About

My name is Terri Mason and I know way too much about living with cancer.  The title of this blog is aspirational.  Cancer is a disease, not a way of life. What does it mean to live well? Are the well and the ill two separate species? I think not, but sometimes I act as though they are. I seek reconciliation.

My sister died of melanoma at the age of 41 and my son was diagnosed with hodgkin disease over 10 years ago at the age of 22; he is doing great now.  I received my third cancer diagnosis this June.  It is something very rare, probably a ‘pleomorphic undifferentiated sarcoma’ and it may have been triggered by the radiation treatment I had in 2006 for stage one rectal cancer.  I also had a very thin melanoma on my left foot in 2007. So three cancers in five years; believe me I’d rather write about something else, but I think my subject matter has chosen me.

Before my generation there was no significant history of cancer in my family, I don’t appear to fit into any known genetic syndromes, and I don’t have ‘lifestyle’ risks. There are no answers beyond some possible combination of genetics, environment and blind chance.

In 2007 I attended a retreat for people living with cancer at Commonweal in Bolinas, CA. It was the single most helpful and healing thing I did for myself when I was recovering from cancer treatment. I have kept in touch with a group of fellow participants in the program via a private online group and I started sharing my current medical adventures in uncertainty with them in January of this year. I am starting this public blog as a way to update my wider circle of friends and family as I go through treatment and recovery.

Something that has come to me clearly through this crisis is that writing and
sharing what I write is a lifeline for me. Here is a  dream I had one month after my latest diagnosis  about my hopes and fears for the future.

7/21/11
Dream before waking. I was out in a beautiful forest somewhere near Yosemite
with a biologist who was doing a study to assess the environmental damage to a
plot of land. A large blue and brown butterfly-moth fluttered near me. The
biologist wanted me to catch it for the study. I reached out and pinched his
wings between my thumb and forefinger. I could feel him struggling as I tried to
hold on tightly enough to keep him without crushing his wings. The biologist
came over and ran a swab over it to take some type of sample. Then I released
the butterfly-moth and he flew erratically up into the sky. He appeared
disoriented and I worried that I had damaged him too badly to survive. As I
watched and worried he landed on a rooftop and a few other butterflies joined
him. I woke up still feeling the energy of his struggle as I held him between my
fingers.