We're In It Now

Last Monday, at 11:41 AM, we entered into a roughly 365-day relationship with chemo/transplant/recovery. That's the time at which Mike's first chemo drug began making its way through his IV and into his body. Mike handled it like a trooper. I wasn't quite as accepting.

First of all, we want to express our deepest thanks to those of you who joined us about a week ago in prayer for Mike's healing. Between the requests through our blogs, and via e-mail, we must have had hundreds of people praying all over the world. It was an amazing moment, though I spent most of our prayer time with God sobbing at what I still feel is His lack of direction and "blessing" on these treatments. I suppose I still want to believe that God didn't really want Mike to do chemo, and that through some intimate request for guidance and intercession, He'd reveal His true will for this situation. Unfortunately, I'm still left to wonder if we're doing the right thing. I don't want to keep second-guessing ourselves, or pouting, because it isn't fair to Mike. I need to be there for him and just be the supportive wife I truly want to be. But at other times I feel like I'm six years old again, not getting what I want from my heavenly father and I'm lashing back by sticking out my lower lip, crossing my arms, and stomping off to my room. That's really what I want to do sometimes, but I can't -- Mike and I grabbed hands, nodded to each other and jumped off this imaginary cliff together. We're in this now....

Anyway, back to the treatments, Mike tolerated them well. I went in with him for day one, by far the longest of the three days of treatment. We were at the hospital for 11 hours. It was so long that when the out-patient clinic closed at 5 PM, they had to send him up to the in-patient, 14th floor of the hospital (where the transplant would take place) to finish his last couple IVs. The irony of the 14th floor is that its shared with another meaningful department -- labor and delivery. When the elevator doors open, one way takes you to oncology, the other to L&D. When we turned to head towards the oncology ward, I kept thinking what a cruel irony this was. Shouldn't we be going to the other side of the floor? Was this just some colossal mistake?

Tuesday and Wednesday were much shorter, and Mike's dad dropped him off each morning and picked him up at the end of the day. Mike had a few moments of nausea, but mostly battled a lot of fatigue. This stuff just totally wipes you out. Since then, each day he's gotten a little more energetic, and his appetite is back to normal. Today he really seemed like himself, and we enjoyed a full Sunday of watching football and eating nachos and buffalo fingers.

Tomorrow Mike heads back to the hospital for a brief checkup and blood draw. It's about this time that his blood counts are expected to drop quite a bit. Hopefully, they won't be too low and the risk of infection and fevers won't be too great. We have several weeks of freedom before either another three-day round of treatment, or the transplant -- we don't need to spend any of this free time in the hospital.

We've been dealing with the "C" word for so long now that it's hard to remember what life was like before it was an integral part of our beings. All we want is to be able to look back at things 40 years from now and say, "Oh, yeah -- remember those few years we had with the cancer? Seems like ancient history." For now at least, life has become something that we do between cancer occurrences. But soon, we will make it ancient history.

This post has gotten a lot longer than planned, but I wanted to share one more story I promised to tell a few posts ago. I mentioned we went to a friend's charity benefit last month, and something strange happened involving the pregnant friend of a friend....

Allow me to set the scene: I have a friend named Robin (she's the one whose family was hosting the benefit). Robin has a friend named Roni. Mike and I have gotten to know Roni through Robin. Roni and I keep in touch every once in a while through e-mail, and I consider her a casual friend, but not someone I'm very close with. Just a really sweet girl. Roni has a little boy, around two years old. In my mind, I figured I'd see her at the benefit, but never said anything or gave it more than a passing thought.When I saw her at the benefit, I was shocked -- she had a very noticeable baby bump. Yeah, it stung. Like I said, I'm not really close with her, but she's still another person I know who is having babies. I hadn't really heard from her over e-mail for many months, and hadn't seen her since her first pregnancy. I had no idea she was expecting. Later that night, Mike asked me if I knew Roni was pregnant, and if I might have mentioned it to him at some point. I told him I had no idea about the pregnancy. Then he got this strange look on his face, and relayed the following story.....

Mike said that earlier that day, on our long car ride down to the benefit, he was having some quiet prayer time as I drove along. He said that he was praying for the usual stuff -- health and safety for family and friends, and that Robin's family had a successful benefit and that the weather held out, etc. While doing his prayer, he also started asking the Lord for guidance with the cancer issue. Mike asked God to please let him know that He was hearing him through all this, to show him somehow that He is with us as we deal with this trial. Then, all of a sudden, Mike had this impression upon him -- not an audible voice of God, but a strong "impression" as Mike describes it. The impression was "You will see Roni is having her second baby." He said it was such a strange, random thought. He even wondered if what he was getting at that point was real or not. Like I said, I don't have too much contact with Roni, and Mike has none. But just a few hours later at the benefit, as Mike was chatting with a friend of ours, across the way he saw Roni -- and her belly. He saw it, just like he was told he would. He said he was in disbelief when he caught a glimpse of Roni, was so startled, and was trying not to react or confuse the friend he was with. Was all this real? Did he subconsciously know about Roni's pregnancy and just forgot, or was God speaking to him, just as he asked Him to do? The magnitude of this was confirmed later that day, when I told Mike this news was as fresh to me as it was to him. We both were in total awe. It gave us chills. God spoke to us that day. He told us He hears us. He used something so obscure and so random that even our momentary skepticism and logical mentalities can't deny. He even used something that is quite a symbolic attention-grabber for us, considering its absence from our lives thus far. But it gave us another little bit of comfort and reassurance that God is there with us through this, and that we "see" that He will not leave us.