Five years

On August 20, 2007, I celebrated five years of dancing with metastatic breast cancer.

How does one celebrate such an event? After all, it's not like having cancer is a picnic. Treatments, aches that may or may not mean anything, appointments with doctors, diagnostic tests, and lots of meds add up to a strenuous regimen. Sometimes when I meet people for the first time, I answer the question "What do you do?" with "I'm in health care management." (I just don't say it's my own health I'm managing.)

This is how I celebrated: I invited my friends and family to eat dinner, drink a martini, dance a horo and indulge in lots of vitamin CH -- chocolate. More than 60 people gathered to party together, from all the different parts of my life. My yoga instructor and one of my doctors. Radost dancers and synagogue members. My sister and niece from New Jersey. Members of my choir Dunava and Rik's colleagues. It was a glorious mishmash of people.

The crowning moments were being serenaded by Dunava and dancing to tunes from Orkestar RTW. As dusk fell, the band played from the deck. We danced on the grass below in the dark, surrounded by strings of twinkling lights.

This is what Dunava sang to me:
We wish you a happy anniversary.
A joyous and celebrated anniversary.
To our dear Jill --
May she have a long, long life!