Perseverance

August 27, 2010 Seattle,WA - 70 degrees, cloudy with rain in the morning, sunny and warm tonight.

Another busy morning at the Cancer Center. Started out with another blood draw to test for anything that would prevent me from having a bone marrow assessment and removal. Spoke with a couple from the Tri-Cities who had a stem-cell transplant that failed two years ago. They're back to have another go at it with a donor providing the stem cells this time around. He had a allergic reaction to the dye they give you for a CAT scan and was hospitalized for a couple of months. That means he gets to start over again and will be here for probably 5 months. He and his wife are real WSU Cougar fans and don't go anywhere without some form of Cougar clothing. The Husky fans are equally as devoted. I wish believers would have as much enthusiasm for God's Team as they do for sports teams. Maybe it's better we aren't exhibitionists for the Kingdom. I think Jesus said something about living our faith in discrete anonymous acts of compassion and humility that only God notices. So keep loving God and serving others so no one gives you too much credit. We're just clay. The Potter decides what shape and function we are to assume. Be maleable in the Potter's hands this week. Let him keep molding you into the "poema" masterpiece of love that is his greatest joy.
After the blood draw, had a panorex dental xray in preparation for a complete dental exam next week. At 10 am dropped down to the 2nd floor to begin sedation for the bone marrow removal. We had a wonderful nurse who always keeps patients fully aware of what she was doing. For some people it could have been TMI, but Kriss and I prefer to know as much as possible and we got along great. Took some very powerful oral sedatives; one could get strung out on that stuff if that was your goal in life. I felt like some Aussie repeating, "No Worries Mate" the rest of the morning. When it came time to penetrate both hips to draw bone marrow and take bone samples, things got serious. Even with the "Lucy in the sky with diamonds sedatives" I was on, it took some real perseverance to endure the procedure. Nurse Talks-a-Lot kept putting liticane deeper and deeper into the muscles and even hip bone when i started jerking and jumping. It's the same stuff we use on cattle and horses, with veterinary approval, of course, and so I can appreciate why they wiggle and squirm when it's given. The left hip went fairly smoothly, but we had a serious battle to get all the samples from the right hip. Nurse Talks-a-Lot said she was really proud of the way I handled the whole thing. She told us about a patient who informed them after 2 unsuccessful attempts that if it didn't work the 3rd time, that he had a gun in his pickup in the parking garage so they were doubly motivated. Fortunately, it worked the 3rd time and no firearms were in play. I came back to the house after lunch and crashed for several hours to let the sedative work out of my system. Nurse Talks-a-Lot said not to sign any legal documents that one's spouse might put before you while recovering from the sedation. She has a good sense of humor and owns and rides horses. You can't go wrong with a cowgirl for your medical provider.

Watford City, Mckenzie County, North Dakota Fall 1958

Mom, sister Kathy,and I moved to Watford City to live together the Fall of 1958. I was going into 2nd grade and Kathy was going into 5th grade which my Mother was teaching. We lived in a trailer house across the street from the school along with a bunch of oil roustabouts families. Dieter Lundy was our closest neighbor and his Dad worked in the oil fields so he moved around alot. He was basically a good guy, but he didn't get too close to others, cause he got tired of the trauma of separation and so stayed fairly aloof. The theme for that year was survival and perseverance. For some reason we were more destitute than normal. Even with my mother's supplemental teaching income, poverty stalked us like a coyote after a newborn lamb. The wheat crop probably failed, or the prices were lousy, or Grandpa Peterson just felt miserly that year. Living so close to school we could walk home for lunch. The memorable thing about my first day in Watford City Elementary was how many students there were in my class and how little there was to eat for lunch. For some ungodly reason, my mother had come across cases of condensed tomato soup. I'm sure my imagination must be wrong, but I swear we ate tomato soup breakfast, lunch and dinner. If we were lucky, we might get a grilled cheese sandwich in the evening, or break up the monotony with milk toast, hopefully with a little butter and salt and pepper. By some stroke of fortune and the compassion of the janitor of the elementary school, he took me aside toward the end of the first week of classes and asked if I would be interested in being his assistant for a couple hours after school. It meant emptying all the garbage cans in the elementary school and wiping clean the blackboards with this special eraser that cleaned off even the dust. He said he couldn't pay me any cash, but that the principal said I could get free lunch tickets for every day we were in school. Well, I had learned early in life that any opportunity you could find to earn any form of income was a gift too great to pass up and I told him that I was his new assistant.

We had all learned to work on the farm from the earliest of ages. I can't tell you our ages, but I remember sitting on the side of a baler with Kathy on the opposite side watching for any bale that was improperly knotted. We would throw up an arm and the driver would stop and come back and tie a new knot so we didn't have broken bales to rebale. We moved up in stature when we got to help trip the dump on the homemade bale stacker that could pile 15-20 bales in a mini-stack out in the field. Another promotion put you in charge of collecting eggs that we sold to a grocery store in town. This was a very important job, because it generated real money, or helped pay off our food charges, and we needed every egg. I was unceremoniously removed from this position in about 6 weeks.You see, chickens don't actually like you to take their eggs away from them every day. They have this fantasy about setting on them until they hatch out and they can proudly pilot them around the barnyard. Being fairly young, I didn't handle the hen pecks on my small hands and so I devised some creative ways to get the eggs from the hens. Solution #1 was to enter the chickenhouse and scream at the top of my lungs causing every hen to fly from the nest in sheer terror. This was an extremely effective method, until my father was leaving the barn one morning during this procedure and came running to she what tragedy caused my scream. After explaining my ingenious solution to hen pecks, he let me know in convincing fashion that this methodology was inappropriate and would cease immediately. Solution #2 involved the use of a foot long 1x2 inch board that I inserted under brooding hens and then hoisted them vertically, pinning them against the top of the laying box with one hand, while retrieving the eggs with the other hand. There was always a certain amount of collateral egg breakage with method #2, but I figured it was the price of progress and I could collect the eggs in record time. The downside to such trauma was that the hens would panic as soon as I entered the chickenhouse. Their either remembered the screams of method #1, or had endured the pincer effects of method #2. For whatever reason, egg production dropped precipitously within a month and I was fired from the poultry division and reassigned to helping slop out the cow manure in the milking parlor. Parlor was a much too genteel and civilized word for our milking operation. It was more than rustic and hadn't been upgraded since it was built in the early 1920s.
Older siblings milked cows twice a day, 365 days a week, no matter what else was happening in the world or their love life. I couldn't tell you how many times those cows got milked at 11pm or later when an older brother drug in from a date. We younger boys would not hesitate to offer to do the milking for them so they wouldn't have to come home so early, for an appropriate level of remuneration, of course.

Working as assistant to the janitor in 2nd grade provided me with, not only a reliable hot lunch, but a sense of self-respect and importance that has stayed with me all of my life. I never complained once about what we had for lunch that year. I couldn't shake the awful tedium of tomato soup and anything they served at school beat that hands down. I didn't understand my classmates complaints about the food and if they didn't finish their meal, I was always right there to offer to take their tray back for them. It wasn't always easy finding a way to eat their leftovers without detection, but hunger finds a way. On the last day before Christmas Vacation, by boss, the Head Janitor, gave me a Christmas Bonus, a box of chocolate covered marichino cherries. I couldn't wait to get outside and tear into that box.I did and got so sick after eating all of them that I cannot bear to eat those cherries to this day. Another lesson learned the hard way.