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One Week From Today

It’s been nearly ten years since I got rear-ended by a semi.

That set into motion a chain of events that led to me focusing more on my physical health. Scans, specialists, and surgeries — some directly related to the collision, some related only tangentially.

Several months after the accident, my neck was still nowhere close to feeling normal. (Spoiler alert: it never did get back to normal.) I’d been given a CAT scan in the ER on the day of the accident, and my chiropractor ordered x-rays eight months later. After the x-rays came back, she sent me for an MRI for further details on the soft tissues of my neck. The MRI found what she was looking for: a herniated disc in my neck.

The MRI also found a 3cm mass on the left lobe of my thyroid.

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Footprints in the Snow

I had just flashed my usual I Love You 🤟🏻 to Connor as the school bus pulled away. When I turned to walk back up the driveway, our matching sets of footprints stood out to me in the morning snow. We wear the same size shoe now: his men’s size 8 tread-marks are on the left, and my women’s size 10 slide-prints are on the right.

This school year is the first that Connor has taken the bus in the mornings since Kindergarten, since the elementary bus pickup conflicted with my work schedule. During those elementary years, I drove him to school — either for Extended Time in the mornings before school, or directly to school on days when I worked from home. Those short drives to school were some of the best one-on-one times I’ve had with Connor, and I had mixed feelings about losing that time with him.

Luckily for me, he still likes having me wait with him for the bus — and not just because I have the iPhone app that shows where the bus is on her route.