Me and My Friends and CANCER!!!

My Wood Badge Patrol, and some of my best friends ever!  Friends are a big deal in the fight against cancer.

Just days after being diagnosed, Hanna and I were getting ready to leave for a drive to the country on a lazy Sunday when she announced that she wanted to sing songs together while we drove.  I was baffled.  We've been married almost seven years and we have NEVER sung in the car.  As I pried into what had gotten into her, she told me she had read in one of the many cancer survival books she was reading that a positive attitude was paramount to overcoming cancer.  And that the author actually SANG IN THE CAR whenever he drove, to keep a positive attitude.

Well, that may eliminate any stress from road rage while we drive, in us anyways, perhaps not in the other drivers though.  :)  As we talked further, we, or at least I, concluded that I could have a positive attitude without singing in the car.  I continued to listen to upbeat music instead.  Positive.  Always.  She wasn't joking.  Cancer can be a bummer, a downer, and I read on the internet posts that depression is a horrible side effect of cancer and its traumatic treatments.

Official pose this time.  We are the Beaver Patrol!  We give a dam.  Actually we build them.

I am in the midst of getting a "second opinion" as to the severity and aggressiveness of my cancer.  This is traumatic.  It is like taking all these freakin' tests just to wait by the phone for the Doctor to call and say, AGAIN, "Guess what?  You have CANCER!!"  It's just as bad the second time.

I am also in the midst of being on Wood Badge Staff.  Wood Badge is a two-weekend six-day total leadership course for Adult Leaders of the Boy Scouts of America.  Best times of my life, seriously.  So much fun happens on a Wood Badge Course.

I mindlessly set my MRI appointment BETWEEN THE TWO SESSIONS OF WOOD BADGE!!  What was I thinking?  I worried about that.  The main presentation I am teaching (Coaching and Mentoring) will be given on the second weekend.  For that presentation to come off, I MUST be prepared.  I MUST be upbeat.  I MUST be focused!!  Could I be while going through this cancer diagnosis thing?

The answer is YES.

Which picture looks more fun?

The Beavers competing in a senseless but very fun game?













Or me riding on a metal tray into a tiny tunnel while the room fills with loud high-tech sounds and several people gawk at my prostate electronically?






Wood Badge wins!!!!  (ALWAYS!!)

As I drove to the MRI appointment, I UNINTENTIONALLY sang in the car.  (WAIT??!!)  Not Disney Songs or child songs like Hanna had been hoping for.  But WOOD BADGE songs!  I was having SO much fun that I actually forgot that I was going in for a medical procedure.  And once I was placed in that tube...........for 35 full minutes..........I caught myself saying out loud "I do not have cancer.  There is nothing for you to see.  It has left my body.  You are wasting your time.  But go ahead and look."  I chanted it over and over for almost the entire 35 minutes.  Or at least until I got bored and then I went back to Wood Badge songs and even practicing my presentation.  Yes!  In the tube!  No Wood Badge presentation ever sounded better in there!  :)

I am a firm believer that you will become just like the people you surround yourself with.  Now, I am the world's truest introvert.  We don't go out with others much.  Wood Badge is an exception and we both dive in with all of our might.  Why?  Several reasons.  We feel safe in their midst.  No one is judged.  They are fun.  We all have the same goal and purpose.  We all want to be there.  But mostly, because EVERYONE is so upbeat.  Death dies at the feet of Wood Badgers!!

This week I surrounded myself with Wood Badgers!  Crazy, loud, eager Wood Badgers! And death, in whatever form it wants, is DIEING.

My best friends are found amongst the happy Patrols of Wood Badge.  Here I am respectfully posing amongst some of my friends in the Bear Patrol.  Respectful, because Bears generally think Beavers are delicious!

Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, said he would rather know what sort of person has a disease than what sort of disease a person has.

It is about the person, not the disease.  I choose to be THAT person.  The one surrounded by upbeat, happy, crazy people.  People who survive tough things.  People that love one another no matter what.  People who fight to help other people.   And in the end, I become like one of them.

Thus I choose my friends carefully.

Scouting and Wood Badge have been huge in my life.

This is me and the famous Hawk Patrol when I was about 14.  (I'm the tall one.)  We are dramatizing the mourning of our losing the Paddle Boat races at Camp Little Lemhi near Palisades Dam in SE Idaho.  Good friends.  Great kids.  (One is my brother, that still counts.......)

Scouting has been my life and still is.  I credit it for many of the awesome things I have accomplished.  And this week I credit it for getting me through CANCER.

Me and two of the biggest goof balls I know, Larry Ross (who is in charge of the Culinary Team at Wood Badge this year) and .......the Lovely Miss Hanna, this past weekend.  (We're supposed to be intently listening to someone else's presentation, but you know, when a camera shows up.......you just got to........)

Who gives a crap about cancer when you have friends like these??


Scouting has taken us to some incredible places with incredible views.  I live for that.  And I live for these boys and what they can become.  I LIVE.