The Sickness

So my sweet friend has chastised me soundly for being absent from the blog and leaving the picture so bleak. So here I am, and forward I shall move, thankful for the encouragement.

In regard to the last post, God, and God alone, intervened, shifted, and changed what we could not not a moment sooner than Tony and I both, though not in concert, said in our spirits, "We are done. We have done all we can do; this is now completely in your hands, God." There have been a few times in our walk together that the answer we have sought has come after such a surrender - moving to New Mexico was one of these - and these have always served as beautiful, sweet reminders of our place and our posture before God. So as we did in the storm, we praise Him in the still and are thankful for the deepening (though very painful) growth of our roots in those moments of struggle.

But that's not what I want to write about today. Today I want to write about the sickness because in this moment that is the storm in which I stand.


In July of 2009, I began to feel toxic. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong, really; something just didn't feel right. I felt sludgy. I was under a lot of stress at that particular time (more so than normal), so I didn't give it much thought. I did a store-bought cleanse and felt immensely better, but started feeling bad again as soon as it was over. In January, I woke up with a headache that would not go away. I could feel it through hydrocodone, and it was making me shake and feel nauseated. It was one-sided and made my vision intermittently fuzzy. My grandfather died of a brain tumor when he was very young, so those thoughts were never far from my mind. After a week of this lethargy-inducing headache, my wonderful dad called in a favor and got me in to see an internist with a practice an hour and a half from where we live (no one else could get me in for a week). She was worried and ordered a CAT-scan, stat. I remember being a little anxious that she had ordered the scan so immediately, and I remember being even more anxious because of the furrow in her eyebrows and the increased speed in the sweep of her pen over my chart the second I mentioned that the headache was one-sided and was causing visual disturbances.

I was still just worried in an it's-probably-nothing kind of way until, in the middle of Tony and I's post-appointment lunch, she called. I've had enough tests run over the years to know that if a patient is fine, doctors don't call to tell them that. Before she even finished announcing who she was, my heart quickened, and the nausea deepened. I stepped outside to take the call.

"I don't mean to scare you, but..." I hate "but"... "your tests showed some irregularities, and you need to get in to see a specialist right away. I've already made you an appointment with the oncologist..."Oncology? That's cancer..."at eight tomorrow morning. She's at the Cancer Center in Santa Fe." Oh no, oh no, no, no, no. It can't be cancer. I thanked her for calling. I hung up. I melted into Tony's arms in the sort-of solitude of our vehicle and bawled like an abandoned child. I felt scared, desparate, unreal - like this couldn't be my life. I thought about my children, and what the rest of their childhoods would look like if I had cancer. I thought about all their firsts I would miss: their first days of middle and high school, the day they got their driver's licenses, their first romantic relatioships, their graduations, their weddings, their first jobs, the births of their first children. I thought about treatment and surgery. I wept harder. All I wanted in that moment was to gather all of my children and my husband to me and hold them all and never, ever let them go, so we drove all the way home even though we'd have to come right back in the morning. That night we talked with my parents who held and consoled and offered their unceasing support. We prayed with friends who dropped everything to come to us, and even in that moment we knew we were blessed.

The next morning was hard. The Cancer Center is a strange place. It is full of people walking or being pushed around in what look like dress-up clothes because of what cancer and its treatments have done to their bodies. Many are gray-skinned, hollow, and carry or wear oxygen tanks and masks. It is deeply unsettling for me to walk around in the presence of souls I know may not live until their next appointment. There is a very distinct sense of vanishing there, and at the same time, there is an unexpected sense of wisdom and peace. In that space, many people know the value of life and of its extreme brevity, and there's something very freeing about that understanding. The appointment that morning lasted only about 10 minutes. My doctor came in and told us that she'd looked at the charts and had a diagnosis for us. Based on the information she had, she didn't think that it was cancer in the tumorous sense or even that it was any of the common blood cancers, but it was disorder of the bone marrow called Essential Thrombocythemia. She said that at my age, it could probably be managed with Aspirin for a long time. We were relieved, and when she left the exam room, we just held each other for a bit and cried again.

The doctor was wrong, though. By March, my blood counts had bounced around and then started a steady uphill climb. I had a lot of different symptoms, and they thought they had missed Leukemia. Leukemia. We were back where we had started. My doctor did a Bone Marrow Biopsy (BMB) and confirmed the original diagnosis in order to start chemotherapy to control my rebellious bone marrow. Essential thrombocythemia (I've learned since) is considered a cancer if a doctor is trying to get grant money; it is not considered a cancer if a doctor is talking to a patient. Finally in April, I started low-dose chemotherapy because I was at such a high risk for stroke and blood clots; by August, my white-cell count was beginning to drop as well, so I came off of chemotherapy for one week in order to start another, more harsh type of chemo. I felt so good in my week off of the drug that, against doctor's orders, I haven't yet gone back on, but without the drug, my counts have risen again to what the doctors consider to be dangerous levels of platelets. They call me a time-bomb.

So what is God doing, where is He guiding, and what is this crazy and crazy-difficult story that God is writing with my life? A lot. More than I could have ever imagined. More than I understand. For one, God has begun a healing work in me, starting in the blackest depths of my soul if not ever in my body, to move me toward unfathomable, unexplainable, unquenchable joy. This is only the beginning of the story...

A Bleak Picture

There has never been a 24-hour-period in my entire life that I have lived so in the face of Darkness, never a time when I have done such serious, heart-rending battle with that which seeks to destroy us. Though I would very much like to tell the whole story, for now, I think it is best in this public forum to remain a little vague out of respect and honor for the individual lives and stories those involved.

It was nine days ago that things began to go awry for our family. I've never in my life felt such a cold sense of muted evil under our roof (and let me be clear - I believe that THOSE FORCES, not the people involed, are what we are battling). I don't think I slept much that night, and usually, I am plagued with self-doubt about decisions. I play conversations over and over in my head, thinking about what went wrong, about what I could have / should have done differently, and I think with grave concern about what the consequences will be - I am really a border-line obsessive-compulsive personality living only in the life-giving grace of the Lord. This time, for whatever reason, was different.

Nine nights ago, I cried out to God in each moment of waking restlessness. For hours and hours, I cried. "Please, please, be what I cannot be. Please rescue us from our own despair. Please let your grace extend to each of us in our weakest moments. Please forgive us of our deepest wrongs, and let us see as you see." And by the time morning dawned, I had more peace than I have ever felt in my entire existence. Peace about the future, peace about my children, peace in that I truly, truly have surrendered my control, released my painfully inflexible grip on MY life, MY future, and MY family, and gave everything up to the controller of all things. What freedom, what peace, what joy is offered in knowing that I don't have to (and in fact I can't) carry it all. And in that moment of waking in the joy of the Lord, I sang praises to him, as I have all throughout this week, for the goodness that He is, and I believe on the Word that He inhabits our praise, and therefore cannot be far when I praise Him.

At this point, I have no idea what the outcome of this particular struggle not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces in this world will be. Because Satan is powerful, and because God I believe that God rarely, if ever, forces Himself on us (though in this case, I really wish He would - for all of our sakes), I don't know for certain that our result will look like I desire it to look. Whatever it is, though, I will sing for joy; even at my saddest, I will sing for joy. In the words of my sweet spirit-filled friend, "God may not change your circumstances, but He will change how you see, engage, and respond to them completely."

"And I'll praise You in the storm, and I will lift my hands, for You are who You are, no matter where I am." - Casting Crowns

Who am I?

"Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." James 1: 2 - 4

I've thought for a long time about joining the blogosphere, and other occupations have continually trumped this desire. The time has come, though. For the first time in twelve years, my writing outlet is not occupied by papers, due dates, deadlines, or grading, and two months after my dissertation and first book was completed, I found myself - mother of four children (one with very special emotional needs), foster parent, director / grant writer for a fledgling non-profit, and woman struggling to overcome an overwhelming and sometimes debilitating disease - unbelievably...ridiculously...bored. And I wondered, how could this possibly be? How could I have such a wealth of things to do in front of me, how could I have so many interests and passions,how could I know in my soul how short this life really is, how could I be surrounded by such beauty and still be so selfishly dissatisfied?

And then I started doing what a dear friend of mine encouraged me to do: "Listen to what God is whispering to your heart." My heart, my heart...What is God whispering to my heart? And when I listened hard - really, really hard - I could hear what God has been whispering to me since I was a little girl sitting in a closet, a corner,or anywhere quiet writing stories and poems in my cow-print journal, "You are a writer; you have always been a writer." So I write.

Now, God gave me all of the necessary implements to physically produce sound and to communicate through speech, but in the written word, He has given me my voice, and I am forever and ever grateful.

So who am I? This me, this mom, this wife, this daughter, this sister, this teacher, this learner, this writer is not who I am but is the He in me, and in these various trials, in the pressing darkness that makes us desperately, painfully ache inside, I consider it all joy as the He in me makes me, and will ever continue to make me, complete.