May 18 – Chapter Two
Who can describe the feeling of reprieve? I know that today, my spirit flew over the trees, I shouted “Thank You, God!” out the window, and I celebrated hugely the prayers and thoughts that so many of you have wrapped around me. This afternoon, we went in to the doctor’s office grinning and filled with the sheer joy of seeing the other side of the “valley of the shadow”. We said, “Tell us everything, please!” He read the report which said that the Vidaza had knocked the dread count of blasts down from nearly 20% to 0.5%, meaning that the intent of the chemotherapy, that is, releasing the infant white blood cells from the material that kept them perpetually unformed and useless and forcing them into working mature cells, was actually carried out. We said, “What is the future?” He replied that he understood that we would want some black and white, some solid data, etc., and that he didn’t have any for us. He went on to say, “The disease is still in the room; it has just been pushed into the corner.” Yes, yes, we said, but how long would it be held in abeyance? Then he said a startling thing. He said that this a rare cancer, and in his practice, he had only seen seven or eight cases. and the people who had it were, in his words, “old and feeble” and did not live much past six or eight months. He said that some couldn’t survive the therapy, which he conceded was difficult, and with which I have done well. “I am not old, and I am not feeble” I sang out, “so what do you think?” “It’s definitely a remission, and I would guess for six or seven months. And then, when we have to, we can come back with the same therapy, or maybe add a new one to it.” He went on to say that my stem cells have been under attack for a long time, and I simply don’t have the supply that healthy people have to work with. He concluded that I would have two more rounds of chemotherapy to not only keep the disease in the corner, but beat it down more if possible, then we would stop for a while to give the body a rest.
My arms weren’t ready to resume the injections, so the nurse had trouble getting them to “take”. She had to withdraw and find a new needle, but the light of this day simply couldn’t be dimmed. We had hoped for improvement, of course, but we had not expected the best possible report! And if this can happen once, it can happen again. A doctor can present his good gifts of healing, but who can really take the measure of miracles?