Remember when everything and everyone stayed the same? Of course not! Every day and every hour of every day generates newness…some good, some bad and some you won’t understand until much later.

Change can be based upon decisions made or chance. Always constant yet never consistent.

Take the scourge of a chance cancer diagnosis. Something changed in my body and it simply wasn’t wanted, yet I have zero personal control (I think) over its existence. For me, the intrusion affected my right eye orbit. For almost a year I knew that something wasn’t feeling right because I would develop more fluid excretion in my right eye area than in my left eye area. It was manageable, but noticeably not normal. Even my annual optometrist appointment hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary affecting my vision. I’ve been nearsighted since around age nine.

Enter COVID-19…How the world changed with this novel viral invasion! But what made this change even more dramatic was the creation of a vaccine to combat its spread. This “cancer” on society was among us and was threatening to kill us! To this day we still haven’t wrestled with the facts of how it occurred. Nonetheless, we all had to choose our own course of action to deal with it. I chose to take the vaccine.

Imagine my surprise when about a month after taking the vaccine my lower right eyelid started to protrude outwards! My PCP referred me to a local ophthalmologist who I wouldn’t get to see for almost three months. Meanwhile I was working my typical busy season at my bridal sewing business, trying not to skip a beat because it was extra, extra busy from all the postponed weddings from the year before due to COVID…a good example of how change is never consistent!

By September I had the biopsy and the diagnosis, and by December I was done with the radiation treatments. Over the next year my eyelashes fell out from my right eyelid (two times), but the treatment worked! Now more than three years later thankfully I am cancer free but have developed a cataract in my right eye, a probable condition from radiation treatment. At least my eyelashes have come back.

Changes…I’ve retired from my sewing business. This cataract has made working more difficult until I can correct it. This will take a few more months. Always constant and never consistent.

I’m still unsure about how my cancer developed. I’ve never smoked, I’m not on any medication, I’m active and not overweight. Is there a change I can make in my lifestyle to prevent another diagnosis of cancer? Maybe. I’ve decided to make some changes to my food choices: more organics, less seed oils, more olive oil, and green tea instead of coffee. There is a chance that my gut health contributed to the cancer in that specific location. How crazy is that? And if food choices can contribute to health changes, can the medicine we consume do the same, good and bad?

Cheers to life and all the changes there in. May God watch over us and keep us in his mercy.