Ten Years Later

Today I'm posting ten-year before-and-after profile pictures because they're a survival story, and I want people dealing with cancer to see this.
 
To see the woman standing behind the Ohia post that holds up her Hawai'i home, and maybe the post is holding her up too because she just had surgery, five thousand miles away from this place, and returned home changed, now a "survivor.”
 
And she's so grateful but the truth is, this early on, only weeks later, she has no idea if she'll actually survive, and she's so tired and even fragile, and it's her fifteen-year-old daughter taking the picture so she's trying to just be present and awake but she doesn't know who she is now or what life, if there will be life, will bring.
 
And she doesn't think in terms of ten years. She can't in that moment.
 
Ten years later her friend takes her profile picture and puts sparkles on it and sends it back to her and she uses it as her new profile picture because it's full of color and there's ink on her finger, which tells part of her story, and she's lived long enough to need reading glasses, and there, on her left wrist, are bracelets from Peru that tell the story of the documentary film she co-wrote with her best friend, who was there, ten years earlier, when she woke up in that Boston hospital bed.
 
And she knows she did exactly what she promised herself she would do on that once-upon-a-time metal table... right after she woke up from surgery in excruciating pain, struggling to breathe, and suddenly realizing she would have to relearn to breathe with less air... she FULLY LIVED.
 
Ten years later.