I truly have not intended to let it all go to neglect, but
life the past few days just snowballed and I am finally getting to update. Thank you for covering our backs in prayer
and checking in with us even when I don’t have it together, not that I really ever
do, just might occasionally look like I do.
We ventured back into the med center yesterday. I suppose I could call it uneventful, but
it’s always just crazy stressful between traffic and the infernal wait. I could just count my blessings that we weren’t
in the line of folk that were sitting in the transfusion room waiting on chemo
or blood that was running hours behind. We
were privileged. We could be prodded for
blood, see the doctors and leave.
Overall, Asa is good and we are on a forward moving
path. The results of his AFP, cancer
blood marker, were up a tiny bit yesterday from 10 to 15, but not a concerning
jump. As his liver grows and things
adjust, this is very possible. He
weighed in at a whopping 25 ½ pounds and for those of you who have been along
for the entire long ride, you know this is a huge move toward full return to
normalcy. It was a very sweet thing to
see the doctors so genuinely thrilled and grinning ear to ear at Asa’s
progress. My heart often hurts for them,
as I know they are so often the bearers of bad news. I know the names and faces and parents of so
many who’ve not won the race in the here and now. I can’t imagine being their doc week in and
out. Dr. Heczey was telling us how he
was using Asa’s case this week to encourage another mother that kids to come
the other side of the really hard stuff.
I wish I could give her a hug.
I’m sure victory tastes sweet for not only us.
We did have opportunity to go and visit other families in the infusion room, check on progress. It was neat to see friends and forward progress. God just so reminded me of his faithfulness and provision still in all this long affair by introducing me to another mother from our area with a son with Asa’s cancer with equally a miraculous story. And it was she who just “stopped to bless” me. There was another mom and dad glaze-eyed with anxiety with tiny babe and I just wanted to scoop them up and squeeze them tight and tell them that they could do this thing, but sometimes there are just not words, just smiles and shared space and hope in this unfair place where the broken are not always fixed this side of eternity. It’s hard.
Asa has actually been moved to a two-month regimen now in
terms of clinic visits. We get to see
the docs again right before Christmas.
Between now and then, we go for port removal and then a few weeks later,
at the crack of dawn, Asa has what we hope to be the last MRI. The liver team will then look at all his info
and the thought is that he will soon after be transferred over to the long-term
survivor clinic.
I think it will be with mixed emotions that we will move
forward. Yes, I have my “today we are
thankful” list, which includes a boy with lots of fuzzy blonde hair that loves
to read books and run us so hard all over the house that we fall in bed
exhausted. I am excited to see God’s
provision for our every need in all this. Even on the recovering side, He is
covering us, helping us to move baby steps forward toward normal, which I do
truly now agree with my friend, Beth, is simply a setting on a dryer. I am grateful that our life no longer
revolves around clinic and counts. But
we are still leaving pieces of us behind.
It’s as if you feel every other parent’s sucker punch in the gut, carry
that been there done that grief with every kid, every adult that is brought to
the table, which is a lot. I think this
will ever be a moment in life by which everything else is measured, before
cancer, during cancer, after cancer.
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