Cancer Musings

It appears that the chemo rounds may have a rhythm.  As I said in the last post, the latest chemo gave Nate more side effects and he felt off for about a week.  Now, he is back to feeling good again.  Just in time for the inpatient round on Jan 17-19. We are thankful that only a couple of our kids had a cold over Christmas and that Nate has been spared so far.

Cancer itself has some unexpected side effects.  It rocks your idea of future plans.  We all 'know' that the future isn't certain, but we still have general ideas of how we think our future will play out.   Nate and I have conversations about when he gets a remission.  Are we going to continue living as we always have?  Are we going to take the family trips sooner that we always said we would do 'someday?'  Just many questions along those lines.

I also have realized that cancer is not a magic pill.  Since we are in the midst of so much turmoil, I thought Nate and I would suddenly get along all the time.  I mean, we should get that at least right?! We would always have the big picture in mind and our issues would seem insignificant.  But, no.  The issues that have always been there are, guess what?  Still there.  Buh.  I am sure though that our relationship is growing and changing.  That just takes time, like everything else in life.

And we had planned on attending Gilda's club last week but, plans changed.  Gilda's club let us know that in the kids group they would be honoring a father who recently died from cancer.  I am thankful Gilda's club gave us a heads up.  We decided to not attend.  We do not know this family and we did not want our kids first group experience to be about death from cancer.  Right now we need to help them understand life with Dad having cancer.   And for various scheduling reasons we will not be able to attend Gilda's club til later in the month.

Nate is working all the angles to see if his transplant can be done in Grand Rapids.  It is not looking promising, but he is trying.  It would be a HUGE relief to have the transplant done in Grand Rapids. Please pray!

-Stacy