Tomorrow I complete my second week of radiation.  One month ago today I had surgery to remove a tumor from my right temporal lobe.

I’m often asked by doctors, nurses, family, friends and co-workers how I’m doing.  The honest response I usually give is that if I didn’t have a huge scar on my head I wouldn’t know anything had happened.  I feel just like I did 5 years ago.  I walk about 4 miles a day.  As soon as I got the staples out of my head and could put on a helmet, at Alisha’s encouragement I went for a short bike ride, 11 days post-op.  Next week I hope to resume bike commuting like I have the past 4 years.

In addition to the radiation treatment five days a week I am taking a chemo pill.  In spite of a laundry list of possible side effects from both, the only thing that might be a side effect is that a few nights after taking the chemo pills I felt like I had just eaten a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream before turning out the lights.  My restless sleep those nights could also be chalked up to other things as well.

To say I feel that God has blessed me would be an understatement.  I returned to work for a couple of half-days two weeks ago, stretched it to three last week and this week will have four 7-hour days, good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise as we used to say when I lived in the south.  It is difficult to effectively articulate but I can tangibly feel the prayers of those earnestly lifting me up.

As is surely no surprise, this is a transforming event.  I was trying to describe it to Alisha the other night.  I’m the same camera looking out from the same vantage point that I have for a very long time.  The difference is that I’ve changed lenses.   I’ve taken off the zoom lens and replaced it with a wide-angle lens.  I can see more of the picture than I could see before.

I have always looked ahead.  When we would go for a family hike here in the Olympic National Park I would always want to see around the next bend before turning around, sometimes running ahead when the rest of the family had gone far enough.   I thought about home improvements I wanted to do some day, getting another sailboat and teaching the girls to sail, saving for this or that, always looking down the trail of my life.

I see now with my new lens how many opportunities I have missed by having senses dull to the moment.   Opportunities for an act of kindness, to show generosity or hospitality with no expectation of reciprocity, to pray for a person weighed by the burdens of life.

The ones that sting the most are those missed opportunities with my own family.  Because I had to check in for surgery at 5:30 in the morning and the fact that we live 2 ½ hours from the hospital, Alisha and I spent the night in a hotel across the street from Virginia Mason hospital.  That meant that the night before I had to kiss my girls goodbye.  I had no way of knowing if I would make it out of surgery or what I would be like when it was over.  My youngest expressed fear that I would be different.   I can tell you that at that moment when telling them goodbye I regretted every single time that I had barked at them for not picking up their clothes or cleaning off the table or any number of other petty things.  It all seemed meaningless. As parents we spend so much time trying to teach our children to be responsible.

It occurred to me a few years ago that there is a whole host of people who will try to teach our children to be responsible; educators, supervisors, authority figures, police.  The list goes on.  But, who is teaching our children to show mercy and to forgive.  This event has served as a reminder to keep my senses sharp for those opportunities to teach them this each day by example and to spend more time in the moment than looking toward the next bend.