Xeni Jardin

Last week a Boing Boing blogger named Xeni Jardin went to get a mammogram after two of her friends had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She live tweeted the appointment to bring awareness to the need for mammograms, but also to ease her own nerves, or in her own words, "to make the unknown and new feel less so." By the end of her appointment, she found out she had breast cancer.

I thought about her all day after I read that. I told Cody and Dad about it at dinner after we moved my stuff in, and we all just kind of shook our heads, lost for words, at the awfulness of it.

I imagine, even though she's a professional blogger, that it must've taken guts to reveal her diagnosis on Twitter, almost in real time. And then she wrote a really beautifully articulated piece on Boing Boing where she describes the outer body experience perfectly via an extended metaphor about space:

"I do not know all of what's ahead. I know a little. I know that there is a new kind of life on the other side of this thing. A changed mind and body. A new appreciation of time, and breath, and health, and life, and loved ones.

The gravity in this place is different. I've spoken to others who've traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can't understand."

It comforts me to know she seems to be looking forward to the positive ways in which her life will change. Mrs. Rapp always talked to me about "the other side" when I was diagnosed, and I can now say that it is definitely a Real Thing. There are moments when the thoughts whirring around in my head just halt to a stop and I think, "Wow, here I am. On the other side." I don't know if those moments--the ones where I stop to just appreciate the sensation of sucking air up through my nostrils--even existed for me before the Hodge. I don't think they did. But they do now, and I really hope they do for Xeni someday, too.