My husband and I just got back from Calgary yesterday after a quick trip to help support our best friends. This trip has truly made me appreciate that our life is really pretty good; a feeling I hope to affect my perspective for some time.
It all started last Wednesday with a phone call from my friend Erica who was calling from the Children’s Hospital in Calgary after their daughter was flown to the hospital earlier in the week. As of that Wednesday, they’d received a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer. I was blown away with the news, trying to listen to the details from Erica when all I wanted to do was cry.
We then arranged everything that night to fly to Calgary on the weekend to help support our friends while they dealt with their life changing completely in an instant. My parents took our girls, my sister in Calgary arranged to pick us up at the airport and make one of their cars available to us for the weekend. We cancelled all of our kids’ weekend activities and cancelled our previous plans to go away for the weekend with other friends. It’s amazing how everyone was fantastic and supported us to make sure we could head out quickly.
On the Thursday before we left, we received the good news that the cancer had been identified as Hodgekins. Hard to believe that good news is knowing what kind of cancer is present but Hodgekins has a very high recovery rate and it really was the best kind of cancer to hope for.
On the way to take our daughters to my parents and head out to the airport on Friday, we received a call from our alarm company that our house was being broken into and that the police were being dispatched to our house. At first my husband and I just looked at each other in disbelief but then we started to laugh while our children in the back seat thought that we were cracking up. But really… we were on our way to a situation that was so much bigger than the physical objects in our house. We decided to laugh rather than rant and it turns out that it was actually just a false alarm.
In the end, we were thankful for our time with our friends and their daughters because while there were times to cry, there was a lot of laughter too. It really drove home that despite dealing with food allergies in our house daily and the fear that can sometimes bring, we’re all very lucky to be blessed with good health. It’s all about perspective.