October 2, 2007
This morning we had rain at dawn – lovely and refreshing and without storms. Now the sky clears and the air is washed and fine. In the past week, the winds came rushing from the south, carrying molecules recently residing over Oklahoma and Kansas, and when I took a breath, I considered that those very bits of air might well have been passing through the nostrils of a southern politician not too long before. I am not sure it altered my thinking, but one never knows. . . now it is still and peaceful over Sanctuary, with the birds reemerging from the trees and checking out the feeders and grasses for good things to eat.
This afternoon I will do the bone marrow aspiration. The procedure is prefaced with my taking two hydrocodone tablets before arriving at the oncologist’s office, then I am given something under the tongue and also an injection in the arm. After a bit, I am almost in an vegetable state, and we begin. Daughter Heidi comes into the room with me and holds my hand and keeps up a conversation with me – the first time we did this, the doctor asked her, “Are you the fainting kind?” and Heidi said, “No, not at all.” This will be my fourth time. The marrow will be sent to the Med Center in Omaha and read there, and one week from today, I will meet with the oncologist and we will discuss what is within and how the next months will go. . .
Granddaughters came for an “overnight” last weekend, and it is a recurring joy to view life through the eyes of fresh minds. Their observations on the forest walk helped me to see things that I had missed, and they carefully removed the seeds from several pods lying beneath the honey locusts so that their grandfather could pot them and get them started in the greenhouse. He promised to take care of it, and while they may envision a small forest of honey locusts in the near future, we are more realistic about the outcome. Kira, the seven year old, worked out a play date for Alphie. “Grandma, I have an idea,” she said with great seriousness, “We’ll take Alphie home with us, and we will send our two cats home with you for the day. . . they’ll be just fine, and Alphie will love it at our house!” It makes me smile to imagine what such an exchange would do to the general karma of both places.
And so the days go on, here and elsewhere, with events large and small occurring in lives all over the world. We strive always to live within Martin Luther’s wonderfully crafted words of prayer, “Into your hands we give ourselves, our bodies and souls and all things – let your holy angel be with us so that the wicked foe may have no power over us”. To LIFE!
October 4 addition:
The bone marrow aspiration was successfully completed on Tuesday afternoon. I was given a lot of pain killers, but the procedure still felt like a large sized root canal operation in the upper hip bone. it is surely memorable, and all for the wrong reasons. Now we wait for the report on what lies within.