Cancerversary with the Space Shuttle

Nearly five years to the moment I had been diagnosed with cancer, I got to see the space shuttle Enterprise being hauled up the Hudson River toward the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

The space shuttle thing was way more fun.

How can I remember what time it was when I was diagnosed with lymphoma? Here’s how:

On the morning of June 6, 2007, doctors told me that I had a tumor the size of a softball in my left lung which, left untreated, would probably kill me by summer’s end.
Stunned and scared, I returned to my hospital room, where my roommate, an elderly hip replacement patient with poor hearing and a handy-dandy morphine pump that she was self-administering rather frequently, was BLARING THE TV.
So it was hard to miss it when Barbara Walters introduced her next guest on “The View,” which airs in the New York area from 11 a.m. til noon, The Cancer Dancers.
I looked up at the ceiling and said, “Really God? The Cancer Dancers? Now?”
No one heard me because the TV was turned up so loud.

So, here’s what I couldn’t help but see and hear moments after being diagnosed with lymphoma:

Lovely kids. Lovely organization. Not at all what I needed to hear or see at that moment.

So when I found out that the space shuttle Enterprise would be towed up the Hudson River today while I was not but a block away at the Javitz Center, I left the conference I was attending and sat in the sun on a wall in the little park next to New York Waterway ferry slip.

Then, at about 11:30 a.m., almost exactly five years to the moment that I found out I had cancer, I saw the crane arrive first.

Frankly, all the tourists and families lined up on the shore began to worry that the shuttle was somehow hanging off the other side of this barge and we wouldn't see it after all.

Then she appeared. I Instagrammed this to make it look even cooler. I didn't mean to include the bald man's head in the shot, yet it's somehow fitting, given my cancerversary and all.