A NEW NORMAL!

September 23, 2010, Walla Walla, WA Cloudy with rain,  65 degreees.

My oncologist here in Walla Walla warned me that I would be entering the Major Leagues of Chemo when I started R-CHOP therapy. It has been exactly one week since my infusion and I am beginning to understand what he was talking about. I am trying to get back into a routine at the office, but by the afternoon, I am just out of energy. Yesterday, we went to a Dr.'s appoinement for Kriss to check on her healing from the four fractures in her pelvis. She is having more pain the last few days and is concerned that it may not be healing properly. Dr. T. referred her to a specialist and told her to not wait so long to take her pain meds. By the time we ran a few errands and picked up some of our multitude of medications, it was 1:30 pm. Both of us slept most of the rest of the afternoon. I have been having some typical post Chemo side effects, but they are easing today. I went into the office this morning and worked there a couple of hours and then met a parishioner for lunch. Once again, when I got home, I was exhausted and rested a couple of hours. Now I am writing this blog and I feel pretty good. I have heard from almost all of my siblings and they are on board for the testing to see who will be a donor match. I need to telephone a couple of them this evening and just touch base about the process. We have gotten pre-approval from the Insurance Company to pay for the blood tests for nine siblings. At $5,000 per test, it adds up pretty fast. I am one of those very fortunate people who has a very comprehensive medical plan. It should be, considering how much the Church pays into it each year. I can't imagine how one would face all of this if you had to go out and find funding and resources to pay for the cost of the procedure. They told us it would end up costing between $250,000-$300,000 for just the expenses in Seattle. The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance has an entire staff of people who do nothing but assist people in securing funding or helping to navigate the maze of insurance red tape. It is certainly a challenging enterprise, but I don't know if we can come up with anything better. There are people at SCCA who come from all over the world to get the care that they offer. I found the same thing was true when we went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. There is a separate reception hall just for international patients. When you drive by the Rochester Airport, you see row upon row of private jets from around the world that speaks volumes of the kind of medical care we have available to us. The challenge of course, is how to make it available to everyone who needs it, without destroying the building blocks that sustain it. That is probably beyond my pay grade, but I have a lot of personal and professional experience living in the medical and health care world. I have to wait three weeks before my next R-CHOP infusion. It takes that long for your body to recover. Just when you get to feeling human again, you get drug back into the clutches of Chemo-Therapy. It's kind of like the Mafia that just keeps pulling you back in, when you think you have the chance to get out. My hair is supposed to fall out somewhere in this process, but so far, no sign of hair loss. It's funny how I notice naturally or artificially bald people now. I look at them and wonder how I will look without hair. Some people get through R-CHOP with all of their hair intact, so maybe I will, as well. The next big medical crisis will happen when I get back to Seattle and they give me another series of Chemo just before I receive the donor stem-cell transplant. That will lead us into a true medical crisis. We are trying to prepare as much as possible for that time. It's hard to know what to prepare for, however. We have all the legal and medical directives in place. I am trying to make sure that Kriss has the information and people around her to help her deal with any eventuality. One of the goals in my life is to make sure that she is well taken care of for the rest of her life. She has sacrificed so much of her personal interests and desires to serve our family and the church. I won't leave her in poverty or without people to walk with her through any unexpected  future. I hope and pray that all those plans will be unnecessary. However, I would urge all of you to make those decisions when you are healthy and think about how you can prepare for whatever future God allows you to share. There are some crisis' you can avert by thinking and planning ahead. When I transitioned from 8th to 9th grade, I came face to face with my last Junior High Crisis.

Wapato Junior High School, Wapato, WA 1965

The summer following 8th grade I embraced the American economic miracle of independent business person. I started my own lawn care and mowing business. I had several older people call to see if I would mow their lawns and I made them an offer for complete yard care at a price they couldn't resist. I went down to the National Bank of Commerce in Wapato and opened a passport savings account with a few dollars I had laying around and made sure that it would take two signatures for anyone to withdraw funds. I had to have an adult on the account, so I put my Mother's name there, but I hadn't forgotten what had happened to money I had earned earlier in my life. From the time we had moved to WA state, we often would go back to North Dakota to help my cousin Rudy with harvest. If I remember correctly, I did that 2-3 times with my Dad and older brothers. Rudy and Dad had dated twins when they were younger, Edna and Evelyn. Rudy and Edna married, but had no offspring. Dad jilted Evelyn and she remained a spinster the rest of her life. We were on surprisingly good terms with all of them, especially Evelyn, and I can remember visiting her home in Beach many times. She worked in the Bank, I believe, and made the best cookies in Golden Valley County. At the end of one harvest, Rudy gave me a check for $25 for all the shovelling and dirty work I had done to help out during harvest. It was the first check I had ever received with only my name on it. He said he would call the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Beach and assure them that it was legit and to authorize them to cash it for me. I proudly strode into the Bank like some financial mogul, endorsed the check, and walked out with the preposterous sum of $25 in my pocket. I got 5 ones and a twenty dollar bill. It was a proud day for a young man to have money in his pocket that he had earned by the sweat of his brow. I bought some goodies for the train ride back to WA state and stashed the twenty away for some special purpose when I got back to Wapato. You can imagine what happened next. My concerned father thought it would best if he kept that $20 bill safe in his wallet, so nothing would happen to it on the trip home. As I handed it over, I had the sinking feeling that as he slid it into his wallet, it would be the last time I ever saw it. It was. I can't tell you how many times I asked and begged him to give me back my $20 bill. He always had an excuse or just ignored me. He had been raised in an era where the labor of a child was the rightful property of the father. He had suffered the indignity and humiliation being treated like a near-serf himself, so it seemed normal that I would follow along in the cultural traditions of immigrant families of all time. I didn't understand any of this, at the time, and it created a bitterness and anger that took a long time to get over. By the time we got back to Wapato, I only had a couple of bucks left for all my hard work for Cousin Rudy. I vowed that that experience would never repeat itself in the future. Ergo, my account at the National Bank of Commerce would be parent proof. I spent the summer moving sprinklers and mowing lawns while most of my friends would sit on their bicycles and watch. If I was feeling flush, I would treat them to an order of French Fries, smothered in catsup, and a large Coca-Cola. There was a Mom and Pop burger joint in Wapato that had the best fries around and they gave us a break on the combo price. On payday, I would treat myself to fresh maplebars from the bakery just around the corner from the National Bank of Commerce on main street. It was sublime to eat those fresh, still hot maplebars, sitting at a booth with my Passbook Savings Register open, looking at how much money I had earned that week and how it was adding up. I wouldn't let either of my parents know how much money I had in the account; no sense in putting more temptation in front of them than they could stand. I remember that I used some of the money to buy school clothes and supplies that Fall and a pair of white hightop Converse All Star Basketball shoes when I made the 9th grade varsity Basketball Team. The crisis of late Middle School or Junior High School is all about relationships. All of us boys had just discovered girls. From 7th grade on, older guys always preyed upon girls our age, and they were more than willing to have a boyfriend in 9th grade versus hanging out with us lowly 7th graders. But by the time we were in 9th grade, it was our turn. I can't say that I actually had a steady girlfriend. My face looked like the surface of the moon due to acne. It was only due to the semi-darkness of the room that any girl would condescend to dancing with me at the afterschool socials. At private home parties, if I was invited at all, I spent most of my time at the food table eating stuff that was never served at home. I remember one party at Glenn Hata's house where I told everyone that I had been diagnosed with an accute case of claustropobia. I couldn't stay in the basement with the rest of them for very long periods of time because of my medical condition. I guess they bought it. Whenever I would go outside to avoid the humiliation of not having anyone to dance with, some "loser" would come out after a while and commiserate with me in my medical crisis. In spite of living in a culture that is obsessed with sex and sexuality, we were all hopelessly ignorant and literally groping in the dark to make sense of that area of life. My friend, Frederick Buechner, in his book WISHFUL THINKING, writes: "Contrary to Mrs. Grundy, sex is not sin. Contrary to Hugh Hefner, it's not salvation either. Like nytroglycerin, it can be used either to blow up bridges or heal hearts." With all the overt sexual content to movies, music and language that surrounds young and old alike, I think we are actually more in the dark today than ever when it comes to sexuality and sexual behavior. Walla Walla County notoriously leads the state of WA in per capita teenage pregnancies. It is an ongoing crisis of epic proportions and we don't seem able to even face the issues honestly, let alone competently. The trendline seems to be descending into a form of hedonism, called recreational sex. Buechner speaks to that disturbing trend when he writes: "At its roots, the hunger for food is the hunger for survival. At its roots the hunger to know a person sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly. Food without nourishment doesn't fill the bill for long, and neither does sex without humanness." Sex truly is like nytroglycerin, it has the power to heal the broken hearts of a man and a wife who have experienced great alleniation. It also can blow up the bridges of life and opportunity for young and old alike when it occurs outside the boundaries of God's intentions. For many of my friends sexual encounters began to define and sometimes delineate their lives into ever more tightening circles of despair resulting in a dead-end existence. By the end of my 9th grade, I had survived one more crisis without total failure and the Spring of 1966 would be the turning point of my life.