Sunday, Sept 21, (Day 31 after transplant). Bucket List

Today's about reflection.  It's been about four months since my diagnosis and 31 days since the transplant.  It seems like this process should have been terribly stressful (it probably was for Sherry), painful, and full of navel gazing about the meaning of life and death.  The thing is it wasn't a process; I just lived it a day at a time.  One of my favorite movies was The Bucket List, with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.  It's a comedy about an odd couple of cancer patients who learn to live, love and discover the meaning of life.  After I was admitted to the hospital, nobody actually told me I was going to die, but it was pretty evident.  My oncologist said I  probably would have died within 24 hours if I hadn't got attention and then admitted they didn't have a clue what to do and were just stalling.  There were only two previous medical cases like mine, but ominously, no one ever told me what happened to them.  Turns out, they both died.  Sherry even asked me if there was anything on my bucket list I wanted to do.  Anyways, I recorded the movie from direct TV, but had to stop watching.  It's odd.  I remember sailing through and having the doctors laughing at me for riding the stationary bike for an hour with a bag of chemo hanging from my IV pole.  Then I see movie scenes of mad dashes to the bathroom, shaking in bed, nightmares, nausea, sleeping with ice packs, and remembered the tough times.  Yet, so far my journey has been blessed.  Since my doc first described a reasonable path to a cure, five events have consecutively gone my way.  Obviously, I'm not out of the woods yet.  Viewed in a negative light, I probably still have a 25% chance of not seeing 60.  Those might seem like chilling odds, but they sound great to me.

So, what I have I learned?  To be honest, I don't know that I learned much.  I'm an athlete.  I know that if you want to run the Boston Marathon it helps to train ahead of time (and to find a flat, fast qualifying marathon).  If you're going to run a 100-miler, you better learn how to eat while you're sick.  I love ultra wisdoms about pain, such as "Mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it don't matter."  Ultras also taught me how to pee while running, which came in handy during chemo, but that's another story.  And a 3,253 mile bike ride demands that one figure out how to get comfortable being uncomfortable.  It's the same thing with cancer, or any other crisis.  It's just a lot easier to persevere if you prepared ahead of time.  Matthew 7:25 says, "The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against the house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock."  I'm a simple person, but I know what I know.  God's a good God.  Romans 5:10 says, "We were God's enemies, but he made us his friends through the death of his Son.  Now that we are God's friends, how much more will we be saved by Christ's life!"  We say a prayer before we eat, but laugh that grace isn't the time to get right with God.  Knowing who I was didn't prevent my storm, but allowed me to skip denial, anger, bargaining, depression and advance directly to acceptance.  And that's a very good thing.

I also know that I have amazing friends and a big brother and wife who love me very much.