"Fair" is where you eat fried dough and corn dogs.

So, let's get to the whole issue of fair and unfair. And please bear in mind that this is me typing right now. Tomorrow, the emotional barometer resets and readings could be quite different.

Right now, I think the following things are unfair:

• I got born white, to a middle-class professional family in 20th-century United States of America.
• I had food based on the best nutritional knowledge of the day, regular medical and dental check-ups, all the immunizations available, and any other medical care I needed.
• Even though I'm female, I got to go to school, and to absorb as much eddification as I wanted or was able to make use of. Sure, there were sexist obstacles, but nothing like what young women face elsewhere.
• My parents never, ever, even once implied that my goal in life should be to get married and have babies.
• I went to college, found work, found love, had a baby, got twisted up by life but became untwisted again.

All of this is manifestly unfair. I didn't deserve any of it. Most of it I had no control over, nothing to do with.

And all of this is leaving aside the fact that God gave me, very early in life, a deep belief in him and a corresponding sense of my own -- there's really no other language for this -- sinful nature, then later, through various means, showed me the way out of that Slough of Despond through the sacrificial love of Christ. I don't know why God called me so young. Certainly, it hasn't been because I was destined to achieve any great thing for God.

So for me to claim that having cancer is unfair, or having to deal with the thought and possibly the fact of losing both breasts AND my hair is unfair, or anything else unpleasant that happens to me is unfair would be ungrateful. To say the least.

And if that weren't enough, I live in a place and time when having the type of cancer I have is not a death sentence. Compared to the horrors that happen to other women, it's barely an inconvenience. And if this kills me, I'll still be better off than most women dying today -- I'll be between clean sheets, in a clean room, with plenty of drugs and people who love me all around me.

So, if you feel like what's happening to me is unfair, go ahead and feel that way. I'm not telling you how to feel. I'm just saying that what I feel is sad and scared, but I don't feel that either Life or God has been unfair.

Right now.

Ask me again after my first two chemo treatments.