One year ago this week I had just finished running the America’s Finest City Half Marathon and had completed several days at a major conference. I was full of confidence and ideas and enthusiasm and ambition. I felt like I couldn’t be stopped… the world was so big, the possibilities so endless, the timing so right.

And then the phone rang.

My father was calm and reserved as he told me the news. A surgeon had called my mom a few nights before to tell her that her cancer was beyond their control. The surgeon had given her two years to live — if she consented to external beam radiation treatments — and that was a big if.

In the minutes it took to complete that phone call, my world shrank to a tiny pinprick of light. Mom was dying. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. Work could wait. Love could wait. Writing books, running marathons, giving speeches… everything could wait. Mom’s life was now a giant clock with hands that were moving way too fast toward a time we couldn’t imagine would ever come.

As a runner for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, we hear lots of stories from cancer patients about what they went through. They say things like, “I went through treatment, and that was really rough.” But it’s hard to imagine what really rough is until you’ve been through it. Mom’s radiation treatments almost killed her. “Really rough” meant throwing up every day, several times a day. “Really rough” was watching her neck turn the color and consistency of raw liver, burned and purple and weeping. Once I moved toward Mom to touch her neck, and she started shaking and burst into tears — sobs, really, whispering, “No, no, no, please please don’t touch me. Please.”

“Really rough” meant phone calls with Papa about how we weren’t sure she would survive the treatment. She lost about 65 pounds, hated food and stopped wanting to get out of bed.

It was perhaps February when we thought she was at her lowest point. She had finished the radiation, but she just didn’t seem to be getting better. She was weaker and weaker, and we were in agony watching her sink. We were all feeling like horrible people because we had pushed her so hard to get the radiation (she REALLY didn’t want treatment!), and now it looked like the radiation was killing her.

Around that time, she received another scan, and WOOHOO! the radiation had worked! The biggest tumor is near her windpipe, and it had shrunk by 50 percent! Other tumors had also shrunk or stopped growing. It was really a best case scenario.

I don’t know if it was the news of her scan or just the timing, but all of a sudden, she started feeling better. She was walking around again. She would eat a little. She resumed Sunday brunch with my sister’s family. She started playing with the grandkids. She was getting better. And better. And better.

Several of you, my readers, have written to ask of news of Mom, and I’ve been hesitant to write about her for fear of jinxing things. But the news continues to be good. We convinced her to enroll in a clinical trial, and she seems to be handling the medication well without many of the bad side effects. The whole famn damily just came for a week-long visit to San Diego, and she walked, ate, laughed, stuck her toes in the sand and had an awesome time. I took her to a local spa for her first spa treatment ever, and she looked beautiful. The picture is Mom and Pop on a ride we all took on The Bahia Belle on Mission Bay. Don’t you love those smiles? These days she is back to enjoying food, and she’s now worried about gaining weight back! What a wonderful problem to worry about.

I called her one day to ask, “What if we decided that you don’t have cancer anymore?” And she laughed. “I live each day, Beth. Each day is a gift. Today I’m alive, and I’m celebrating that.” I am, too, Mom. I am, too.