It’s a perverse time for me to be writing about luck. I am not feeling like the luckiest person right now. I can’t eat much, am finding Gatorade more delicious than any cocktail I ever tasted, and the peanut butter and honey toast I ate yesterday morning almost blew my mind with its robust flavors. (And then made me feel lousy, again.)

The fact remains I still sort of am. Lucky. I’ve felt that way about a lot of things in my life – career opportunities I had, meeting the man I married, the school our kids attend – so many small and large things that I can only trace back to being lucky.

Back when this all started – what drove me to get a skin biopsy on a patch of skin that had already been checked? The conviction that something just wasn’t right there. (OK,  that’s more intuition than luck.) In my gym class I’d lie splayed over the Bosu ball and feel it pressing against that patch of permanently sore skin in the middle of my back. I needed to get it checked again. Of course, I didn’t expect the grim call from my dermatologist that followed the biopsy. But what if I’d not listened to that voice telling me something was amiss? Let the bad cells run rampant until I was well and truly screwed?

I sailed through my initial melanoma treatment as easily as could be imagined. And then I proceeded to distance myself as far from it as I could possibly go. I would show up for my checkups, sure, but this was all a formality and anyone could see I was through with this. I kept hoping Quentin at the check-in desk of the cancer center would even forget my name and face between appointments (turns out he never, ever does, and he really likes my new haircut). I thought luck would keep me from becoming a repeat customer.

It strained my sense of luckiness, then, to hear I was back in Cancerland this fall. I didn’t feel lucky, I felt creeped out, because the enemy had burrowed further in, gotten into my lungs, which have already been on notice the past few years for failing to stop me from developing pneumonia when I get the slightest infection. I didn’t feel lucky when I went in for a lung biopsy, and wound up with a collapsed lung and a two-day stay in the ER.

But once the data was in, and we knew who the enemy was, a chat with Dr P restored my sense of luck. “Five years ago, you would have been in much worse shape,” she informed me. The drug I’m getting was approved in 2011, and has been a game-changer. And if this melanoma drug doesn’t take, they are now able to sequence the DNA from your tumor in order to customize further treatment. Dr P even went as far as to say that today, metastatic melanoma is becoming more of a  condition to be managed, like high blood pressure or diabetes. Now that is a hell of a pitch. I’m buying it.

Until this past week, I felt still very lucky, because I was sailing through treatment without any discernible major side effects. Sure, I was eating everything in sight (my default stress response, unfortunately), and I was a little more tired than usual, needing a daily nap before going to pick up the kids from school. But I was fine.

Lying here now, having tripled my dose of steroids this morning, which seems to have calmed the roiling in my belly, I feel a sense of calm that has been absent all week. I feel centered. I’m not worried about a potential one week delay in my treatment schedule (until I am back on track digestion-wise). I am still starved, but not experiencing the headache that usually accompanies hunger for me.

I am lucky. I am insured, I live in one of the best places in the country to have a serious illness, I have a community which is coming through for me and my family in so many important ways. I’m going to be fine. And keep feeling lucky.