Halfway done!

As of today, my 12 weeks of chemotherapy are halfway done. WHEW! In fact, today and tomorrow are "bonus days" since the next infusion was moved from today to this coming Wednesday. Just think, right now I should be sitting in that chair hooked up to an i.v., as nurses hover nearby checking my progress and commenting on my choice of reading material (seriously!). Instead, I am home and normal* this morning. The day's plan includes a 3-mile jog, a sushi lunch rendezvous with my husband, and an afternoon prayer with my dear prayer buddies. What a gift compared to what should have been!

Sadly, my relief over the halfway point is still overshadowed by the dread of the next round. The symptoms may be temporary -- the extreme exhaustion and flu-like aches last about 5 days and then I'm back to normal* (I love normal*!) -- but it's still hard to feel side-lined from life and nearly useless in my home and family and world.

Last week I helped chaperone my daughter's kindergarten field trip to a nursing home where the children sang and presented handmade gifts to the residents. My post-chemo days of fatigue and feeling useless made the visit more poignant than it has in past years. While interacting with the residents -- all living in a nursing home, many confined to wheelchairs, some unable to speak or engage in a conversation, one curled up with a baby doll and seemingly unable to engage with anything else in her environment -- I considered what lies ahead for many of us who (God willing) will live our full life expectancy. We will reach a point in which we are sidelined from our brand of normal. We reach a point in which we no longer contribute in a way the world, and perhaps we ourselves, consider valuable. This could be a disturbing thought, but it's a reminder that our sense of value should not come from our performance on the world's stage, not from a sense of contributing or accomplishing or succeeding. Our value must come from our identity as children of God. That's the one lasting thing, when your body and mind give out, when you cannot do what you want to do: you are still loved, so loved, by God.

 *Well, normal except that I'm bald. That will never feel normal. Every time I look in my closet, there's this moment of shock when I see my wig sitting there. It's not a nice kind of shock, the oh-how-sweet-someone-got-me-a-lhasa-apso-puppy kind of shock. It's the yikes-someone's-been-scalped-in-my-closet kind. Shocking.
Incidentally, I learned yesterday that first grade boys find wigs and baldness very interesting. The boys in the Sunday school class I team-teach had so many questions when I showed up after many weeks' absence: "Are you really bald?" "Is that really a wig?" "Does it feel like real hair?" Of course, I obliged by letting them pet the lhasa apso on the head and by peeling a corner of it off my head to prove I'm really, honestly bald underneath it. It's nice to be appreciated by first grade boys. One of the most mischievous (and most curious about wigs) then spent the lesson cuddled up next to me, as if the whole wig thing made me very endearing.