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...