On Wednesday night Christine and I were invited to a recruiting presentation for prospective students of the MBA program. If you’ve been following us since the beginning you may recall that Christine was accepted into this degree program and had just begun courses when I was diagnosed and we made the decision to defer her enrollment for a year. The school has been very supportive of us and our decision and Christine has kept in contact with them throughout this process.

I have to tell you, at every encounter I continue to amazed and impressed by these people. Christine has been guaranteed a spot in next years class but they still invite us to the occasional recruiting event or reception in order to “ensure that you remain enthusiastic and interested in our program.” What they forget is how enthralled we are about the program but that just goes to show how thorough and impressive they are. Throughout the process they given us the impression that THEY have been courting and recruiting US into their exclusive program when really I feel like it should be the other way around. This is one of the top Business School programs in the country and they want Christine! (we won’t tell them that she can’t count)

It was a beautiful reception and dinner at the Sorrento Hotel with a brief presentation and then a few alumni spoke. I got so excited for Christine to start this program again, it was the same feeling I had back in the fall when we attended the “Back the School Night Reception” after her first day of class. I distinctly remember sitting in that room over dinner at the table full of her new classmates. It was a feeling of excitement, hope and endless opportunity ahead of us. It was happening! She was taking her first steps into this amazing program, I had just come off 8 months of solid steady work and was a few weeks away from starting another 3 months of work. Life was good! I was SO proud of Christine for everything that she had accomplished and was about to start, and frankly I was proud of myself for everything that I had accomplished and was about to start. That last bit doesn’t happen often, so I always note it when it does =) Two weeks later… well, you know that story by now.

The thing is, I had that same feeling again on Wednesday when I was sitting in the room listing to alumni talk about the program and the opportunities that it provided for them. I looked over at Christine and again was immensely proud of her and I was excited again for the future like I was back before everything happened. This is important to note, I purposely haven’t been “counting down” my number of treatments or spending too much time thinking ahead about an exact date when I will be finished with chemo since we don’t know, and it could change even if we did. But I do feel comfortable looking forward to next fall when Christine will be starting the program again. I assume that by then this painful experience will be be fading into the rear view mirror of our lives (hey look at that, imagery! This is what happens when you start reading books without pictures in them again). We’ll be back where we started, and probably much wiser for the journey.