I was awakened on a recent morning by
this terrible pain in my stomach. That, in itself, was disappointing
because we've been working on adjusting my medications and we seemed
to have been making some progress in the past few days. I slept
longer than I normally do, though, and I think that had an impact on
the effectiveness of my medicine.
On top of that, when I wake up at a
different time than usual, I can feel frazzled, and that's an
invitation to the unnamed, but deep, fear I sometimes experience to
come and join the party. It's almost paralyzing, made the more
upsetting because I have no idea what causes it or what it is about.
I think I'll be going to a “special” (wink, wink, nudge nudge)
doctor to talk about that.
Once upon a time, it happened rarely
and was easily ignored. Now, it's becoming more and more common and
it can't be ignored. I also can't really do anything about it
because... Hello. Unnamed. Unknowable.
Those are hard to get out of bed days,
you bet. I'm afraid to get up because... Hello. Unnamed. Unknowable.
So, I lay there and feel an almost physical presence keeping me in
place. I'm only aware of how tense I've been when I finally shift
position and find my knees aching, my hands cramping and a big knot
at the back of my neck because I've been locked and loaded the whole
time.
And this, brothers and sisters, is
where you come in. When I say I couldn't fight this cancer the way I
have without you, these are the times when it is truer than true. As
I lay there, with fear marching to “Night at Bald Mountain” - as
seen in the fabulously popular movie, “The Wizard of Oz- with none
of the fun and all of the menace of the original piece of music, I,
frankly, don't have the power to reach out: not to my wife, who is
generally nearby; not to my children, who are only a phone call away
and the cell phone is right there; not to all the supportive friends
I see on a regular basis.
I have to go with what I've got on
hand, which is mostly a head full of fearful nonsense I've managed to
convince myself actually means something. But, I've also got things
you have told me, done for me, given me and they are right there with
me as well.
I used to be big on drama. BIG on
DRAMA. If there wasn't any in my life, I would work hard to create
some. With drama, comes exaggeration and the need to make things seem
“more” than they are/were. It's something I now constantly guard
against. So, when I say my fight against this fear begins with the
knowledge that thousands of prayers have been said on my behalf, you
need to know I am not selfishly inflating that number. There have
been that many and it has made a huge difference.
This leads me to one of the women's
circles at the Oxford United Methodist Church, Oxford, PA, where my
son-in-law Mark is the pastor and my daughter Jennifer helps keep the
women in a circle (he he). They not only prayed for me, they knit me
a prayer shawl, the weight and warmth of which brings me great
comfort.
A co-worker and her family gave me a
wonderfully heavy blanket with a great texture. Comfort comes from
the weight and the texture and, this winter especially, the heat it
provides.
You have given me countless
talismen/talismans? to carry with me offering messages of comfort,
hope, faith. Truth is, if I carried them all at once, I would list to
one side. I do keep them all in the same drawer, though, so that I
see them every morning as I get ready to leave the house.
In the same drawer, I also keep a
rosary. I am not now, nor have I ever been, Catholic, and readily
admit that my knowledge of the rosary comes from movies, television
and books where people seem to use it to help them with their
prayers, usually, popular culture tells us, when the person saying
the rosary is in some sort of trouble. I have no doubt it provides
comfort. But consider this: the guy I know gave me, not only a
rosary, but his mother's rosary, and told me to carry it with me all
the time. I tried to refuse. It was his mother's rosary, after all,
and I can't begin to imagine how important that would have been to
him.
Still, he wanted me to have it, so I
took it. I carry it with me every day, receiving calm from the feel
of it in my pocket.
I have received cards, letters, emails,
phone calls, encouragement from people I don't know, but who have
been reading what I've been writing; been picking up what I've been
laying down, if you will. Thanks.
My younger daughter Alison and a group
of her friends get together for breakfast on Friday mornings during
the school year. They are all moms with children in the same
elementary school. Unbeknownst to Alison, they got a card that
represented a string of balloons, and each of them wrote a message of
hope and encouragement to me on a separate balloon. They didn't want
Alison to know because they wanted me to see it was their idea,
generated by how they felt about my situation, and not just because
Alison was my daughter.
They sent it to me while I was in the
hospital for my stem cell transplant. Now, there are rules about what
you can put on hospital room walls and how you can put it on there
(no tape, for example). The nurse in charge when the card arrived
(note- she was neither of the ones I dropped my pants in front of)
was not such a big rules follower. I don't think she broke any, but
there were some curved rules by the time she was done. I didn't used
to be a “cheer him up with balloons” kind of guy, but the joy
that card gave me made me a balloon believer and a homecoming queen
(trivia fans?).
Then this week I got a call from a
reader who wanted to send me something to show how much she
appreciated my writing. She had been a cancer survivor for eight
years and, since her initial treatment had been radiation and not
chemo, she sent me this hat that, on the front, said “Chemo Sabe.”
OMG. As a fan of truth and goodness as unashamedly brought to the
(mostly) black and white television screen by the Lone Ranger and his
faithful Indian (?) Native American (?) companion Tonto, it struck a
chord somewhere deep. She'd had it for eight years and knew the right
person would come along to share it with and, after all that time,
she felt the right person was me.
Man, I got a great life!
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere.”
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