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Today we celebrate our first wedding anniversary. I am thankful to be able to reflect on the past year. It has been a wild ride full of outside forces acting on our family, namely the cancer treatments. In June 2013 we were engaged to be married. We started planning our wedding for June 28, 2014 with all assumptions that I was healthy and all would be normal. Well, nothing about our story had really ever been normal so I am not sure why we expected this wedding planning would get to be normal!
Ten months into our wedding planning we officially had a diagnosis of an aggressive recurrence which would take extensive treatments. Did that slow us down? No! Although we had to make a few changes, cancer does not get to define our lives. Therefore, we went on with the wedding as planned. Looking back there are things we never thought we would be dealing with during our wedding. I had one specialist, my urologist, who had to agree that I could unhook my nephrostomy tube long enough to get married, take pictures, and enjoy a little bit of the reception unhooked from my bag. Out the window went all the Pinterest worthy beautiful long hair styles I had been pining over for months, I was now bald. Bald and beautiful I might add, it was definitely hot outside and I didn't have to deal with all that hair! We had a family friend, only two days before the wedding, whip up the most stunning head wrap I've ever seen which I used for the ceremony. We changed our wedding favors and got cervical cancer support wristbands for everyone. We had to postpone our honeymoon due to the fact that I had another round of chemo two days after our wedding ceremony. The oncologists frown on trips to Mexico in the midst of active chemo treatments, especially when your blood counts have been so low you've already spent a week in the hospital!
In spite of all that, we had the most fabulous ceremony I could have ever imagined. I only wish we had a close up video of our vows. My husband and his groomsmen surprised me with a song. It was the longest wedding ceremony I've ever been to that was not a structured religious wedding ceremony and it was so us! We wrote our own vows and didn't share them with each other until the ceremony. We did a unity painting, which was a fabulous time, and I got to marry the love of my life. Here's a link to our wedding site if you want to see more pictures from our special day.
Today we are going to go out a celebrate, in spite of the cancer, in spite of the worry that weighs on us daily while we wait on a treatment plan for this recurrence. We are just going to celebrate! We are going to celebrate for the past years we spent together in college. We are going to celebrate for finding each other again after years apart. We are going to celebrate our past year as a family. Most of all we are going to celebrate for our future together.
I challenge each of you to do something today to make someone else smile. I'd love it if you posted a comment here and let me know what you did to make someone else smile today!
To my husband, JR, I love you more than you could ever know. You are my partner and support system. I don't know what our family would be like without you (although he will never read this because my blog makes him cry).
Ten months into our wedding planning we officially had a diagnosis of an aggressive recurrence which would take extensive treatments. Did that slow us down? No! Although we had to make a few changes, cancer does not get to define our lives. Therefore, we went on with the wedding as planned. Looking back there are things we never thought we would be dealing with during our wedding. I had one specialist, my urologist, who had to agree that I could unhook my nephrostomy tube long enough to get married, take pictures, and enjoy a little bit of the reception unhooked from my bag. Out the window went all the Pinterest worthy beautiful long hair styles I had been pining over for months, I was now bald. Bald and beautiful I might add, it was definitely hot outside and I didn't have to deal with all that hair! We had a family friend, only two days before the wedding, whip up the most stunning head wrap I've ever seen which I used for the ceremony. We changed our wedding favors and got cervical cancer support wristbands for everyone. We had to postpone our honeymoon due to the fact that I had another round of chemo two days after our wedding ceremony. The oncologists frown on trips to Mexico in the midst of active chemo treatments, especially when your blood counts have been so low you've already spent a week in the hospital!
In spite of all that, we had the most fabulous ceremony I could have ever imagined. I only wish we had a close up video of our vows. My husband and his groomsmen surprised me with a song. It was the longest wedding ceremony I've ever been to that was not a structured religious wedding ceremony and it was so us! We wrote our own vows and didn't share them with each other until the ceremony. We did a unity painting, which was a fabulous time, and I got to marry the love of my life. Here's a link to our wedding site if you want to see more pictures from our special day.
Today we are going to go out a celebrate, in spite of the cancer, in spite of the worry that weighs on us daily while we wait on a treatment plan for this recurrence. We are just going to celebrate! We are going to celebrate for the past years we spent together in college. We are going to celebrate for finding each other again after years apart. We are going to celebrate our past year as a family. Most of all we are going to celebrate for our future together.
I challenge each of you to do something today to make someone else smile. I'd love it if you posted a comment here and let me know what you did to make someone else smile today!
To my husband, JR, I love you more than you could ever know. You are my partner and support system. I don't know what our family would be like without you (although he will never read this because my blog makes him cry).
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