Lymph Journal # 32

2/22/2012

Time to start another round today.  It’s been so great to feel so great for the last week and now it’s time to spend a few days feeling less than great.  It’s part of the deal and it’s OK.  It broke sunny and cloudless this morning and I scored a lounge chair in the chemo room with my back facing where the sun will be pouring in more and more as the day progresses – thankful for these little things.  The lounge crowd is pretty quiet this morning and the antihistamine fuzz is beginning to be felt as the infusion begins - so much so that I need to put this aside for now.

Well, for now meant until 5AM the next morning.  This is, I think, the first time I’ve had trouble sleeping through the night since treatment began in early January.  Generous hydration (recommended as part of the therapy) and some of the internal rearrangements of chemo – my abdomen seems to vary widely in shape and tension throughout each cycle – lead to a night’s rest with – Oh, how to put this delicately? – frequent (I can almost set my watch by them) brief interruptions but I usually get right back into REM mode and have more crazy dreams.  Last night as I went to bed I could feel the day’s long antihistamine fog lifting and I began the think about where I wanted to go with this entry and woke up at 4AM still working it out.

Good news! – we’re back online at home.  The new router arrived and I actually

rallied enough by late afternoon to set it up.  Thus ends a week of trudging next door

or, on days with the right microclimate, opening up Carl’s window and trying to grab

next door’s signal to check and send email.  It’s kind of funny some of the cross

cultural pronunciations between German and English.  In “talking” (a generous

description on my part) with D-Telekom the word router was always pronounced

rooter (as in my rooter is kaput). It took some getting used to.  There’s all sorts of

these things in any language crossover.  “Th” as s, “w” as “v” and the reverse,

pronunciation of all vowels including what, to an English speaker, would be silent -

it’s all quite fun.  Ven vee say that our city, vich is more like a large willage, lies in the

sous of Germany, people often sink vee live in Bawaria.  I remember that most

amusing day in German I when I was assigned a read aloud portion that

compared geographical features of Germany and the USA.  Much amusement was

had by all (including my classmate Diane) as I fell into the ex-pat trap of trying to

pronounce American terms the way a German would.  Such and such a region in

Germany compares to the state of Mine-ay (Maine – duh!) in the Northwest of the

OOH.ESS.AH.

(Sorry about the formatting issue above)

This is enough digression if I expect anyone to continue reading what I actually have

been working through.  As I begin this bit may I say that I am relatively optimistic at this point in the therapy so it is not coming out of an overwhelming pre-occupation with the life-threatening nature of my brand of lymphoma but that it is something everyone (I may use “everyone” often from this point on and I know that is a gross generalization but forgive that and remember I recognize the point) has to deal with due to the fact that at some point in their ones life one dies. (That’s not a generalization but a proven medical fact – so far).

Depending on whatever your formal or informal – I’ll say it because that’s my schtick in the classroom – worldview you have a different starting point for the thought process.  For the Christian believer it is hard to find a better place than the apostle Paul’s confession that, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”.  (found in the first chapter of his letter to the Philippians) For an apostle that could be so wordy (just try diagramming some of his longer sentences sometime – do people diagram sentences anymore?) this is pretty succinct.  It’s also pretty packed as you consider it.

When you have the luxury of a “heads-up” on the substantial possibility of looming death (as if is it is not the thing that we ALL have to do sometime) you can’t help but ask some of the classic questions of what your life has meant?, don’t you wish you had more time or had spent the time you did have better?, what comes next?, etc.

I’ve asked them.  Diane and I have had some of the necessary conversations and I’ve tried to write out the practical details of navigating through the detritus of death (financial records, how do you pays bills online with our German bank, you’d better get multiple official death certificates for life insurance, retirement pension, etc.).  So we’re in the loop on matters of life significance and practical considerations.

As Paul faced the real possibility of his own death (that man had a lot of practice with this, I’m sure) he came up with (my paraphrase),  “Here’s life – Christ, here’s death – gain.”  I’ve had the opportunity to teach about this before and recently to have conversations regarding this truth and tension and, of course, I have to live it but then again, so do you.  As I’ve thought more intensely about it over this past week I realize Paul’s mantra is both true and a call to understand what we consider life to be, what we consider death to be and how does Christ and “what comes next” relate to it all.  I’ll start my attempt to break it down in today’s post and continue in the next – no, actually, I’ll let you rest your eyes today and pick it up next time.