’t have any control over the uncertainty that came from the diagnosis of breast cancer and the surgery to remove it. But I’m not sure how well I handled the rest of the year. I’m not sure I’m any better off than I was as I sat on my friend’s porch in the late afternoon a year ago.

Up until that lump showed up, I had big plans for 2012. When you find out you have cancer, plans go out the window. Uncertainty creeps into everything. That’s understandable, but I think I let that overshadow everything else. I don’t think I ever got to the place of saying, “Hey, that was scary, but it’s over. I can go back to what I’d planned.”

I think that my fear — and especially the fear of what it felt like to go through the crisis alone — threw me into a tailspin that’s taken longer to recover from than I realized. In some undefined way, I was waiting for someone to rescue me, I think. It’s hard to accept that nobody’s going to rescue me. I just have to deal with life — and with life-threatening crises — alone.

I don’t know what I learned from 2012. I guess I learned what it feels like (for the first time) to be a piece of meat going through the processing of the medical system. I learned what it’s like to go to sleep in a surgical theater not knowing what’s going to happen while I’m out. I learned what it feels like to beat cancer. And I learned that I can do all of that alone, even if I hate it.

Right now, I have big plans for 2013. I plan to pick some things up where I left off last year before the cancer showed up. But I’ve learned that things happen in unexpected ways and for unexpected reasons.

Woody Allen is credited with saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” I have plans for the upcoming year. I have things I want to create. I have things I want to achieve. I have things I want to build. And I don’t want to be alone while I’m doing all of them.

I have plans. God laughed at me a year ago. I hope He has less reason to laugh at me today.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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