I suspect this will be a long story as opposed to a short one, and not surprisingly it starts with dogs.<\/p>\n
For most of the thirty years Bill and I have been married, we\u2019ve made do with a queen-sized bed. \u00a0Then, suddenly we had dogs that thought our bed was their bed. \u00a0We finally succumbed to the lure of a king-size bed in Bellevue last year but still had the Tucson queen. \u00a0Then we arrived here with Mary in tow. She\u2019s still a miniature dachshund, all right, but she\u2019s definitely bigger than either Jojo or Bella. \u00a0Where everyone else sleeps on a vertical plane, Mary prefers the horizontal style which causes Jojo to do the same. \u00a0Two \u201chorticals” versus two verticals in a queen-sized bed? \u00a0I\u2019m sure you see the problem here.<\/p>\n
So last week we went out and bought a king-sized bed, but since it\u2019s much lower than our old bed, we also had to replace the bedside tables\u2014which meant, in turn, that the contents of the old, taller bedside tables had to sorted before they were moved. It was during the sorting process that I came across my St. Michael\u2019s medal.<\/p>\n
In case you\u2019re not aware of this, St. Michael is the patron saint of the Airborne. And no, I\u2019ve never been a paratrooper, but here\u2019s how I came to have a St. Michael\u2019s medal of my own.<\/p>\n
By contract, authors receive author copies of their books\u2014so many copies for a hardback publication; so many for paperback; so many for audio versions. \u00a0We\u2019re talking forty or fifty books per edition per title. \u00a0If you\u2019re talking thirty plus years and fifty plus books, that amounts to a lot of books. And what do you do with all those books? \u00a0You store them, of course. \u00a0In the Nineties we stored them in the attic of our home in Bellevue. \u00a0Boxes came and immediately disappeared into the attic.<\/p>\n
I may have mentioned before that Bill is an engineer. \u00a0He\u2019s also a very smart man. \u00a0One day and not all that long before the Nisqually quake hit the Seattle area, he said to me, \u201cYou know, all those books means that we have a lot more weight up in the attic than we should have. \u00a0If there happens to be an earthquake \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly thereafter we heard of an NGO that was partnering with FedEx to send books to our troops in the middle east. All we had to do was box them up and take them to the nearest FedEx office. \u00a0So 30 plus boxes of books came down from the attic. \u00a0(Just in time, too. \u00a0Whew!!) \u00a0Every book was autographed before being packed off to Fed Ex, and away they went.<\/p>\n
Sometime later, I heard from a soldier named Cesar Flores. He was in the Air Force and assigned to the 18th Airborne at Camp Bucca as a Security Forces Team Leader when the Humvee in which he was riding hit an IED. He and his gunner were severely injured but both survived. The fire was so hot that it melted his dog tags and his St. Michael’s medal. While he was recovering in the hospital\u2014and before he reenlisted (while still in Iraq)\u2014someone gave him one of those autographed books to read. It was a Joanna Brady book, set in Arizona. \u00a0Cesar, who hailed from Texas, felt right at home. \u00a0He wrote to tell me how much he liked the book, and we commenced an e-mail correspondence, writing back and forth. He was still overseas when his daughter, Kendyl was born, and I was happy to send her the softest pink blanket I could find. (If you think that\u2019s sexist, tough!) By the way, Cesar tells me they still have the blanket.<\/p>\n
And then the day when the Beaumont book Justice Denied<\/em> was scheduled to go on sale. \u00a0At 8:30 in the morning on the first day of the tour, I received a call from the doctor\u2019s office, telling me that my test results had come back \u201cpositive for uterine cancer.\u201d Anyone who has ever been given a cancer diagnosis knows how that felt. \u00a0On our way to the first signing of the tour, we stopped by our GP\u2019s office. \u00a0He said, \u201cDo you want a warm fuzzy surgeon or the best?\u201d We allowed as how that since our GP was doing warm and fuzzy, we would opt for the best. \u00a0\u201cOkay,\u201d he said. \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019ll take a while to set it up. \u00a0You go on your book tour. \u00a0Don\u2019t worry about this. We\u2019ll take care of it when you get back.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t worry. Right. Famous last words. \u00a0I went on tour and TRIED not to worry. \u00a0I didn\u2019t talk about the diagnosis on the book tour, but the next time I heard from Cesar I mentioned it to him. \u00a0In one of his next e-mails he said, \u201cPlease send me your snail mail address,\u201d which I did. \u00a0Two weeks later, when I came home from the book tour, what should be waiting for me?\u00a0 A snail mail package from Cesar containing a St. Michael\u2019s medal \u201cto keep me safe.\u201d<\/p>\n And it did. \u00a0I had my hysterectomy done by the DaVinci robot and my not-warm-and-fuzzy surgeon. My cancer was stage one and totally contained, so no chemo or radiation were needed. (Early detection wins the day!) \u00a0And I have to say, Cesar\u2019s medal really did keep me safe, so safe, in fact, that I don\u2019t think of myself as cancer survivor. Eventually my St. Michael\u2019s medal got put away\u2014in the drawer in the too tall bedside table in Tucson. \u00a0Which is where I found it this week.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s when I realized that the medal that kept me safe might very well work the same magic for someone else. \u00a0At the moment I have a dear friend in Oregon who is battling breast cancer. She\u2019s had a double mastectomy and is now recovered from surgery enough to undergo radiation. She\u2019s tough, and it\u2019s a good thing, too, because fighting the Big C is not for sissies. But it occurred to me that I should pass my St. Michael\u2019s medal along to her. To help keep her safe.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure if it will arrive prior to her reading this week\u2019s blog, but it\u2019s on its way. And when she\u2019s done with it? I\u2019m sure she\u2019ll pass it along to someone else who will need to be kept safe as well.<\/p>\n And let\u2019s all remember, what goes around comes around.<\/p>\n So endeth today\u2019s reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I suspect this will be a long story as opposed to a short one, and not surprisingly it starts with dogs. For most of the thirty years Bill and I have been married, we\u2019ve made do with a queen-sized bed. \u00a0Then, suddenly we had dogs that thought our bed was their bed. \u00a0We finally succumbed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,59,133,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-cancer","category-health","category-pets"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-oI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1532"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1535,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions\/1535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}