My First Blog

Well... This is my first Blog.  I'm not really sure if I have anything to say, but I'd like to give this a try.  I met an author the other day who said "Do you have a blog?"  and I said "No."  and she said that I'm never going to be published unless I at least have a blog.  She said something that made sense.  "You truly suck if you don't have something published in a newspaper, a blog, a magazine, a cookbook...something."

That made sense to me in a weird way.  So today I started a blog.

So about L.T. Crane....

I'm a high school teacher, sponsor of a writer's club and I've been a dreamer and storyteller as long as I remember.  I majored in Art, History and French and I became a teacher because I was convinced as a young child that writers and artists didn't make any money until they were dead.  If they're lucky.  If they're not lucky they don't make any money after they're dead either and their children inherit a lot of notebooks or canvases that they can't give away.

I live in South Georgia with my husband, my children (five years and seven) and an adopted puppy whose soul purpose in life, it seems is to destroy our house. We moved here just before 9-1l, to a town we knew little about, in a place where we had no friends or relatives.  We struck out, just my husband, myself and the dog; leaving our family almost five hundred miles to the north because God wanted us to.  That's the only way I can explain it. There is no other way that we could have found jobs, friends, a church and a home where we love it so passionately and fit in so well had it not been for the divine providence of a loving Father.  We are born again, Bible believing Christians and we attend a wonderful Baptist church.  

Any questions?

Okay, so up until a couple years ago (2007 to be exact) I was content to write my stories as a way of therapy, a way to get away from the grind of the real world and escape to one of my own.  I was content to just write them and throw them in a box under my bed.  I was hoping one day when I died my kids would find them and either be pleasantly surprised or horrified that their momma would write such things. I started the Young Writer's Club at my school in 2004 and encouraged my students to write and share their work but I never did.

2007 was the year that changed my life in so many ways.  First, my daughter was born and if having a little girl isn't already enough to turn your world upside down- she was our surprise baby.  Our son had just turned one and we weren't expecting another so soon, were doing things to prevent it even.  But God knew that sometimes the best blessings are unexpected so He gave us our surprise baby.  We considered naming her sneaky, but figured it wouldn't go over well with my mother.

We had a perfect pregnancy until it seemed like the whole of South Georgia caught fire in the summer of 2007 and having breathing problems already, I caught pneumonia.  I was two weeks away from my due date and I was in the hospital with a collapsed lung.  I recovered but she was born with complications and spent a couple days in the NICU.  She recovered completely thanks to a lot of prayers, and a God who listens to them. 

Oh, by the way, we didn't name her sneaky.  We named her Sunshine, because without her our lives would have been dreary.  

The next blow came when I lost one of my favorite students, a young man with so much talent and potential that I am still awed by it.  He was killed in a car accident along with another young friend the summer after he graduated.  He had told me once that writing made you immortal and I had sort of laughed at him because he was sixteen at the time and what does a sixteen year old know about immortality?    But after he died I went back to my classroom and found all his stories and poems that he left for me in a notebook.  His mother has notebook after notebook of his writings, and though he isn't here with us physically, we always have that part of him.

I wondered if I died, would my children remember me?  I got a journal and started writing stories from my childhood.  I didn't know why I felt so compelled, but I wanted them to know about things I did when I was little, adventures we had, things we got whippings for.  My husband wouldn't know these things.  I wrote and wrote and wrote and I was happy.  I had two babies, a wonderful husband, a fat dog and I couldn't ask for more.

Except maybe for some more sleep (I had given birth to a vampire- ironically named Sunshine- who liked to sleep all day and party all night) and maybe to get well and stay well.  The thing was- I kept getting sick.  Nobody knew why I would have bronchitis and then two weeks later it would start to turn to pneumonia and they would treat it and it would start all over again.  I had gotten used to it really. It had been that way since my pregnancy.  We went through antibotics, breathing treatments, medications but nothing seemed to work.  Finally I was sent to a specialist.

 In November they found the tumor.  Deep in my right lung, completely plugging the airway, it had caused the whole bottom two lobes of my lungs to collapse and that was the reason I couldn't get better.

My husband said the doctor couldn't even look at him in the eye when he came out with the news.  After all, I was thirty one years old, healthy, never smoked, my family never smoked, so what was there to worry about.  Everyone (including myself) thought that it was probably some bit of food I had aspirated (I had choked on a piece of candy years before and that was when the trouble started) so we weren't pepared for what the doctors did find.

Cancer.

Wow, I thought only people that smoked got lung cancer but there it was in the photo, looking like an angry meatball in my bronchial tube.  We didn't know what kind of tumor it was (but let's face it any kind of tumor is bad), or what would happen next.  It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and I found out I had cancer. The pathologist was gone until Monday and their wasn't a thing in the world we could do besides wait and pray. Kind of blows your holiday, you know. My parents were visiting us for the first ever South Georgia Thanksgiving. Turkey just doesn't taste as good when you find out you just might die.  

My family and I spent an agonizing weekend wondering and crying and praying. My church prayed.  My brother's church prayed, my student's churches prayed. My former students found out and prayed and told other people to pray.  People sent emails and calls came in from all over.  People I didn't even know.  Prayed.  Nona DeGeorge prayed with her church ladies in Pennsylvania all the way down to a Penecostal church in Texas.  The way I figured, friends of friends and family had the whole eastern side of the united states praying.

 I didn't know it at the time, I was focused on me and my little family.  My daughter was only months old, would she even remember me?  My son had just turned two, my life was just starting and it didn't seem fair!

But then God spoke to me.   Not out loud because I'm a Baptist, and I think those kind of revelations are reserved mostly for Pentecostals, but he spoke to me just the same.

I was rocking the baby, and crying and I flipped on the television. The televangelist stared right at me and said.  "Someone out there has a tumor in their right lung.  God is taking care of it.  That tumor is going to go away."  Or something like that.  I don't remember exactly because my stomach fell to the floor and my hair stood on end and I think my heart stopped beating for a second.  I held on to the baby, though, don't be ridiculous, cause I'd just gotten her to sleep and if I woke her, she might not sleep again for a week.

I sat there for several seconds wondering what I should do.  The way I saw it, I had two choices.  I could say "Ahhh.  That's a coincidence."  and blow it off and forget all about it or I could say "You know, what are the chances that I A) have a tumor in my RIGHT lung  B) Am sitting here praying about whether I'm going to live or not C) Turn on the TV to the right channel D) just at the very time that the guy says that???  No way that was all luck.  That was God."

Sorry, those are too many coincidences together.

Believe me, cousin Murphy runs rampant around the Crane household. I don't have that much faith in mere luck.  I knew it had to be from God.

I accepted it and thanked Him.  I knew there might be a rough road ahead but I was going to live.  I tucked it inside my heart and kept it safe.  It was a promise.  I knew it.  I didn't dare tell anyone because I knew what they would say.  They would say it was coincidence, or I was crazy, or God doesn't speak to people like that.

Monday morning we got the pathology report, and you'll have to excuse me.  I'm not a doctor.  I'm about as stupid about medical stuff as you can be, but he said that if there is a good kind of cancer (which there isn't- but bear with me) then I had it.  It was very rare, it didn't spread and it could be removed with surgery and I would have no chemo and no radiation.

We scheduled the surgery for January 3, 2008. I told the doctor that my Thanksgiving sucked and by golly we were going to have a fun Christmas if it killed us! Probably a poor choice of words because the kids caught a stomach flu two days before Christmas and it almost did! They gave it to the WHOLE family.  Parents, Grandparents, everybody. (I think even the dogs got it). To tell you the truth I was glad to see 2007 slip into the rear view mirror.

2008 was going to be a new beginning.  We had a  party the night before my surgery.  My last meal was spaghetti, birthday cake and two gallons of ice water because they didn't want me to get dehydrated before my surgery.  I'd like to tell you I had peace that everything was going to be all right after all the other things that had happened to me but I'd be lying.  I was scared out of my wits.  I'd never been cut on before unless you count the babies.  I'd never been completely unconscious for more than a few minutes.  My husband prayed for me in the car, and his friend called and said a prayer with me and I cried the whole time.  My family was coming later, after the kids could be dropped off at the daycare.

My husband held my hand and kissed me goodbye before they wheeled me out.  I have no idea what was going on in his head.  I was a wreck but I had the easy part.  All I had to do was go to sleep and wake up.  He had to sit for hours and worry.  To my joy I didn't have much time to be nervous.  The anesthesiologist came in and turned me off like he was switching off a light and I guess a couple of hours later he switched me back on.  They took the two bottom lobes of my lung out and I didn't know I was in the world.  That's some good medicine they use.  

I woke up after the surgery and said rather loudly "Thank God, I'm alive!"  It sort of offended the surgeon though.  He growled: "What did you think?  That I was going to kill you?"  I guess I did, or part of me thought that.  The cancer was gone.  They didn't have to take my whole lung and though I might never run a marathon I'm  getting better all along.

I started writing again in 2008.  My spiritual daughter Xiomara encouraged and inspired me to write again and my high school best friend Dawn wanted me to finish a story I started in college.  I told her it was under my bed but I'd send it to her.  She read it and told me to finish.  I'm pretty scatterbrained so for me to finish ANYTHING is a major accomplishment.   She would not be put off though, so between 1999 when I started it and 2012 a lot of life has happened and I'm still plugging away at her novel.  Dawn's keeping after me and the end is in sight for some of my works. 

I've just finished my first novella called  The Girl I Forgot. It's a little over a hundred pages and it's sort of spooky and dark for me.  I like to write tear-jerker romances.  The kind of stories you say "Wow, their life sucked.  Mine doesn't seem all that bad now."

The Girl I Forgot is a sort of Christian, Mystery, Vampire, Love story. Sounds like a conundrum doesn't it?   It's different than anything I've ever done and it's due primarily to God giving me an inspiration and to Dawn encouraging me to finish.  I hope it's a runaway success, but since it's my first attempt at putting anything I've written out there on the wide web, I'll be glad if a couple people read it and like it.  I'll be putting it out there in a couple days so just be patient.  As soon as I figure out how to work create space and get it published myself.  I'll give you a teaser.  

Until then, God bless and I'll tell you what I tell my students.  If God gives you a story- tell it.  He doesn't give them to everybody.