Wherein My Pending Demise is Greatly Exaggerated

Last night my friend Cassie called me.
"What is WRONG with you?" she began the conversation.
"Uh. I have a cold. Other than that I'm fine," I replied.

She then told me that prayers had been offered on my behalf in church on Sunday (for some reason Mensa Boy forgot to tell me that), and then she proceeded to enumerate the number of things I have NOT been to in the last week.

It is true that I have been somewhat of a serial church skipper this past year. As I struggle with "this menopause crap," as my friends call it, it's been difficult to have the energy just about every other weekend. Sometimes I just go anyway, but other times I think about how there is basically just a scrolling screen saver across my brain that says "I want to be home. I want to home."

I do feel much better than I did last summer and winter. But I still have low-energy days, and they seem to happen most on weekends. Probably because I run around as much as possible during the week to get work done.

However, I have also been absent from church as I cover the new ones that are opening up here in our community. I am the de facto "church correspondent" for our paper, and so I cover quite a few church events and some of them happen on Sundays. Last Sunday I went to a service for a new church called "The Community Life Church of the Carolinas." The week before I went to the service now offered in our community by St. Paul's Episcopal Church of Fort Mill. In a couple of weeks I'll be going to the Presbyterians.

I've never been much for attending multiple services in a week. And especially not twice in one day.

So I've been gone from church a bit. It's noticed in a little church like ours, because we only have about 90 people in our services. And of course our family sits right in the front row.

Cassie also is breaking my back about Jazzercise. We opened a new location here and I just haven't gotten to it. I've been going, but my schedule as a freelancer is very flexible, so I still end up going to the other location, which has daytime classes, pretty much all the time.

But what really concerned her were the prayers on my behalf. "Do you think they are praying for my soul?" I asked.

"I don't know," Cassie said.

And then all became clear when I asked Mensa Boy about it.

"Oh yeah!" he said. "They think you have breast cancer!"

huh.

I guess someone misunderstood my Komen donation letter...where I mention the testing I had last spring. My point was how cool it is that we have all the modern technology. That even someone like me, who is hard to screen, can be screened for this disease thanks to the work of foundations like this.

So my dear church put together my absences and my Komen letter and came up with me dying of breast cancer.

I'm not. But I do have a pretty bad cold. I feel like death warmed over, but I'm pretty sure I'll recover.

Maybe.

(Many thanks to those of you who have donated to the Komen Race. I'd love to have more. It's not a competition of any kind--well, Mary of "Shoe Dawg Shoe" and I are kind of having a Komen pledge throwdown--but really? It's just a good thing to do. I'd love to have more of you contribute!)