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Friday, 11pm…

Time has no meaning… it’s hard to believe it was only about a month ago that Sandy and I arrived at Stanford… after all we have been through since that frightening MRI in Spokane on October 10th, arranging the medical treatment at Stanford, the flight to Palo Alto, and all that happened at Stanford, her surgery and recovery, the trip home… seems like we’ve lived a lifetime in this past month.
Sandy finished her first round of chemo medicine on Wednesday night. Fortunately so far the only major side-effect has been fatigue. She is also transitioning onto another anti-seizure medication from the one she has been on for 6+ years. She hasn’t had a seizure since the one in 1999 that forced the true diagnosis of her brain tumor. But it turns out that the anti-seizure drug Dilantin diminishes the effect of the chemo drug (Temodar) that she’s on, so she is switching to an anti-seizure med called Keppra.
She has been real tired, but still tries to stay active… wrapping Christmas presents, adding to the decorations in the house, watching videos, listening to books on tape (like "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" - a great story), and writing thank you cards. She has also been enjoying reading all the emails, comments, and beautiful cards and messages from students at her school. They have really been cheering her up. Considering what she has been through, I continue to be amazed at her strength in dealing with this "siege" (as Susan put it so well). She is of course not without those melt-down moments and days (as I am too), but overall her attitude and resiliency shines through.
She probably put too much energy into trying to handle the small stuff of life this past week as we transition into what passes for normal in our lives these days. But she realized that trying to solve other people’s problems, and trying to resolve some differing local medical recommendations was not helping her heal and gain strength for this fight against cancer. So now she has dropped all that small stuff and is getting focused on what she needs to do. Trying to handle the physical and emotional pain of this journey can be totally overwhelming at times, so all the extraneous "normal" issues of life have to be let go of.
So it’s a good thing those angels are still out there watching over some of those "normal" details, like cars… Our main vehicle (an ‘88 Subaru with only 330,000 miles on it) broke down as I was driving home from my first short day back at work this past Wednesday afternoon. I knew it was a snapped timing belt, as that has happened before. So I coasted into a parking lot in town and had the car towed 30 miles to the shop the next morning. I had also been noticing a thumping sound in the front of the car since August, but figured it was just an axle boot needing grease, so I never got around to fixing it. I told the mechanic to check it out as long as it was in the shop. Well, he checked it out and called me up yesterday…
"The axles are fine," he said "but the ball joint on one side was about to break. You’re lucky…"
I gulped and said "Oh **** [expletive beginning with s]." I know enough about cars to know that if a ball joint breaks at high speed, basically the front wheel breaks off and you lose control of the car. We had driven back from Seattle over a snowy mountain pass just days ago. I thanked those angels for breaking the timing belt.
And in other thrilling news… this morning I was standing on the top rung of a 25-foot ladder leaned against one of our big trees, and I was fully outstretched and off-balance to grab a neighbor’s cat that was stuck way up there. As I grabbed the cat, I looked down from the shaky ladder, way down, and thought "hmmm, this is really stupid… after this past month… I think Sandy needs me too much to risk it for a cat…" Anyway, I survived. So did the cat.
My mom sent Sandy a framed poem she found at a store. Unbeknownst to my mom, it’s the same poem that I had printed on the back of Sandy’s brain tumor support group t-shirt a few years ago. I was wearing the shirt during Sandy’s surgery. My mom told Sandy that she almost didn’t send it because of it’s powerful words, not knowing how Sandy might feel about it. But she sent the framed poem anyway, not knowing of course that it has long been a favorite of ours. It’s good to take chances with that kind of thing. Here’s the poem…