It was the year of my birth, BC (before cancer), and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon to plant the American flag there.

And here I am, in much the same way, moonwalking through my chemo rounds. I get a hero’s send-off (my gratitude chemo board and all those prayers and well wishes), I get blasted to the moon, and no matter how long I stay up there, I know that I’ll always come back home again.

It gives new meaning to “I love you to the moon and back again.”

That’s where I found love in the first place, well, not on the moon, but close enough. We were in the sky on a USAir flight. Remember our story back in July?

Saturday, I reminded Alex (ahem, I’m the one with chemo brain here) that December 5th marked the anniversary of our engagement.

It was much to be cherished. Alex proposed on another USAir flight. This time we were going to visit my Grandma. The lady at check-in told me that he got tied up at work and couldn’t make the flight. He had purchased my first-class ticket, which was there with a bouquet.

I figured he was playing with me, so I waited to board. He wasn’t anywhere, though I scoured the crowds. I finally gave up and feeling the effects of my cold, I bought some soup.

Meanwhile, knowing my tendency to be late, Alex arrived early, and they snuck him on after the cleaning crew and before boarding began. They hid him in the back of the plane and never even asked for his ticket.

He was getting periodic updates from the stewardesses, who were totally in on the game. “She’s boarding…Now she’s eating some soup.”

He waited until 7 pm when he told his parents he’d propose, so they’d be praying for us. It just so happened to be the same time the stewardess came back to say, “You better act now. She’s falling asleep.”

But we’d been in flight for thirty minutes; I gave up thinking he was on that plane when he appeared from the coach compartment with his entourage of flight attendants. He stood in the aisle that he had just walked down and stopped in front of his empty aisle seat.

He got on his knee as best as he could, held out the ring, and asked me to marry him. The stewardesses both told me, “say yes.”

I was in such shock, I couldn’t speak, but I remember putting my hand out so he could slip the ring on my finger. As Alex likes to remind me, I said nothing, but the stewardess said yes, instead. You would have thought he had proposed to her.

The stewardess announced our engagement over the loudspeaker, and everyone clapped, including Puff Daddy, who was sitting in coach.

When Alex settled into his seat next to mine, we both told our sides of the story. He joked that his work buddies had warned him not to propose this way. “What if she says no? It’ll be a painfully long flight.”

Of course, he could have gone back to coach class to sit with Puff Daddy. We figured the least Puff Daddy could do was write a song about it, but maybe he was sour because he wasn’t in first class, too.

So I take Alex on my moon adventures, or as far as he can go. Inevitably, I have to land on that moon all by myself. And while I’m there, plant my cancer beanie as Neil Armstrong did with the American flag.

Seriously, you see new things while you’re on that moon. Your body can’t do what it can do on earth. You can’t eat the same foods. You feel out of this world. In fact, how can your brain, or what’s left of it, even process what’s left behind?

Re-entry’s the hard part. How do I return fully to life when I still feel like I’m in between zip codes?

I’ll acclimate, and then, unlike with Neil Armstrong, it’ll be sure to happen all over again. That’s the clincher, how do you keep killing and rebuilding fast-growing cells over and over again? Can’t I call uncle already?

But since we had been moonwalking in 1969 anyway, I happened upon a newspaper article about Dad three months before Neil Armstrong touched down on the moon.

But in April 1969, Dad was dressing for the opening playoff game with the Boston Celtics, and he couldn’t straighten his back, which the team doctor diagnosed as muscle spasms.

Dad had a flashback to the year before when he broke his wrist during playoffs. So he asked for a pain-killer shot and played the game.

“Playing with pain is something a professional must do,” Cunningham said. “Once you’re on the court, you do not think of being injured anymore. The game moves too fast for that. You forget that you’re even hurt.”

I’m not a professional athlete, and I’m not even in pain, but I get that sense of, here we go again. Find it in the reserves, as the pros must do, and as Captain and Tennille would sing, “Do that to me one more time.” Well, technically for me, three more times, but who’s counting?

Just as Neil Armstrong’s space mission ended with a splashdown, so does mine. Only, I don’t have an escort home. My mission ends when I pull myself out of the waters I’ve fallen into and come back to life.

Inevitably, I wind up accident-prone: pulling a muscle (that was after round 2, actually), burning myself, spilling and dropping all kinds of things, getting lost.

So why not end on a quintessential getting lost story?

Here I was in the elevator and a woman got out and quickly changed her mind and came back in again. She said, “I thought it was the first floor, but apparently, it’s not.” I said, “If it makes you feel better, I got lost coming out of the doctor’s office and couldn’t even find the elevator.”

She asked me, “How are you doing”?” I said, “Good,” figuring wearing a beanie didn’t give me much more room for optimism.

She said, “Mine’s grown back. Stronger and better than ever. It’ll be the same for you.”

Indeed her white hair was about an inch thick all over her head. She looked fabulous–I hadn’t even pegged her as a cancer patient. I could have hugged her. I was so happy for her. “I’m so proud of you. So tell me, how long did it take for it to grow back?”

It totalled to around six months. We can’t be lost forever. It’ll come back, and so will I—taking those baby steps with moon dust in my shoes, finding my way home again.