These days I find myself striving for a life that is pretty "normal". OK, maybe "normal" isn;t the right word. I'm not sure many would look at our life as too normal, but uneventful nonetheless. I don't want to live as though I am in a battle for my life. Instead I try to live as if I don't have a life-threatening illness. Living day to day in the reality that Jesus has my life. It is His. There is no fear of tomorrow. I don't know if this is sweet oblivion or stupid ignorance, but either way life goes on and so do I. There are even some days that I forget I even have cancer until my stiff neck or crooked smile catch my by surprise.
The kids are going hard at life. We are in the midst of soccer season, school testing, award ceremonies and field trips. The end of another school year is fun and exciting. I love sharing the feelings of excitement and anticipation with my kids. There is a surprise field trip for two of them next Monday and I can't wait until they find out they are going!
As life goes on all around me I try to consume myself with the normal things there are abnormal events as well. The major of those is my treatment which occurs every other Tuesday. I am a part of a clinical trial and yes, I am receiving experimental drugs (Jeremy's favorite thing to tell people). I go in early on the mornings of treatment for blood work then to see my doctor. They check me all over to make sure nothing has changed and that I am healthy enough to receive treatment. Then I go downstairs. I get a private room with a bed and a TV! There they start hooking me up to all the machines. They make me take a variety of oral drugs to lessen the effect of a possible allergic reaction. One of these is bennedryl which makes me very loopy and so sleepy. Then I wait 30 min before receiving an IV drug that is supposed to boost my immune system. No allergic reaction so far. Next is shot time. They place a huge bag of ice on my thigh to numb the injection sites. And after about 30 minutes of icing the nurse comes in with her 7 huge needles. She goes as fast as she can injecting the thick, syrupy liquid into my skin, but it is 7 shots and by the time she reaches the last one, my skin has come back to life and it hurts. There is blood and 7 bruised welts as evidence of her time spent with me. I go back to icing it and generally I have fallen asleep because of the drugs. 6 hours later, after monitoring my blood pressure and temperature I am able to go home. So far i have felt only fatigued, tired and medicated after treatment, but no serious side-effects. I go every other Tuesday for treatment until June 5th when I will get new scans. If all is well I will continue receiving treatments but less frequently.
I am grateful for so many things in life these days and this sort of treatment is one of those things. I am so grateful to be able to life a "normal" life in between treatments. I do not take this for granted as so many who battle cancer have their lives completely turned up side down. The day after treatments I am back to full-time mom, home-schooling and taxi-driver. It is a blessing.
Thanks for praying. More updates to come. :-)
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