I am a planner.

I make my living crafting plans for long and complex projects with multiple unfolding and changing factors, and I really enjoy it. My clients say that I am pretty good at it.

I make all the plans for our family vacations. I can easily become obsessed for hours with comparing airline schedules versus prices versus available seats versus the quality of the airline. I can spend days comparing the smallest details of myriad vacation rental options.

I plan our family’s financial outlays and investments. I plan our activities. I even make most of our meal plans.

I have planned from scratch the layouts, interior designs, and (with my wife’s assistance) even all the finish and trim details of our last three houses and then got them built.

You get the picture. I like to have a plan.

So along comes this hassle called multiple myeloma. It wasn’t in the plans. We were living our lives in what we thought were the best ways we could and suddenly everything was different. Obviously, everybody with a major health event has a similar experience, but not everybody hears the words “incurable cancer” along with it.

For those of us who do, it throws a real wrench into our plans.

I, of course, started immediately making plans for my demise, which I could only assume was going to come at any minute despite what the doctors all said. In hindsight, this was one of my coping techniques, and it helped me through the initial shock of the diagnosis. My poor wife, who has long become accustomed to me making plans, could only stand back and delicately try to remind me that the doctors said this probably wasn’t going to happen overnight. But I had a plan.

Once this initial diagnosis phase passed, I came to realize that most of my previous plans – both before and after multiple myeloma – were not going to work out the way I thought. Maybe I needed to relax a bit and stop worrying about my plans. It was during this time that I decided I needed to start enjoying the journey a bit more and stop focusing so much on the destination.

Sounds like a good plan.

But for a planner like myself, even my relaxing and focusing on today needs a bit of a plan. I can’t just stop planning for the future; instead I am trying to accept the fact that I don’t really know what the future means for me. This makes things challenging all the time, in all kinds of little ways.

For example, just recently we have decided that we need to be looking for a new car. We aren’t really into cars that much, so we have always gone with practicality over enjoyment and comfort. Now, though, I have started having second thoughts; I’m wondering whether I would like something more comfortable even if it doesn’t get great mileage. Heck, I am even thinking that maybe we should choose a color we actually like instead of just taking what is cheap and easy. My wife, on the other hand, is planning for potentially more and longer trips to the doctor’s office in the future, and is therefore thinking maybe we should go for the high miles per gallon of a hybrid.

But we don’t even know if I will need more trips to the doctor during the life of this next car. In my current “maintenance therapy” mindset, where my disease is being held steady and I am feeling pretty healthy, I don’t think we need to worry about all these trips.

That is the trouble with making plans for multiple myeloma. This stupid disease doesn’t always read the plan.

The car is just one small example of this conundrum. There is of course the constant give and take of finances we have to face. Should we spend it now and have fun, or should we save it for our future? Even the grind of my treatment has this dilemma. Should I keep going on maintenance therapy and suffer the effects, or should I quit the drugs and enjoy whatever time I have left?

It’s just too hard to make a plan when you don’t know what the future holds.

To me, the lesson in all this is that I need to quit planning so much and just accept what I have today.

As John Lennon is quoted as saying, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

I am going to try and remember that!

Aloha and carpe diem!