Planning Schmanning

I am an obsessive planner. I always have been. I love to make plans, even if they never quite pan out as intended. Training plans, meal plans, weight loss/gain plans, career plans, school plans – I am a schemer and a dreamer. Lists, diagrams and charts are addictive little things. And then came cancer.(Ka-boom.) So now, as a previously incessant planner of all things, I am actually finding it difficult to plan a single thing. 

The future is tenuous for everyone. We know that. Anyone could die in a car crash tonight. But cancer survivors (and their families) feel that reality a little more acutely. When your whole life explodes with absolutely zero warning, you wonder if (or when) it will happen again. I wonder if my husband will get sick, or if my kids will, or if someone else I love will have a catastrophic accident. I no longer feel immune to tragedy, as I once did (but don’t we all, to some degree, until it hits us?). I had a lot of plans, mostly related to my PhD. But I also had baby plans, and plans to move to BC. And on diagnosis day, that was all blown to bits. 

Now, with nearly a year of recovery behind me, I feel this silent expectation that I will go “back to work.” One year, after all, is what they say you need to recover. But what does it mean to be “recovered”? Who measures? And with what? I don’t know if I’ll ever finish my doctorate. On the flip side, I’ve been in graduate school for so long that it’s hard to envision an alternative life. For now I’m taking a break. I think about planning the next steps, planning my fieldwork, and I feel exhausted. Then doubts creep in – why bother planning when my plans never work out anyway? Also, maybe it’s pure craziness to return to the same high-pressure, type-A life that I was living before cancer. Maybe this is a do-over. Maybe I should just give up planning altogether. Let the universe decide. Although… the last time I told the universe to “bring it on,” I got leukemia. (I’m not joking – that actually happened.)

But can we live life without planning? People are always asking me what I’m going to do next. (“So, you seem to have conquered this whole cancer thing. What’s next on your agenda?”) I often just shrug, and I can tell people are dissatisfied with that answer. We are, after all, a goal-oriented society. We don’t generally approve of aimless wanderers. But can we find contentment being in the here and now and not worrying about next week, next month or next year? My last big plan was to survive this year of recovery and regain my health and strength. So far so good. Gold star for me. But what next? If I don’t plan, then how will I know what will happen? How will I know what to strive for? And how, pray tell, will I measure progress? 

But the reality is, I can plan all I want, and I still can’t control the outcome.

I’ve found that a common thing for people to say is: “Just trust that it will all work out.” I am guilty of saying this many times myself. But for a cancer survivor, it is very hard to trust. It’s hard to trust anything after getting blindsided by such a trauma. It’s hard not to see terrible things lurking behind every corner. But I survived, you say. I had a donor. Therefore I should trust that all things are possible. Yes. I should. But the survival was not without scars. Not without loss. Not without permanent damage. And I’m still so early in my recovery that it’s hard to trust everything will remain well. I’m trying.

On top of a mountain!

So I plan tentatively, and not very far ahead. But one thing I never do is plan to be sick. I am prepared for the possibility, but I don’t plan for it. Obviously you get your affairs in order (I’m not that irresponsible), but that doesn’t mean you plan to be sick, just like you don’t plan to be hit by a car or blown up by a bomb one day. It could happen. I just assume that it won’t. If it happens, we’ll deal with it just like we dealt with it the first time, maybe even a bit better. (I would definitely shave my head sooner!) But if I only have a small amount of time left, I don’t want to waste it feeling anxious and depressed over an illness that might never happen. We don’t live that way before we get cancer, (or at least I hope we don’t!) so why live that way after? 

So don’t ask me what I’m doing next. I have absolutely no idea. I’d rather just live in ignorant bliss for a while.

The Race

Before cancer, I really loved trail running. I did a fair share of road races, but my real love was skipping over roots and logs on winding, forest trails. There is something about running in the woods that I find remarkably freeing. It brings back precious childhood memories of traipsing through the trees in homemade cloaks and wooden swords. All stresses melt away when I can run in the woods. So when I landed in the hospital and heard the word “leukemia,” I wondered, among many things, if I would ever trail run again.


On Saturday, less than one year from my bone marrow transplant, I ran my first trail race. My pre-cancer, type-A self would have been really amped up about the race, gunning for top five if not a podium placement. But my post-cancer self was remarkably calm, there for the fun of it, completely unconcerned with placement or time. I was just thrilled to be there. As long as I wasn’t last, I’d be happy.

Before my race, my two-year-old nephew and my four-year-old son both had their own races. Watching their little legs go as fast as they could over the finish line was almost as good as doing my own race. They were so pleased with themselves and their little finisher ribbons.


Afterwards, as I prepped for my own start, I ate a few energy gummies. My son, with his uncanny ability to spot junk food from 1000 metres, immediately saw them and asked for one. I acquiesced – one gummy, after all, was not a big deal. It wasn’t until after he had popped it into his mouth that I realized I had given him a caffeinated gummy. I quietly backed away and eased myself into the starting line, leaving any potential consequences for my dad to sort out.


The race itself was amazing. It was at Golden Ears Provincial Park and the scenery there is breathtaking. The course had crazy climbs and super technical downhills, so it was hard to go fast, and everyone’s ankles were in constant danger, but it was really fun. I kept playing leapfrog with these two other women who had different strengths from mine. I would pass one woman on the uphill, and then another would pass me on the uphill. Then I’d catch her on the downhill, and then the first woman would catch us both. And the cycle would repeat. This went on for the entire second half of the race, but in the end, I beat them both. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit pleased.


I had forgotten what racing was like. I had forgotten how much faster you can run in a race than you can ever run during training. I had forgotten how hard you can push yourself. In the last two kilometres I started to fade, but I kept reminding myself of my victory over cancer, and how this was my celebration of life, and suddenly my energy came flowing back.

When I crossed the finish line, I immediately burst into tears. No one was more surprised than I was. I sat down on a rock and just sobbed. I could tell people were looking at me funny. One of the woman I had been leapfrogging came up to me and asked what was wrong. I told her I was just happy, as I almost died a year ago. After briefly telling the story, I realized that I had essentially just told her that she was beaten by someone who could barely walk 11 months prior. I'm guessing she'll run harder next time.

Some people came and clapped me on the back in sympathy, even though they couldn’t possibly have known why I was crying. But I could imagine their thoughts from their quizzical expressions:

“Jeez, woman, it’s not a marathon.” Or “I’m sure your time wasn’t that bad.” Or “It’s not the Olympics, honey.” 

I tried to pull it together. But then I saw my dad and brother and burst into tears all over again. It was hopeless. Let them stare. Let them wonder. I’m alive. I raced. I wasn’t last. And I even beat some people. 

Victory lap complete.

Victory Lap

I came home to BC yesterday. I call it home because this is where I grew up and got married and lived the majority of my life, and this is where my heart is. Not a single winter has gone by since I left beautiful BC where I have not yearned for the green, mild days of January in Vancouver.

It was a strange homecoming, in a way, because I have not been back since I got cancer. I was here last February, when I was battling a reoccurring kidney infection and we knew that something was wrong. But we had no idea how wrong it was. It wasn’t until I got home and underwent a battery of tests and ended up in the emergency room that we realized I had been fighting leukemia for the entire time I was in BC. So now that I’m back, I’m flooded with a range of memories. Memories of waking up in my parents’ house, drenched in sweat and feeling miserable, but getting up anyway to nurse my daughter back to sleep. Memories of snowboarding with my brothers and falling a lot at the end of the day because I felt a bit “off.” Memories of an amazing birthday with my friends where I felt a little unwell and was battling a feeling of dread. Memories of going to Minneapolis to meet my new professors and getting cold sweats every time I had to walk somewhere. Memories of going to the walk-in clinic repeatedly for antibiotics until a doctor finally told me that I needed blood tests.

In retrospect, it is clear how unwell I was. But at the time, I thought it was just a bad infection that I couldn’t shake. And then the piano fell on me.

Coming back now is like a victory lap. On my first day back, I ran into the trails behind my parents house with glee, hopping over roots and logs, and running up the insanely steep road back to the house, not stopping even once for air. That, to me, was miraculous. I have hardly run any hills since I started running again, and my lungs have less capacity than they used to (thanks, radiation), so I had no expectation that I would be able to make that climb. And yet I bounded up with relative ease after already running hills for an hour. I really have no idea how.

I am going to run those trails again today, and tomorrow, and the next day. And on Sunday I am going to run part of the Vancouver half-marathon course with my dad to keep him company. After that I’m going to go trail running in North Vancouver and maybe do a hike with my brother. And then, right before I leave, I’m running my very first race post-cancer – a 14k trail race at Golden Ears.

Victory lap? Yes. A punch to leukemia’s throat? Indeed.