Keeping Our Fingers Crossed

Call it what you want. We are all doing it. Thinking good thoughts. Keeping a positive attitude.
Meditating. Visualizing. Waiting. Hoping. We are all doing the same thing. Whether newly diagnosed, through with treatment and trying to get on with life, stuck in a cycle that comes with metastatic disease, or fighting to add months, weeks, even days to the life expectancy we've been told we have. We are all praying.

We are all praying in our own ways, our own traditions, our own religions. Some depending solely on a single loving God, some to many gods, some to themselves and their own inner strength. But we, the cancer patients, are always focused on the disease and if we will be one of the ones to outlive it...beat it....be cured....be healed. Prayer is a constant river that runs through each and every one of us who sit back in the chairs, sit with the people who sit in the chairs, or treat the people who sit in the chairs. We rarely talk about it amongst ourselves when sitting there in the treatment chairs on Asheville Avenue, but I feel it in my soul every time I turn the corner and walk past the glass partition. Among all the fear, pain, resignation, exhaustion, resentment, and depression that seems to lay low on the ground at our feet, there is the running stream of prayer, the waters of hope, the river that flows within us, confirming our spiritual strength, our power to believe:b the power of prayer.

Yesterday, while sitting in the chair and observing all that was going on around me (busy day for the girls), the nurse who was trying to access the veins of the elderly woman beside me was having a little problem. She had found the vein...."a good stick".... but the vein had "blown" or collapsed the minute she tried to put fluid in it. This happens a lot to those of us whose veins are tired and scarred and used up from years of all the sticking. So I knew the nurse felt bad and the older woman knew she would be stuck yet another time out of hundreds of times....maybe thousands. So what did I do? I prayed. I prayed that the next stick would be great and not blow and open up and let the medicine flow. I asked God for mercy for the nurse and the patient. Such a small thing, but why add to the suffering, Lord? And my prayer was answered.

I look back on yesterday and think.....such a small prayer, but one with an immediate, divine
"ok", and I think why not go for the BIG stuff, Lord. Why just show me the small???? I figure it was a small God moment that I needed to see to boost my faith. That God never promised us we would not suffer as his children, he promised that we would never be alone. That one small good stick was His way of saying to me, "I see you. I hear you. I am with you, always.....even in small ways." The nurse and patient totally unaware of the holy conversation taking place beside them. The immediate peace the second stick brought to me and known only to me, to be cherished by me.

When Maha and I had our meeting (exam) yesterday, we said we were hopeful that my numbers that we will run in two weeks will reflect the positive way my body has been behaving lately. Relatively speaking, I feel pretty darn good. Relatively speaking I am symptomless from what cancer may cause.....no bone pain, no abdominal pain, no shortness of breath, no fluid in the lungs, no abnormal nodes or swollen organs. Any problems I have seem to be from what I have to take and the years of what I have already taken. So, as two old comrades in the fight, knowing better than to let our guard down at any time and be too positive; knowing that even though my body is a good barometer of my overall health and status, and knowing we have been snake-bit before, Dr. Elkordy parted with these words: "We'll keep our fingers crossed."
I turned back to her immediately and said, "Oh no, we'll do much more than that." She nodded her head because she knows. And she knows that I know what we will be doing. We will be praying...praying like my life depends on it. Because it does.

"Be joyful always; Pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances....." 1Thessalonians 16-18