June 15, 2006
After the white blood count came out of the basement to a level that made human interaction acceptable, we have had a good number of visitors, including friends who have come many miles to say hello and how are you. Our conversations inevitably come to the subject of having an incurable cancer, and how one deals with that reality, particularly as it relates to God. “Are you angry at God?” one asks, and the answer to that is an emphatic “No!” because such an emotion would imply that God is the selector of who is to be afflicted and who is not. I think this subject is one which humanity keeps picking up and studying from all angles, and there never is a satisfactory conclusion. When we come to the unfathomable, it is time to move on in faith, letting God’s mind be the mystery it will ever be. Some contemporary writers who address illness and suffering and God will say that they consider the illness a “blessing” because then there are the prayers of so many, and the opportunity to review priorities. This is another very foreign point of view in my mind because I can’t ever consider pain a blessing. When I was researching an essay that I was writing, I read about controlling physical suffering as it was practiced in the medical community and was astonished to read that the concept of pain as a good thing carried on right into the early 20th Century. Then it was thought that it was either a sign that you were being punished by God or, if you were a good and upright person, a sign that you were being honed into a higher state by the gift of suffering. Women weren’t given anything to ease the trials of childbirth because it was thought that the pain would make them better mothers. And so on. What a fine thing it is to live now, when such ideas have been set aside, and a far more compassionate ethos rules. Both Charles and I agree that good things have come of the advent of MDS in our lives, and we give thanks for them; but we aren’t inclined to say that it has been a blessing.
I have been in remission for nearly a month, with good days and bad in that time. One of the things I have discovered is that the internal chemical wash of drugs means that I have to be very careful about imbibing alcoholic beverages; if I drink more that a small amount of wine, for example, I find myself having most memorable muscle spasms of both upper and lower legs as the night moves on. I have termed these “Liquor taxes” and have determined to resist more fully the temptations of the fine wines that have arrived at our house in the hands of friends and family alike.