After a fantastic March, I was all set for April. I even picked out a race to run. I was feeling great. My breathing was good, my legs felt good. Everything was good. I felt almost like I had never had cancer.

And then, of course, it happened. Hodgkin’s Disease, or the treatment of Hodgkin’s Disease I’m not really sure which, somehow morphed me from the kid who used to win perfect attendance awards in school to the young woman who gets really sick if someone so much as thinks about sneezing in New Guinea.

The month actually started off on a good note. A very, very good note. On April 2, I went to see my oncologist. Just the usual routine follow up appointment with the usual labs. He was in a good mood, I was in a good mood. My eye has been doing much better. I had no complaints. We enthusiastically talked running. (You know how runners are when we find another rare soul who actually WANTS and LIKES to talk about running….) I was especially in a good mood when he surprised me and said I didn’t need any more scans because the risk of the Hodgkin’s coming back was so small now that I didn’t really need any more “routine” scans. I’ve always had a tough time reading my doctor. Don’t get me wrong, I like him a lot and would not hesitate to recommend him, but other than seeming really happy and surprised that my PET scan came back clean after just three cycles of chemo, he never came across as very convincingly positive and optimistic about me. The news was never really bad (we never got past the “we have to watch that” point really), but even when the scans were good he always would always throw in a qualifier like “so far.” Anyway, this was the first time in three years other than the PET scan where he actually came across as really optimistic and positive. I left the office for the first time in three years actually feeling like you know what … maybe I AM going to somehow manage to get some sort of movie script ending out of all this. Maybe I am going to be alive in five years. Maybe I should start structuring my life like I am going to be alive several years down the road.

So the month started out not just good but great. No, not just great. It started out awesome.

But then a few days later, everything again fell apart. Fortunately not directly related to cancer, but rather to the damage caused by the treatment that scarred up my right lung.

The following Wednesday my sinuses started to hurt a little. By Thursday I had a dry cough. By Sunday I had a loud and productive cough, fever, and chills. By Tuesday I was so sick I could barely drag myself around the neighborhood for a short run and struggled through work. Thursday my GP told me I had walking pneumonia and put me on a Z-Pack.

Friday even though I still felt very poorly I stupidly drove to see my boyfriend who lives 8 hours away. The next morning I even more stupidly decided to try running and five minutes into the run got that awful but vaguely familiar metallic taste in my mouth. Yup. Blood. A trip to the local emergency room netted me a series of chest x-rays and a bronchoscopy. (And a very scared boyfriend.) Fortunately all that turned up on the biopsies were lots and lots of good old pneumonia bugs. So, I got to take several bottles of antibiotics and some prednisone home with me to Cleveland.

The one positive was even though the out-of-state pulmonologist who knew nothing about me and had no copies of my imaging to compare with seemed quite worried about the possibility of Hodgkin’s Disease based on my x-ray and symptoms, I really was not. And that surprised me. Maybe something did change after that visit on April 2. Don’t get me wrong, once horribly betrayed and stabbed in the back you never really trust your body again (Et Tu, Lymph Nodes?), but for the first time in three years I am not finding myself up at night worried about the possibility of Hodgkin’s Disease. Of course, don’t take that to mean I’m sleeping because I’m still up at night, it’s just now I’m just up listening to the overly loud gurgling of the fish tank filter and not really thinking much about anything. Its just that while I’m still definitely not all the way convinced of the whole movie script ending coming true (at least not yet), the dark thoughts simply aren’t rolling in the way they used to do – like the storm clouds that inevitably roll off Lake Erie in the summer. Time is slowly healing the wound and allowing me to recover that sense of “invincibility” that we humans know is really just an illusion, but that is really sort of necessary to live life. I’ve said it many times, but you can’t really live your life like today was your last day and still be a truly functioning member of society with a job and bills and other obligations that you would just chuck out the window if you really were “dying.”

I’m hoping with the summer’s warmer weather I can avoid any more colds or flues for a while. It has been now over three weeks and I am just now starting to feel better on my runs. I’m just now starting to lose that horrible aching feeling in the right side of my chest and I’m just now not falling victim to a crippling stitch on every single run. Yesterday’s run was good and today’s run was good and both were at my normal 8:15 pace after weeks of barely being able to run 9-minute miles. Hopefully, I’m at the start of another string of “good days” -- it sure would be nice for hard times not to come again no more, but right now I’ll just settle for a respite from medical problems.