Vancouver!!!

Yea! We are finally here!

Today seemed like a week! We left our house at 8:30am to get on our flight to Seattle, Washington. By the time we got through security and to our gate, they had already seated our section (Southwest does seating a little funky, lol) and so we just jumped ahead of the line to board. Mom and Dad sat together on the flight and Joie, Jordan, and I sat together. It was a short flight of about an hour.

The views outside the window were amazing! I love the Cascades! It was so cool to see the topography from an airplane! We were able to see all of the dormant volcanoes that dot the plain lands and through the Cascades and flew right by Mount Rainier!! It was wonderful and it made me miss Grandpa Hale terribly. I wish that he could have been there to point out all of the geological marvels that we flew by. I had tons of geology questions. It is easy to think geology for me when I am in the air. I can see things so clearly from that point of view. I love it. :)

Since we got to Seattle so early, we went to church in the Skyway Ward. It was a wonderful ward and the people were so friendly. The spirit flowed strongly throughout testimony meeting and then through Sunday school. By the time Relief Society started I was hurting to bad to pay attention to anything. I had been sitting for too long and I was pretty cold. Two things that can spark bad pain attacks. I do not like it. After the meetings, the ward has a tradition of "Break the Fast" where they do a potluck and break the fast together! They had invited us fourteen gajillion times . . . and . . . well . . . we were hungry! So we went. Lol. Talk about feeling out of place, but welcome all at the same time. They were pleased that we would come and join them. The people in that ward know how to make people comfortable. ;) People were always asking us who we were, where we were from, if we were visiting or had moved into the ward, and then making the rounds again to talk to us again about anything! It was fun! I felt pretty special in that ward. They didn't know us from Adam, but were still willing to share all that they had. It was truly ONE CHURCH! No lost sheep in that congregation. And in testimony meeting there was not one quiet stretch of time! It was person after person, group after group! And it was pretty entertaining. Never a dull moment where you wished you could fall asleep like there are so many times on fast Sundays. Lol. It was great.

After that, we hung out in the rental cars until Nikki, Jeremy, Jerrod, Erika, Jon, and Brit's flights came in. Joie, Jordan and I played a card game to pass the time and had a hilarious time! Once everyone was packed in the vans, we got a quick bite to eat at Jack in the Box by the Qwest Field, the closest I have ever been to a NFL game, lol, and then hit the road for Vancouver!

None of us were prepared for how long it would take. lol I still don't know how long it took, but I think around three to three and a half hours. I was so cold that my right hip was starting to act up again and there was nothing I could really do about it. Everyone in the car was hot so the A/C would go on, then I got too cold so the heater would go on! Eventually, as we got into North Vancouver, they left the heat on and rolled down their windows. lol I had my heat and they kinda had their cold. :)

The stop at the boarder was uneventful, thank goodness! They do have a cool monument there that has a cool saying on it. I knew I wouldn't remember it, so I had Erika write it down. Unfortunately, I am blogging at 4:30 in the MORNING! Erika is fast asleep, so I will get it later. The picture is the only souvenir I got. THEY DIDN'T EVEN STAMP PASSPORTS! The whole point behind getting a passport is to get the stamps to brag about the places you've been to outside of the country, right?! Sigh. I'll live though. :)

Well. There is nothing else to write about right now. I am going to do my best in posting while in Vancouver. It is a special experience and should be documented. :) Plus, I know I have about 50 people who will be excited to see that I have posted. :) At Jordan's homecoming and other places, so many people commented on how I haven't been writing. It was funny to me at first, but then I realized that more people were reading my thoughts and feelings than I was aware of. Not only that though, people have been wanting more. It made me feel shocked, humbled, and loved.

Recently, I have had the overpowering awareness of how many people are . . . touched? . . . by me. It is an uncomfortable feeling for me because I don't feel like I am doing anything that should evoke kinds of words and feelings like: "hero", "I look up to you", "You touch my heart", etc. It troubles me so much, but last night after I had packed, I picked up a very special book to me. When I had been released from Primary Children's Medical Center after my bone marrow transplant (BMT) my outpatient coordinator gave me a children's book called "The Blue Spot". It is about a blue spot that hangs out in the book and has everything it needs until one day (today) it decides it is missing something and asks you to tilt the book to the right. It runs (like blue watercolor) across the pages! You finally say, "Hold on! Where are you going? This is my book and you belong in it!" The spot replies that for so long he has had everything he needed, but now he is curious to see if there are any more spots in the book and to see if they would be his friend. Knowing the value of friendship, you decide to tip the book to the right and follow the blue spot to the end of the book where a yellow spot is found! Then you slightly close the book and the colors run together to make a green spot. New friends right there at the end! Anyway, it is not the story that I love about the book. My outpatient coordinator had all of my nurses, doctors, fellows, and anyone who has helped me through the last (at the time) two and a half years at the hospital sign the book. When I opened it for the first time I was overwhelmed by the comments in the pages. They were all touching and along the lines of love, spirit, hero, example, happiness, joy, etc.

When I picked that up last night and reread the comments in the book, I felt overcome with love, tenderness, remembrance of hope at being done with cancer treatments that had turned into sorrow when I relapsed AGAIN and finding hope in something else, and trying to figure out what exactly is going on inside my thoughts. It is a muddy maze without any clues as to where to go from where I am. I am trying to find out where I am in the maze with no vision of how big the maze is or what it even looks like. It is quiet frustrating, frightening, and lonely trapped in the head on my shoulders. Not knowing if what I am thinking is actually how I feel or if it is the front I put up for other people to see.

For example, I am a different person when I am at home and when I am up at Primary Children's. At home, we don't acknowledge the big elephant in the room and continue our lives as if it doesn't exist. At Primary Children's, my emotions are close to the surface and I cry most of the time I spend with particular people. It isn't fair to those people that from the moment I see them, I cry. They wish with all their heart they could do something to take away the heartache, sorrow, shame, and anguish that floods my being at that moment. I stop crying, out of habit. So now I am wondering which person am I really? Am I the person that doesn't mind not mentioning the Huge White Elephant in the room? Or am I so distraught that I need to talk about it? When I have talked about it it feels good at the time, but then that goes away, and I am left with all the overpowering sad, down trodden feelings that I don't know what to do with, but ignore them. So does that mean that I am in denial of what is really going on and am not working within the realms of reality, or am I just following the crowd I spend most of my time in and am comfortable with how "things roll"?

I do not know and this is what bogged down my brain as we drove from Seattle to Vancouver. Sometimes crying. Most of the time trying to crowd out the thoughts with the heavy bass booms of the music playing in the car and then trying to keep my brain busy so it couldn't go back to the black cloud. So which one am I? Or do I play all the parts and just pick and choose which one depending on the people I am around so that I can get their attention? I DO NOT LIKE THIS FRAME OF MIND! I WISH IT TO STOP AND TO STOP IT MUST! THIS WEEK IS GOING TO BE FUN! EVEN IF IT KILLS ME!