One year is a long time... enough for a few adventures.

I realized mid-morning yesterday that it was exactly one year since Daniel had his surgery. (Well, first surgery.) And I thought, "Guess it's time for a blog update."

Then, later, I realized I was one week late. So now I have an update on the one-year-and-one-week "anniversary" of our rather considerable health adventure...

I suppose it's possible - though highly unlikely - that someone has read this but has not had any other contact with us. To you, if you exist, I apologize. When I last wrote Daniel was just starting his second round of chemo, and the story was left hanging a bit. Things are immensely better now.

After that last post, chemo ended. Daniel was quite sick. Daniel's hair fell out completely. He started to feel better. After follow-up blood work and scans looked good he was cleared to have his port removed. We celebrated his "port out" day at the wonderful restaurant Fiddlehead's in Bangor (below).

It was surprisingly easy to convince myself that that was it. We'd gotten through it. Cancer was in the rearview mirror. In some ways this was true: surgeries were done, chemo was over, scans were looking good. But, of course, it's never quite that simple. Despite our best efforts to pretend, not exactly consciously, that the whole thing wasn't that big of a deal it turns out that it actually was. 

I'd be lying if I said anything other than the past year was really, really hard. There were wonderful, beautiful, fun parts. There were winter adventures, like when we explored Katahdin Woods and Waters with our friends Tyler and Lindsey (see photos above). There was laughter, like when I texted Daniel a photo of my half-asleep self (below) from Cutler at 6am partway through a 16-hour, all-night running relay. There was pride, like when I completed my thesis, successfully defended, and checked all those boxes off that project (whiteboard proof below). But, it was definitely incredibly difficult. Harder than we let on, to ourselves or others.

I'm telling my part of the story here, not Daniel's. For my part I can say that this whole journey brought up some very sad, very hard memories from when my mom was sick. There was no avoiding it - the smells in the hospital, seeing the side effects from chemo, watching hair fall out. It was really hard and often made me very scared and very sad. The only thing harder than going through the health crisis yourself must be watching someone you love more than anything go through it. All I wanted was to be sick myself, but of course that's not how the world works. So I/we just kept slogging through because that is really all you can do. 

So, during the not so fun and wonderful and beautiful parts of this year we slogged through. And then we tried to soak up the better parts as they came. We slogged through shoveling out from the blizzard, then soaked it up much more (below) after breaking down and asking our neighbor to plow us out. (Best $20 ever spent on Hilliard Street.)

Daniel went on two fires, one in Georgia and one in Oregon (below). He also worked his tail off on numerous fires around Maine. And with all that work we enjoyed knowing and seeing that he was well enough to be back doing what he loves.

I started a new job! It's an endeavor that's always stressful in some ways, but filled with lots of enjoyment, too. When Daniel was in Oregon, I even snuck up north with one of my new coworkers Jesse and we climbed the new Abol Trail on Katahdin (below).

With this seemingly endless, warm, and dry summer we soaked it up with a weekend canoeing adventure to Pistol Lake (below). What an amazingly quiet, classic Eastern Maine spot. Not a soul was seen besides us and the frogs Sadie tried to catch. Note the impressive timing of our take-out spot selfie. 

Daniel still has a bit more than 4 years of scans and blood work to keep an eye on everything. That particular journey isn't over quite yet. But it does feel good to have this one year "anniversary" of sorts behind us. 

For the longest time, especially in my mid-20s, I kept wondering to myself when I would "finally" feel like an adult. As a kid it seems like adults all have their shit together. When would I have my shit together enough to be an adult? Over time I realized no one has their shit totally together. I hope that some day I'll be 90 years old and still wondering when I'll start to feel like an adult. 

But even if I don't always feel like an adult or feel like I have my shit together, I realize that quite a lot of learning - and certainly considerable "life experience" - happened this year. And one of the things I've learned just a tiny bit better is the utter importance of truthfulness. My goal with writing this was to be truthful about the challenges, and joys, of the past year. I'm quite good at faking being "okay" and could use a little practice being more wholly honest; "Actually, things are really hard right now." 

So, things were hard this year. And they can't even be all blamed on cancer! New jobs, finishing my master's, buying and moving into a new house (oh yeah! we bought a new house!) were all stress-inducing. But here we are, on the other side of a lot of that, and still smiling most of the time. 

It's safe to say that we're hoping the next year of blog posts are filled with a lot more woods and a lot fewer hospital rooms. 

Love and light, Lauren