I’m sidetracking from the theme of my recent posts and will get back to them in the next few weeks. For now, my roller coaster car is slowly, loudly, frighteningly clicking it’s way to the top of yet another peak. Last October my 22 year old daughter received a life-renewing double lung transplant. Last Friday she ended up in the ER in Denver with very little blood in her body. She needed blood but wasn’t bleeding from anywhere. So what happened to her blood? After a few tests, the culprit seemed to be cancer. Anna and I flew in an air ambulance back to Duke Hospital for further testing. This week, we heard again that she likely has cancer. We do not have any definitive results yet, but everything is pointing toward a version of lymphoma that is hand-picked just for transplant recipients: Post Transplant Lymphoproliferative Disease. At this point nothing is for sure, hence the click-click-click as my roller coaster car inches up, up, up. It may be chemo, it may be a different, less intense drug therapy, it may be we stay in North Carolina, it may be we go back and forth between NC and Colorado, it may be any manner of events; it’s just a lot of “may be’s”.
That’s how life is sometimes. We don’t know what to expect. We only know this moment in time. We only know to breathe in and breathe out and then do that again. Support is key during times like this. Reach out to those who can hold you right where you are. If you need to grieve possibilities, name them as possibilities and let the tears flow. If you’re angry, then let yourself feel the anger and give it an appropriate outlet. If you are gripped by fear, name it as well and let it have its space. Though it’s important to process what we know is true and real, possibilities are, at times, all we have and we find them affecting us. We give them a place to be heard and expressed so they can be processed.
Click-click-click, breathe-breathe-breathe
Journey Forward 