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Carpe diem<br /><br />In the meantime, while going through all this, I started reading a lot of books, and one of the books that helped me the most was """Love, Medicine and Miracles""" by Dr. Bernie Siegel. In this book, one of the things he said, which really struck me was that if you have cancer and you want it to go away, or you've had cancer you don't want it to come back, or if you just don't want to get cancer in the first place, one of the best things you can do is to start living your life as if you only have one year left to live. And at first, I was in, total denial about this. I said """oh well, I'm already doing this, I love my job, I love my students, I love my colleagues, and everything's' fine, it's just terrible that this happened to me.""" But I was living my life as if I had one year left to live. But then when I was really honest with myself, I realized that I really wasn't. There was a man who I had met here at Louisiana State university, a composer, who left after my first year, went teaching in Illinois, and we'd been having a long distance relationship for eleven years. And even though it was a wonderful relationship, when he's in Illinois and I'm in Louisiana, there's something wrong with this picture. So, after reading this book, part of the reason we thought we could never be together was he was a full professor with tenure there, I'm a full professor with tenure here, and financially it just didn't seem possible. But somehow after having cancer, it put that more in perspective so that Christmas of 1997, I proposed to this man, and .....