Lymph Journal # 54 - And so, we wait

4/16/2012

And so we play the waiting game.  Here’s the thing.  My blood levels, particularly my white count, needs to rise to a certain level in order for the “harvest” of stem cells from my blood supply to be successful.  It should happen but we wait and check by blood test every few days.  Friday’s test put them at about 7% of where they need to be.  This morning’s (Monday) no change seen.  This is not worrisome, as the lab tech explained through vivid swooping motions, the levels drop far and then rise as I continue to inject myself each morning with the leukocyte stimulant.  It’s not worrisome but it is waiting and, humanly speaking, honestly speaking, I’m a bit tired of waiting. 

Gloomy weather doesn’t help and it has decidedly gone back into the fairly common cold wet spring mode here in Germany’s southwest corner after a spell of fairly glorious weeks.

Physically I haven’t bounced back quite as far energy wise as after the first hospital stay.  I suppose that makes sense.  Two rounds of this more potent chemotherapy should logically impact me more than one.

I can’t put my finger on why this waiting seems harder than what I’ve waited through before.  Maybe it’s easier to wait in the winter when we’d all like to hibernate anyway.  Maybe it’s because things have moved at a predictably appropriate pace until now.  Maybe it’s because I’m sort of at the brink of the endgame – a, hopefully, fully successful procedure that could just put this thing behind me.

Maybe I’m tired of betrayal.  It came to me a day or so ago that cancer is just that – a betrayal of yourself by your body.  One day something so basic and unconsidered as your T-cells and/or (in my case) your B-cells “decide” to run off the deep end and put the entirety of your existence here on earth at grave risk.  Surviving that risk requires a wholesale change in circumstances and medical procedures that no well person would think of undertaking voluntarily.  You haven’t been “hit by a bus”, you haven’t chosen to bungee jump with too long a cord, you haven’t wittingly exposed yourself to environmental hazards, your enemies have not fiddled with your drink – what’s happened is that your own body, in contravention of common sense, has turned upon itself. 

But that is just that way it is in this broken world of ours.  We’re our own worst enemies sometime deliberately (a thought I entertain when I enter a hospital portal through the clouds emitted by smoking medical personnel) and sometimes just because that’s the way it is in this Creation that groans for redemption.

So, it’s not my finest moment in the whole lymphoma chapter of life.  But truth always helps.  A few weeks ago I was reading II Corinthians and the following verses were powerfully refreshing so I set them aside to be included in future musings.  I think now is a good time.  And the sun just broke through.

II Corinthians 4: 16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

5: 1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, 3 because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4 For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

 6 Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. 7 For we live by faith, not by sight. 8 We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. 9 So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. 10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.