A year of living.
Posted: Sun Apr 04, 2021 7:22 am
The question I posted in What if you had only one year to live? is not merely academic to me, that’s approximately about the amount of time my physician has told me I have to live when I got my PET scan results last Friday (I’ve already used up a week!).
I’ve had friends, Christians and otherwise, who got the sort of same news, I’ve been in the shoes of my family and friends who are at a loss for words. I chatted with one of my old High School buddies the other day and he finally said “I don’t want to just shower you with platitudes” – I know both sides of that conversation now.
So I thought I would start this discussion thread (not monologue or repository for platitudes) among my Mennonet friends to share my experiences with what I am calling my “Year of Living” (rather than my “Year of Dying”) and maybe help figure out how to break the awkwardness of relating to someone who is sick and facing an earlier death than anticipated.
First an update: I completed my first round of chemotherapy. The therapy is palliative, not curative (there's no cure available but a miraculous one). The goal is to keep me as healthy and active for as long as they can, minimizing the side effects so that I can have a good quality of life before I decline. Between the steroids used to prevent nausea and the relief of the pain in my abdomen (that has prevented me from getting more than a few hours of sleep at a time) I felt like Superman after my first infusion. I was up early on Friday morning and even went into work for a few hours. I wanted my co-workers to see that I’m still alive – I’m still the old me. For lunch, Betty and I took a walk through the woods along the sea shore in Boothbay and when my son came home that evening we enjoyed one of my old favorite suppers, "Finnan Haddie", with the best smoked Haddock we've ever had. If this is what chemotherapy is going to be like - bring it on!
Yesterday we drove to a clinic an hour away to have a nurse show my wife (a nurse) how to remove my portable infusion pump and flush the "port" they implanted in me that feeds the chemo into the large veins near my heart. We went to the nearby Cabela's to buy the fishfinder/chartplotter for our boat when the medication I had taken to prevent another side effect hit me. I won’t go into details beyond saying that Cabella’s rest rooms are clean and comfortable. Betty and I had other shopping plans as well but we headed home instead. I crashed in my recliner chair, tired and feeling just plain crummy. I knew that the therapy would crash me, but I was expecting it to hit me on day 4, not day 3. All the projects my son had come to help me with were put on hold again. Betty and I both felt discouraged last evening, everything has changed so suddenly - and I do mean everything!
This morning after a long night’s painless sleep (the first long night in a long time) I feel pretty good. I’m the first up; I kindled a fire in the fireplace just for the atmosphere. We will have our traditional Polish Easter Breakfast and see what the day brings.
My wife and I are moving from living hour-by-hour to living day-by-day. We have our times of sorrow and grief (we “salt our coffee with our tears” these mornings lately), but really when we stop and talk about all the ways God is working in very tangible ways in our lives right now we feel comforted and we can focus better on the living we want to do this year. The opportunity to buy the house next door to our daughter (and grandchildren!) has been given to us and that is a greater gift than I deserve from our Father and one of the ways that God is showing His power in all this.
More later…
I’ve had friends, Christians and otherwise, who got the sort of same news, I’ve been in the shoes of my family and friends who are at a loss for words. I chatted with one of my old High School buddies the other day and he finally said “I don’t want to just shower you with platitudes” – I know both sides of that conversation now.
So I thought I would start this discussion thread (not monologue or repository for platitudes) among my Mennonet friends to share my experiences with what I am calling my “Year of Living” (rather than my “Year of Dying”) and maybe help figure out how to break the awkwardness of relating to someone who is sick and facing an earlier death than anticipated.
First an update: I completed my first round of chemotherapy. The therapy is palliative, not curative (there's no cure available but a miraculous one). The goal is to keep me as healthy and active for as long as they can, minimizing the side effects so that I can have a good quality of life before I decline. Between the steroids used to prevent nausea and the relief of the pain in my abdomen (that has prevented me from getting more than a few hours of sleep at a time) I felt like Superman after my first infusion. I was up early on Friday morning and even went into work for a few hours. I wanted my co-workers to see that I’m still alive – I’m still the old me. For lunch, Betty and I took a walk through the woods along the sea shore in Boothbay and when my son came home that evening we enjoyed one of my old favorite suppers, "Finnan Haddie", with the best smoked Haddock we've ever had. If this is what chemotherapy is going to be like - bring it on!
Yesterday we drove to a clinic an hour away to have a nurse show my wife (a nurse) how to remove my portable infusion pump and flush the "port" they implanted in me that feeds the chemo into the large veins near my heart. We went to the nearby Cabela's to buy the fishfinder/chartplotter for our boat when the medication I had taken to prevent another side effect hit me. I won’t go into details beyond saying that Cabella’s rest rooms are clean and comfortable. Betty and I had other shopping plans as well but we headed home instead. I crashed in my recliner chair, tired and feeling just plain crummy. I knew that the therapy would crash me, but I was expecting it to hit me on day 4, not day 3. All the projects my son had come to help me with were put on hold again. Betty and I both felt discouraged last evening, everything has changed so suddenly - and I do mean everything!
This morning after a long night’s painless sleep (the first long night in a long time) I feel pretty good. I’m the first up; I kindled a fire in the fireplace just for the atmosphere. We will have our traditional Polish Easter Breakfast and see what the day brings.
My wife and I are moving from living hour-by-hour to living day-by-day. We have our times of sorrow and grief (we “salt our coffee with our tears” these mornings lately), but really when we stop and talk about all the ways God is working in very tangible ways in our lives right now we feel comforted and we can focus better on the living we want to do this year. The opportunity to buy the house next door to our daughter (and grandchildren!) has been given to us and that is a greater gift than I deserve from our Father and one of the ways that God is showing His power in all this.
More later…