Outlier

Today I went for a bike ride. When I ride, my mind tends to wander down tangent paths that are typically suppressed by the business of everyday life. For an hour today, my mind was free & flowing. I was thinking about my cancer experience & the staging of my disease. Some doctors would say I was stage 2b or even 3 and that my chance of recurrence is pretty high. After I was first diagnosed, many people would ask me what was my stage. I tried not to get caught up in the numbers and statistics. Maybe it's a form of denial, but I like to think it's because I believe in outliers. I don't want my fate to be determined by statistics. This sounds a bit ironic coming from an engineer who thrives on data.....graphing her kids' growth & swim times in Excel. If you've taken a statistics class, you'll recall that within a set of data, an outlier is a data point that is much different from the rest of the values. "Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside a normal experience. I feel like an outlier in many ways. My life is not defined by mainstream society so why should my disease? Everyone is unique in their experiences & circumstances, thus producing different outcomes. I strive to be different & prove the cancer statistics wrong. I have a fair amount of experience proving myself as a female engineering student & in a male dominated engineering company. I am an outlier who surprises the doctors and, at times, myself. I am special......and this belief grows hope for a bright future.

Today my kids played in their annual holiday piano recital. It was my daughter's first recital. She was very excited.....more about which dress she should wear.

Tomorrow I get my first dose of Herceptin since September. Should be fine. Then I see my radiation oncologist in the afternoon.

Have a great week! Love, srb