NEDNEDNEDNED

Starting out with THE BEST NEWS! If anyone has ever had to mentally navigate everything that comes with a metastatic stage 4 cancer diagnosis, then you might know how stressful PET scan day can be every 6 months! But if someone is experiencing marital strain and trying to heal during a heart breaking separation when cortisol pumped in my veins way too often for the past 6 months on top of that, then you can imagine the concern I had walking in to get my PET scan this morning! However…. My prayers were miraculously answered when Dr Johnson informed me of 3 amazing bits of news!!! 

1. My echocardiogram showed improvement in heart strain from -18% to -22%!!

2. He recommended doing a PET scan less often because I’m a SUSTAINED RESPONDER!!! Aka…I’m a walking miracle!

3. My PET scan still is NED!!!! Praising God!!

Singing Gratitude 🎼 

🇫🇷 France 🇫🇷 

There’s rural France and then there’s Paris! And the two shall not be confused! 

I just experienced two and a half weeks with a special person in my life. Judy is a friend who lives in France and invited me to visit anytime…so I did!

France is where I experienced friendship where my raw honesty, emotional fragility, needed jocularity and renewed autonomy were accepted and welcomed.

So what did we do? In her little rural town called Le Lude in the Loire Valley…

Daily boulangerie (French bakeries) morning runs for illegal pastries (not whole food plant based) and fresh grainy breads.

Drank in the beauty of rolling countryside fields of golden haystacks and 🌻 sunflowers. Plus, we popped over to a Roman Ruins just minutes from Judy’s house that’s just sitting out in the middle of some farmer’s field! And it’s about 2000 years old!

Medieval villages rich in history in the Normandy area where we roamed around on cobblestone roads, ancient cathedrals and rows of houses hundreds of years old via e-bikes.

Honfleur, France

Ancient salt cellars now art galleries in Honfleur

So many cathedrals in France!

A wooden bell tower for local cathedral in Honfleur

Typical town with a château seated in the city center. Châteaus are everywhere!

On our one night in Normandy area we slept on an Airbnb sailboat and the captain took us out for an hour long ride before sunset. It was nostalgic in theory but honestly it wasn’t the most comfortable bed!

We relaxed in rural France taking on leisurely jaunts in châteaux gardens filled with elegance.

In the town where Judy lives is the Le Lude Chateau.

Villandry Chateau and formal gardens

Sadly I missed out on the lavender fields in Provençe by 2 weeks, but these Villandry gardens sufficed for intoxicating my olfactory and visual senses in lavender. 

And thanks to my S. Korean daughter, Jumi, who flew from Cambridge, England to see me, we enjoyed Loire Valley wineries where I learned to spit out the wine so one can just taste wine but not ingest it. It felt very wasteful and un-lady like at first, then I just pretended I was a real wine taster and spit without care!

And the stupidly expensive, unbelievably delicious fresh French nougat! Oh yes! I’ll take a teeny tiny taste!

It was all so very good for my soul being in Judy’s home. My bedroom at Judy’s was framed with Timbers from the 1600s!

Judy’s adorable house in the town of Le Lude, France offered me the perfect amount of R&R! My very own spa like bathroom! With fresh lavender and roses! 

Every morning I prayed and journaled while God soothed my heart aches and pain. Lavender and chocolate, conversation and calm music were my medicine!

The sanctuary of her back garden!

We shopped at a few markets and enjoyed strolling through little sleepy villages and occasionally brocanting

Fresh mint and lemon granita!!

That was my first week and a half!!! Bucolic, peaceful, quaint rural France!!!

THEN… Paris!! 🇫🇷 It’s another world! It’s anything but laid back! It’s swarming with people, both French and foreign. It has enormous, ornate, historical buildings from palaces to museums and monuments to governmental edifices, literally everywhere as far as the eye can see! I got to choose what we saw but thanks to Judy’s firsthand knowledge, Rick Steve’s Paris travel book and AI it was amazing! And I haven’t even scratched the surface of France!

My highlights in Paris in just the first two days were impressionistic art at Museum D’Orsay, seeing the Eiffel Tower, Monet’s house and gardens with blooming lily pads in Giverny, Bon Le Marche (puts Dorothy Lane Market in Ohio to shame!), strolling the pedestrian markets and popping in to one of many chocolatier shops. 

Here’s a peek into 4 fully packed days in and around Paris!

Day 1: Museum d’Orsay

Some of my favorites from the day! It’s currently in a former train station build for the 1900 World Fair. 

Day 2: Started the day at the Paris Metro station!!! The most intense and confusing transportation center to me where buses, trains, and subways are all organized and depart from! Were it not for Judy’s expert knowledge in navigating, I’d still be lost in the subway tunnels!!

We moved and walked over 14 hours this day including in Giverny (Monet’s house, gardens and ponds), then in the heart of the City. My feet were trashed and throbbing at the end of this day, in fact, my neuropathy had neuropathy!! And… it was wonderful!! Seeing all this rich history was surreal. 

Claude Monet’s house in Giverny

The driveway to Monet’s house lined by flowers everywhere!

Something I’ve decided while in France is that I’m thinking about picking up my watercolor paints and brushes again! It’s inspiring!

Then off to the City in the afternoon! The history is unfathomable from the ornate Alexander III Bridge and monuments like Arc de Triomphe to the corner where the French Revolution organizers met, and a famous hotel, Lutetia, where survivors of the Holocaust met to find each other.

Alexander III Bridge

Grand Palais

 Should one need to refill their water bottle in Paris, just look for a random fountain like this! And be careful because it will spontaneously start spraying out a mist to cool off passers by!

The French take chocolate seriously! (In fact, they take art, wine, bread, pastries, cheese and chocolate very seriously!) Here, Leeza was generous with glacé tasting and offered small bites of world famous chocolate here at Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse! Evidently, this well known chef owns the restaurant on top of the Eiffel Tower! 

 

Day 3:

The least planned and most unusual surprises happened this day! Because the Tour d’ France was culminating its frenetic enthusiasm in Paris, we attempted to avoid the crowds so we walked to a nearby cathedral and fountain,

and window shopped (I learned the French translate that idiom to window licking), and walked around to a beautiful area where Parisian families sit and relax in the Sunday sunshine.

But then we went into the Metro station and I experienced an opera singer belting out ballads that brought me to tears, so we stayed and listened for about 15 minutes!

Once on the subway train we soon realized that because of the Tour d’ France, the trains didn’t stop at 10 of their normal stops for security reasons and so we had to get off on a stop translated as ‘Pig Alley’ and it didn’t take long to realize why! Let’s just say that Moulin Rouge was there with Can Can dancers cheering on the bike riders, and the store fronts were debauchery at its peak! Couldn’t wait to exit this area!

But because the Tour d’ France attracts thousands of onlookers, we literally got trapped in a sea of people! But the fun of it was that we actually got to see them fly by on their bikes. 

Day 4: We ended our time together as Judy headed back to her quiet little town and I hung out in Paris by myself until I met up with a friend of a friend name Sarah who showed me Luxembourg Garden where the Medici Family Chateaux sits!

And from a tourist perspective those are the highlights. 

From a mental health perspective while in France, I’ve approached my healing journey differently than last month in California. In France, it was not so regimented and planned. In fact, I treated it like a vacation vs an official healing retreat. Why? Because there’s the sense of urgency I have to heal as my number 1 priority? When I journaled, the Lord put it on my heart that this is a time to just Rest and Relax! 

It was a time for me to Reset & to Remember what it feels like to be normal again without constant mental stress. Time to enjoy Beauty with Judy (as the Lord told me one morning in prayer) and just be me. I admit, it was a struggle to feel normal again.  God wants me to honest and present with whatever comes up. Be honest about my hyper vigilance and learning about what’s behind it. This beautiful song ‘Quiet’ is the one that speaks to me this week. There's too much chaos if I allow the racing thoughts run wild so I listen as if it’s God speaking to me and offering me the comfort my soul needs to trust Him.

As I’m reading a transformational book called, “Is It Me?” by Natalie Hoffman and listening to many podcasts and presentations including ones by Dr Gabor Maté, I’m so much more aware of the critical necessity to heal my mind so that I can continue physically living this lovely long life God is gifting me! 

According to Dr Maté, we are all born with a need to attach and be authentic and until I fully understand healthy attachment and feel emotionally safe to be fully authentic, I will take every necessary step to accomplish that original state that God desires for me!  I’m His beautiful, perfect as I am, whole, cherished, forgiven, accepted, grace filled, daughter that only has to honor my Heavenly Father and myself! With Jesus, there’s no shame, no blame, no games! And the way I please Him is to love and honor the person He made me to be. I thought I always did that well until I realized that I allowed others to treat me in a way that violated my boundaries for the sake of keeping relationship, and in so doing, I sacrificed my authentic self. It about killed me. The cognitive dissonance and absolute confusion created more internal stress than my body could handle and my body finally said NO MORE! No longer can I continue being harmed emotionally. My Creator’s view of me is the only one that matters. His is the only Truth, and He is trustworthy, and it’s His voice alone that I’m striving to hear in my head!

I didn’t ever think that at age 58, and going through stage 4 cancer treatment, and wanting to just live my life with gratitude and joy that my life’s trajectory would be so interrupted with so much personal emotional pain and need for healing! This time I’m not staying put when my body says NO! I’ve been saying NO since February and the trauma my body has experienced is exhausting. I’m not running from it. I’m not hiding my pain. I’m not pretending I’m fine. I’m not going to ignore that which will cost me my life if brushed under the rug. This time I am spending time with those who love me well, support my healing and don’t dismiss my reality. And I don’t have a timeline. Healing isn’t linear. But I promised myself that this time, a wholesome healed Tricia will emerge!

My nervous system is finally feeling less on edge and more regulated after France. Praise God that He is directing me toward the path called healing!