Cancer Post #5- Enough with all this WAITING!

I feel like I have been holding my breath for 148 days in a row.  Since that first appointment to make sure it was nothing I inhaled and have yet to let it out.  You wait for appointments and then wait some more for test results.  You wait in waiting rooms and then wait in exam rooms.  You wait for medications to be filled, for side effects to hit, for sickness to pass and then you wait to do it all over again.  You wait on the phone and for the phone to ring.  You wait to recover and you wait for surgery.  You wait, and then you wait, and then you wait some more.  The physical stuff aside, it is enough to destroy a person.  All this waiting, all this wondering, all the ‘what if’s’ and ‘what will be’s’ and all the ‘why’s’.  My husband and I are both so weary from all of this waiting.  And here we sit yet again, waiting.  

After chemo, you are eligible for surgery 4 weeks later.  For various reasons, my surgery ended up being scheduled 8 weeks out instead.  Four extra weeks to sit here and google every new thought that comes to mind. Four extra weeks to sit here and become more angry and more anxious than I already am.  I have wept harder and more often in this period of waiting which is interesting because physically I am feeling more like myself as my body recovers from being poisoned.  I am even back to running my 3 miles everyday again, not nearly as fast but still a piece of me recovered that I have desperately missed.  But, it doesn’t change this awful waiting.  

With my specific type of cancer, treatment is first and then surgery.  Until surgery the Dr’s are not able to give you a final “staging” of your cancer so with the waiting of this surgery and all it will entail, it feels like the moment we have been waiting for.  The final verdict that feels like it will determine the rest of my life.  It is the worst and I hate it.  I am desperate to know and yet desperate not to know all at the same time.  And yet, there is truly nothing I can do about any of it.  Absolutely nothing.  And so, we wait.  

Time is a strange thing, isn’t it?  Here today and gone tomorrow.  A mist that appears for a little while and vanishes, the Bible says, and that reality has never seemed more true to us.  As we both celebrate our 40th Birthdays which are supposed to represent the half-way point of life, we will instead sit in hospital rooms staring at blank walls wondering if maybe we should have celebrated my half-way at 20.  It’s a sucker punch.  

OK, so if you know me you know I may be coming off a bit negative.  Especially when you give me a blank page and tell me to write out my experience.  In all reality, my prognosis at this point is good.  My husband reminds me every day of that but I am still very much in the thick of it so it’s hard to see through to the other side just yet.  

I should mention, even though this waiting is awful, God is with us in this waiting.  I have plastered to the fridge that He is WITH me in my grief and in this waiting.  My frustration comes in when I want Him to take me OUT of this grief and this waiting, not just join me.  I mean, after all, He is an ‘all powerful, snap His fingers or just say the Word kind of God’ and I want in the worst way for Him to throw that kind of power in my direction.  To end the waiting and to end the grief.  Is that really so much to ask? 

He has been present though, despite my request for magic fairy dust.  Often it is through a text from a friend checking on me at just the right moment or a hot meal that has shown up on our doorstep.  I use to keep God in a box and that has served me well up until now.  Do this plus that and life will be OK. I really believed He would not give me more than I could handle if I was faithful to Him.  I wish that is how it works but I’m learning it’s not when it comes to God.  Many of the statements I claimed as truth my whole life need about 10 asterisks behind each one.  I am still trying to wrap my mind around all of this, but this God that has outgrown my box is both beautiful and terrifying.  A God who can’t really be fully figured out.  A God who I will hold onto through all of this no matter what because if NOTHING ELSE He is holding onto me.  That’s one truth I can hang onto in this waiting.  

Onto surgery and whatever is beyond….. After another week in a half of waiting that is.  

A few friends helped us pass the time as we celebrated
 Paul's 40th Birthday last week.