One full rotation around the sun

 One year.  It's been one full rotation of the sun since we found out Alex has cancer. One full year of losses, hopes held and hopes dashed, dreams put into mothballs, suffering, enduring, waiting, learning and struggle.  It's felt like a very long year.  And now?  Here we are right at the edge of a major mile marker on this journey, the next PET scan.  Ugh.

Honestly?  I haven't wanted this scan to come.  I've tried very hard since Alex started getting healthy to hold space for a result from this scan that isn't favorable, but my space has been diminishing.  At this moment, I don't want to know.  I just want to go on as we are, Alex living life, feeling good, juggling a million supplements and meds, reading everything he can about cancer and how it works so that he can get a handle on how to go forward, us chopping and juicing and cooking constantly.   I want to stop time and live right here.  It feels doable.

But time waits for no one.  Time is relentless in it's march onward.  It doesn't slow down, it doesn't turn back.  I can't freeze it, stop it or get outside of it.  Scan day will come, whether I want it to or not. It's relentless.

The Slog.

me living my best life in Georgia

As a young believer, what I thought walking with God would be like and what I experienced when I gave him my whole hearted yes were pretty different things. In 1992, at the ripe old age of 19, I moved to Tbilisi, Georgia. I had arrived in Sakartvelo (საქართველო) starry eyed to be an official missionary.  I was really putting my faith into action, following God's call on my life, risking everything for the gospel. Wow. This was it. Not just a hypothetical, but reality. I had trained for this, 6 months of Discipleship Training School (DTS), I was ready. Or not.

What I experienced in that year is a story all it's own, but today's reflection is on how very mundane and often tedious my days there could be. My experience was much more of a slog than a highlight reel of glorious sun drenched moments. It was a shock to my Christian system. I had gone into it braced for hard things, but for the days that stretched on forever?  Not so much.  I feel a bit of the same right now.

 

What can I say here in this moment that I'm inhabiting?  That I feel a bit claustrophobic and I would like to get out of the discomfort? That saying to everyone around me (+ myself ) that God has his purposes in this season doesn't change how hard it is to live every single moment of this season. It's a slog. It's just one foot in front of the other. Just do today. This too shall pass.

I clearly still have so much to learn a full 32 years after my bold step into unknown lands, but one thing that came home to my heart then and resides there still is that God is with me every single slogging step of the way.  There's no place I can go where He isn't with me.  (Psalm 139)

So if you're looking for me, I'm just over here slogging along.  Thankfully, I have great company.

The grass of the field...

 Yesterday morning I took a walk just as the sun was making its entrance past the very ordinary, although sprawling, lawns at CSU. As I walked by I just happened to look back and catch the startling sight of millions upon millions of diamonds recklessly and lavishly thrown across that vast expanse of lawn.  It was an unconscionable display. A ridiculous extravagance of wealth just thrown out there, devil may care.

Yet there it was... 

"But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"  Matthew 6:10

Emotional health + triggers

 I've been thinking today about many things. One of which is how very diverse the reactions and responses are to a situation like our family finds itself in right now. People are complex.  Life is complex.  Every day as I interact with different souls I have no way of knowing what little landmines or triggers I might accidentally run into, either in them or in myself. The difficult and time consuming work of becoming an emotionally healthy human is a commitment.  It doesn't happen overnight and it's often painful and uncomfortable. Addressing each trigger as it comes is a lot of work!! Since I can only speak for myself and the multifaceted and LONG journey I have been on for the last 7 years very specifically, this work is ongoing.  I'm not 100% sure I will ever check the done box! That said, I definitely try to have the bandwidth and grace for every soul I meet knowing the layers of complexity that exist in every single person. I'm not succeeding at this perfectly, but I am trying.

The truth is that just the word cancer alone can be very triggering. There aren't a lot of lives out there that haven't been touched in one way or another by cancer.  There are a LOT of opinions, ideas, beliefs, feelings, heartache, trauma, experiences...and the list goes on...around cancer.  I wish I could cut the wires to this explosive word.  Deactivate it and kick it into the junk pile, but I can't.  What I can do (to the best of my ability) is actively release the fear that builds up around the heart when this word is spoken.  Like a pressure valve, release the fear and take on Presence. Breathe in the clean air of God's truth and exhale the worry, anxiety, and the toxicity. I'm getting a boat load of practice. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

today

 In the interest of putting both facts, thoughts and a bit of processing all in one place, I’m writing this blog post. It’s Wednesday, one week after Alex’s surgery to remove a cancerous lymph node to be biopsied and one day after he met with the blood cancer specialist. Unfortunately yesterday did not reveal any new information to speak of. The biopsy results are not available yet due to some mix up/trouble the lab is having and the specialist, Dr. Mountjoy, didn’t really have much to tell Alex except that the next step in the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma flow chart is salvage chemo followed by a stem cell transplant.  Oh, and the good news that his odds of survival are 30%, not the measly 20% he was told originally.  So, you know, pretty awesome really.  I mean, who doesn’t jump up and down for joy over the prognosis of extreme suffering and a 70% chance of death?  

Forgive me if I don’t put up the balloons and streamers.

I feel that it’s necessary to clarify here that Alex is a 23 year old adult man.  He’s not a child under our care, we are not making the decisions for him.  He’s a very capable human, I would say more so than most honestly.  He is rational, grounded, clear eyed, faith filled and strong.  He’s young, but he’s actually gone through and done a lot of hard things already. He went through the last 6 months of chemotherapy like a champ and believe me that was not fun. When he got the results of the most recent PET scan almost 3 weeks ago he hit a pretty hard wall.  He took some time to lament, feel the pain and look the reality of his situation in the eye and then he went to work. 

8 months ago when Alex originally got the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma stage 2 unfavorable, he just did the next thing the oncologist told him, which was 6 months of chemotherapy that had an 85% success rate. He went back to studying philosophy (his passion in life) and endured the treatments and made plans for his future.  I mean, an 85% chance!  Those seem like some really decent odds.  So he didn’t dig into researching cancer cause why would he?  85%...the chances of not beating this were minimal.  Enter PET scan from 3 weeks ago and the script has flipped.  Now his Philosophy books sit in a stack off to the side of his computer and the books about cancer are accumulating.  Honestly?  The minute he told me he was going to dig in on cancer research, I breathed out.  I have a lot of confidence that he will discover a way through this.  And if that’s not the outcome, if this road does end horribly, he will have given his survival every ounce of his strength, focus and energy.

So that’s where we stand.  Daniel and I are obviously committed 100% to supporting him and helping him however we can as he navigates the days and road ahead.  To those of you who have been praying, please don’t stop!  In many ways I feel like the journey is just beginning, like the last 8 months were just the slight incline to the trailhead and now we’ve rounded a bend into completely uncharted territory.  By the grace of God alone we will one day find ourselves on the other side of this journey, but that is not today.

I would like to decline.

If you're here at my blog because you're wondering what's going on with Alex and cancer, then you are not alone, so are we. His PET scan last Friday revealed that the main biggest tumor is still there and hasn't really shrunk since his PET scan in January that looked really good.  His oncologist has referred him to a specialist and he will need to get a biopsy of the big tumor so that they have more information.

Based on how he was doing at the midway mark through the last 6 months of chemo all signs had pointed to success, but that is not where Friday left us.  I was trying my best to hold space for this, but in all honesty... I didn't think this was going to be the outcome.  (Daniel was in Peru when we got the news so he came back a few days earlier than planned just because being so far away when hard news comes is tough). What can I say? Now we wait for the biopsy. Now we wait for the evaluation of the specialist. Now we wait.

What I mostly said to God on Friday was, "NO!"  An emphatic, with all my being "NO!"  If I could by any means possible hit some kind of big red DECLINE button, I would.  But I can't.  There is only one way forward and that is through. And I'm gonna be honest, I don't want to go THROUGH. I don't want Alex to have to go THROUGH... I want an off ramp, a way OUT.  I don't want God to tell me "I will be with you in your pain."  I want him to say, "I'm going to heal Alex and get you out of this."  And before you start thinking, "Wow. What a lack of faith!"  I refer to Jesus:

"Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”  

Matt 26:39

So at least I'm in good company.

Just show up.

The things I'm learning as I go. 

First, let me start here by saying that traditionally I am not great at walking with people through difficult times. I am a very internal processor.  I think I have learned, somewhat, how to listen, how to just be present and when to hold my tongue (definitely a work in progress).  But I'm not the strongest "jump into action" person. I'm much more likely to feel the pain of someone I love going through the fire, but not act.  

One thing I think I'll take away from this experience of walking through cancer with Alex is: just show up.  If you know the person who is in the midst of the hard pretty well, just show up.  Hard things, as it turns out, can be very isolating.  People don't want to intrude (myself included), they don't know how the individual is handling things, they don't want to be a bother. But sometimes in the middle of hard days you just need company, a kind word and to know someone cares.

{This is mostly a note to my future self who will probably still struggle with this}.