Maybe a little less talk and a bit more info?

Originally this blog was started as a central place to put all the information about Ryan's disease so that anyone who wanted to follow his diagnosis could do so. It quickly became a place where I record most everything about his cancer and what we feel about it. I don't intend to change that completely, because this is also the only record I have of the almost day-to-day of this chapter in our lives. But, I am a highly emotional person, and I write more from what I feel at any given time than from the logical and informative side of things. That being so, I realized there is a lot missing from this tale of ours. Not about Ryan or his care or his progress through GIST cancer--but about us. About our family and our daily functioning and how we are arranging to continue to live our lives. All of that has changed, is still changing. The normal we knew a few months ago doesn't exist anymore, and I am struggling daily to locate and settle our family into a "new" normal. That is a process I haven't recorded much of, and I do intend to change that.

There are some who have asked questions that I want to answer. There are a few well meaning souls who are trying their best to guide me in the way they feel I should be handling this--I want the opportunity to be very clear on why I make the choices I do and how they are working out for our family. There are others who will find themselves on this shock wave of unwanted diagnosis when they wake up tomorrow, and I want to be able to say "this is how we handled it, this is what we did about that issue..." Just in case one person can see that and breath a tiny sigh of relief because it gives them a bit of clarity or direction that they were searching for.
Mighty big ambitions, I know. But I believe with everything within me that there can be a greater purpose to this experience than just the heartache we feel, or the suffering Ryan endures. I have never for a second accepted that all of this has happened just because we are meant to feel this pain. I don't buy into the whole "everything happens for a reason" fluff. However, I do adamantly believe that you can take what happens and use it. Life happens, the good and the bad, and you can't stop that. But you can choose: it either happens to you, or you catch what comes at you and you use it for something good, something greater than yourself and your own experience.

So that's my current plan of action! It's a little bit ego-inflated maybe, thinking I can do or say something that will change someones place of fear and hurt some day. It's more than a little bit control-freakish. But lets face it, there's pretty much nothing left in my life that I am in control of. If I can feel a tiny bit of power-over-my-destiny by anally chronicling the how-to's of our wrestling match with cancer...well, why not?