Tag Archives: AML

Aug8

Miserable Mess

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_0618“Today is the worst day of my life,” Allistaire said to my mom yesterday.

She hardly smiles.  I try and try and maybe occasionally there is a flicker.  Mostly she just lays in bed, curled on her side, flat expression or grimaces of pain.  The hurt intensifies, the moans quicken.  I glance at the heart monitor and watch her heart rate climb, climb. 150, 160, up and up.  Sleeping these days it’s in the 140s.  Sometimes it’ll dip down to 115.  A normal resting rate used to be in the 80’s or 90’s at night, about 105 in the day.  Her heart is working so hard. A flurry of intensity.

“I’m gonna throw up!!!” she screams and I tell her, “NO, NO, you mustn’t!  You HAVE to keep those meds down.  Your heart is hurting and needs these meds!”  She struggles to hold on, she pushes through and manages a few more minutes until her whole body is taken over by the anguished effort to empty her stomach.  Face contorted with neck thrown back, back arched and bottom jaw stretched as far down as it can go, mouth wide as the constriction of her stomach demands to eject its contents.  Retching is really the word for it.  Great green gushes of dark bile arch into the air and down into the basin.  Over and over her body is racked with contractions.  When at last she is spent and there seems to be nothing left, I ask her if she feels better.  “No, no, I feel worse,” she says with sad haggard voice.

I make her get up and walk.  “Even if you cry the entire time,” I tell her, “you will walk this lap around the Unit.”  She shuffles slowly along, one hand gripping Doggie and the other in mine.  Small warm.  Oh how I love her.  There are greetings as we move through the halls.  Cheers.  “You can do it Allistaire!”  Looks of love and compassion.  So many nurses and CNA’s that have loved us for so long, have watched Allistaire over the years, struggle and victory, defeat and perseverance.  “My tummy hurts,” she cries.  She whimpers and occasionally yells out on our loop, at last she collapses back in bed.

Her heart rate, oh man.  We’ve got to get this thing under control.  Her little heart is working so hard.  Her BNP (measure of heart distress) was 1,700 on Sunday.  I haven’t seen numbers like that in months and months.  Her BNP a week ago was 360 (normal is 0-90).  She had an echocardiogram and her ejection fraction has dropped from 36 two weeks ago to 22.  We are all hoping desperately that this is a temporary hit and not a long term regression.

Late on Thursday evening Allistaire and I arrived at my parents house with the plan to stay the night and get up early the next morning to pick Solveig up from camp.  I so wanted to see her little eager face, to have her tell me all about her week.  I wanted to see the transformation from the scared, nervous girl I dropped off on Sunday to the one that would be beaming with joy.  We had been in the house no more than 5 minutes when I felt Allistaire’s face as she nuzzled up against my leg, having returned from the other room ready to change her attitude.  Oh my gosh she is so warm.  The internal debate, the desperate desire to ignore what I sensed flooded me with heat but my mind sternly declared, “Take her temperature,  just do it, you must.  It doesn’t matter that you just drove all the way here and may have to turn right back around.  Focus.  Take her temperature.”  Solveig’s sweet face lingered in my mind.  I turned to Allistaire.  102.4  A fever.  Oh crap.  We’ve got to go, we’ve got to go.  Allistaire has no ANC, she has no defense.  Something is brewing in her and things can move fast.  103.5  We were out the door and back on the road, speeding through the night.  I talked to the Hem/Onc Fellow on call.  I want blood cultures and antibiotics ready for when we get there.  I talked to the ER.  I don’t want to have to wait.  I drove 70 mph the whole way, rehearsing in my mind what I’d say to the officer if I was pulled over.  Allistaire cried and cried, so sad to not see Sissy.  My jaw was clamped closed, hands gripped on the steering wheel, intent, scanning the night.  My whole heart screamed out into that darkness, “But I have TWO daughters!”

By 3:30am on Friday morning, we were at last settled into our room on the Cancer Unit.  Blood cultures had long ago been drawn and antibiotics were nearly ready to go in for the second time.  All day Friday she fought fevers.  At 13.5 hours something started to grow in the blood cultures – bacteria described as gram positive cocci and chains.  Another big gun antibiotic was added to cover more bad bugs – she was now on Flagyl, Cefepime, and Linezolid.  She has VRE (Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci) which means that if this bacterial infection was Enterococci, Vancomycin would not be enough to stop it, we need something bigger, broader.  With another day’s growth the villain would be revealed as Streptococcus Viridans.

As Saturday began her fevers waned but a new woe broke into the peace of the morning with sharp painful screams.  She was inconsolable.  What could be going on? An X-ray was ordered to look for overt blockage in her gut.  Nothing could be seen.  A CT with contrast was ordered.  For three hours I tried to get Allistaire to drink the contrast, but over and over she would throw it up.  I was desperate.  We MUST get the contrast in or the doctors can’t see what’s going on inside.  Finally, we just decided to go for it and hope for the best, a sufficient image.  Thank the Lord there was no typhlitus but there in the loops of her intestines were great black spaces, gas trapped and a gut that would not move, that had altogether stopped.  When we got back from the CT she threw up a huge amount of contrast.  I couldn’t figure out how she could throw up so much, how so much could still be in her stomach when she had been drinking it over the course of hours.  Well now we knew, for some unknown reason, Allistaire has an ileus.  There is no physical blockage but there is a mechanical one, her gut won’t move and so that gas is just stuck in there and whatever she puts into her stomach just sits there until it is forced upward.  She was immediately made NPO (Nothing Per Oral – meaning she can’t eat or drink). After much conversation and a consult with the GI docs, it was determined that she would be allowed a few occasional sips of water and to take her oral cardiac meds that cannot be converted to IV.

This ileus is a mystery.  We don’t know what has caused it.  Regardless, it is incredibly painful for Allistaire and she is now on frequent pain meds and anti-nausea meds.  Despite being NPO, her stomach continues to make acid and therefore regularly fills and requires her to retch it all up.  The GI doctors recommend her regularly curl up with her knees tucked under her stomach, her little bottom in the air, in hopes that the gas will slowly move up and out.  We now have an activity plan and walk around the unit hoping the movement will help her gut to get moving.  The next step will be to add a medication that can help wake up the gut by blocking certain receptors.  A third step would be to have a NG (Nasogastric) tube placed to suction out the contents of her stomach and giver her relief.  As you can imagine, Allistaire is terrified of this prospect. The reality is that this will simply take time to resolve, there’s really much we can do directly to solve this.

Not only does the ileus create immense pain for Allistaire which raises her heart rate but it also necessitates that she be on TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition) which is essentially getting all of your food by IV since her gut is not functioning.  Being on TPN is viewed as a “Grade 3 Toxicity,” which in turn bars Allistaire from being eligible for the T-cell trial.  While we assume the ileus will resolve and she will have no problem eventually returning to eating normally, while on TPN she is disqualified from participating in the T-cell trial.  Because this means that the possibility of getting the T-cells is firmly put on hold until her gut starts to function again, the cardiac anesthesiologist did not feel it worth the risk for her to be sedated today (Tuesday) for the planned PET/CT, brain MRI and bone marrow aspirate used to determine the state of her disease.  The fact that Allistaire is throwing up would necessitate he put in a breathing tube during the sedation so that she won’t aspirate.  A breathing tube increases the risks of the procedures and he was considering arranging an ICU backup plan.  All her procedures have been cancelled for now and will hopefully happen the beginning of next week in hopes that with more time her heart function can improve and perhaps so will the ileus, thus reducing her vomiting and that all in all sedation would be less risky at that time.

All of this is incredibly disappointing and scary.  Since Allistaire’s gut is not functioning, everything must be converted into IV form which means a ton of fluids are being pumped into Allistaire’s veins which in turn creates much more work for Allistaire’s heart.  Normally all her food and liquid and medicines would go into her gut, not at all adding work to her heart.  This is a vicious cycle.  She’s in crazy pain so we give her pain meds.  The pain meds, even the non-narcotic ones, act to keep her gut suppressed, but her pain causes higher heart rates.  Until the ileus resolves, she is taking in a ton of fluids (even though this is being tightly monitored, restricted and managed by Lasix) which is also hard on her heart.  You can’t use Lasix too much to get her to pee off fluid because her kidney’s don’t like it.  Already today her BUN is 42.  I want to throw up my hands.  Today her BNP was 2,600.  I know it is nearly doubled simply because she had a transfusion of red blood yesterday.  Man, we need her ANC to come up.  We need her marrow to recover so she doesn’t keep needing transfusion.  Everywhere I turn there are things we desperately need to look different if she’s going to have a shot at making it.

Dr. Cooper reminds me that this is exactly the sort of scenario the doctors have described to me that can happen with chemo that suppresses her counts to zero.  The only chemo that really has a shot at taking down her disease also wipes out her white blood cells which defend her against all sorts of bacteria and viruses.  To get an infection almost always means the necessity to respond with an increase in IV fluids of various types.  Her heart just limits everything that can be done.  But here’s how I see it: we know the outcome if Allistaire is not given chemo of any significant strength – her disease will progress and we won’t be able to stop it.  She will die.  The alternative is we give her chemo that may stop her disease while opening her up to awful infection possibilities but that she may be able to make it through.  One choice leads to only one end – death.  The other has the chance to work and just maybe infections won’t be the death of her.  Maybe just maybe there’ll be a way through for her.

Statistics.  Oh what deafening power they seem to possess.  Allistaire probably won’t make it.  The likelihood is that she will die.  Even from the time she was diagnosed she only had about a 60% chance.  Relapse wipes that percentage down to nearly nothing.  Almost exactly two years ago, when disease was found after transplant, the doctor told me Allistaire had a 5% chance of survival and probably wouldn’t live 6 months.  Okay.  So a 95% chance she’ll die.  But she didn’t die in those 6 months and two years later she is still here fighting.  Somebody has to be the 5% is what I declare to myself over and over.  Allistaire just may be in that 5%, who knows?  And you know what?  Statistics say Allistaire should never have begun this crazy path.  Her type of AML, M5, only constitutes 2.5% of all children diagnosed with leukemia.  Only .8 to 1.1 in a million children are diagnosed with M5 AML each year.  She is literally one in a million.  So while she may only have the slightest chance of survival, well chance, chance really has nothing to do with it.  Chance has no power.  Chance is simply an observation of what most often occurs.

I call out to the Lord over and over because I believe it is He that holds her life.  He is the one to determine her path.  It is not chance or probability or statistics that determine the outcome of this brutal road, but the Living God, my Father.  And it is a peculiar sort of wretchedness to know that the one I love, the One who declares to love me, the One who is able to sustain her life…He may not.  He may allow death to come and swallow my sweet child as He has so many other children.  On the surface this seems to be an ultimate hypocrisy, and ultimate deceit – not love but horrific cruelty, betrayal.  But He calls me to His Word – to fix my eyes on Him and to be reminded down into the core of me, that He is God, GOD!! It is His to give life and bring it to an end.  It is His to determine the course of my life, the course of Allistaire’s.  He reminds me to separate an audacious 21st Century American view that I have some sort of right to a healthy 80 years on this planet from what He declares this life to be about.  Because it is not about marking off the bullet points of beautiful childhood, rigorous college education, fulfilling meaningful successful career that gets me enough money to have a nice house and vacations for myself and my perfectly attractive, wonderful spouse and children followed by a leisurely retirement and at long last a pain-free dignified death surrounded by everyone who has loved me and honors my amazing life.  No, really God makes a much simpler claim to what this life is about.  He says this life is about coming to see that HE is the source of life, true, eternal, abundant life through the death and life of His son Jesus Christ.   And if you have come to see Jesus as the only source of life, then go, go, live your life in such a way as to draw the attention of others to see His resplendent beauty – Christ – not a path to life but Christ who IS life itself.  Christ is not my guide.  He is not my sherpa hauling water and nourishment for me as I walk through this life.  Christ Himself is the very way, He Himself is the water, the food, the healing.

So who am I to say what my life should look like?  Who am I to say how many days I ought to be allotted or what circumstances should fill them?  Over these long years the Lord has worn me down, cut here and there, gouged out, cauterised.  It has hurt.  At times it has been agonizing.  There is still much work to be done on this proud, self-sufficient, trembling heart.  But I can say, that somehow, mysteriously, I am coming more and more, millimeter by millimeter to trust Him more, to rest, truly rest in Him.  Honestly, I really don’t think Allistaire will make it out of this alive.  I am utterly confident that God can make a way through for her.  He has made a way through many times when it felt like all the walls were crashing down on us.  He can do it again.  He may and that would be glorious and oh how I would rejoice and rejoice and thank Him for all the days that He has carried her so far.

But there is a way in which I feel like I am just living out days that must come.  We cannot say we are done because she is far to alive.  As long as there is an open door before us and Allistaire still seems to have vitality, we will walk forward.  But somehow it feels that we are coming down to the end of things.  I guess the oddly beautiful thing though, is I’ve stopped caring so much about what will be.  I sipped warm foamy latte yesterday and realized that I have been going to that coffee shop and drinking that coffee all through fall into winter into spring and now summer.  Fall is coming.  I cannot begin to imagine Fall.  There is no end in sight and what I mean is, I am no longer fixing my gaze on the end.  At long last, I am coming more and more to dwell in this present.  To feel the incomprehensible soft wonder of peach fuzz along the curve of her forehead down across her little nose.  I am soaking up the sensation of her little bottom tucked up against my stomach as we lay in the bed together, my fingers running through her flaxen hair.  I rest my cheek on her cheek.  I listen intently to her voice.  With gentleness I change her diaper.  With sternness I demand she take her meds.  I live out each task and detail.  I want to fully inhabit not just these days but all the moments and actions that accumulate to eventually be gathered up into the satchel marked “day.”  I look over labs, all those little numbers painting a picture of her flesh, telling a story of the tug of war of life and death, sickness and health.  The numbers, how they have for so long knocked me off my feet, casting dark shadows over so many days.  Their power is slowly draining away.  I can control so little.  The doctors have so very little power.  We are all just doing our best, but really, it’s out of our hands.  I have not relaxed my guard over her, I will not let up in my fervor to examine every last angle, but no longer do I grip her with white knuckles desperate and crazed.  She is my sweet little love and I will do my best to care for her every moment and every day given to me.

Yesterday evening I stood looking out across Lake Union toward the beautiful Seattle skyline, the sun having already set, leaving mellow pinks blending with the last of the day’s blue.  Behind me cheerful, high energy music played and hundreds of people gathered.  Doug, the camera guy, said it best – “beauty and affliction.”  There’s just so much of that.  How strange that the thread weaving all these people together, people dancing, drinking beer and chatting – we are all bound together by sorrow, by loss.  Last night was the big Obliteride kick-off party at Gasworks Park.  I had the opportunity to stand up for a few minutes and relay a bit of Allistaire’s story and the incredible need to advance cancer research.  I dwell within just one story among thousands and thousands, millions really, of stories about how cancer has stolen away those beloved, cherished, bright.  Today I have the joy of having some fun team time with the Baldy Tops. Tomorrow we will put into action all that we have prepared for.  We will swing our legs up and over that frame, hoist ourselves onto the seat, clip into pedals and at long last flex…will our legs muscles to contract, propelling us forward, down the route.

Thank you ever so much to each of you who have given sacrificially of your own money, money you could have spent a thousand other ways, but chose to give to directly enable the furthering of cancer research.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again.  It all seems so abstract, science, experiments – weird stuff.  But it’s a real man like Stan Riddell who is an immunology expert at Fred Hutch.  I saw him standing on the outskirts of the party at Obliteride last night.  I introduced myself.  I looked into his eyes and told him thank you, thank you.  He went on to tell me that he is the doctor that trained Dr. Bleakley, Dr. Gardner, Dr. Jensen.  Dr. Bleakley is our amazing transplant doctor who designed the naive T-cell reducing transplant that is attempting to minimize the awful impact of GVHD as a complication of transplant; this was the transplant we had so hoped Allistaire would be able to have.  Well, you know Dr. Gardner as one of our beloved smarty pants doctors who has cared for Allistaire so long.  What you may not know is that along, with Dr. Jensen who is the lead researcher at Seattle Children’s Cancer Research specializing in pediatric cancer research, she heads up the amazing T-cell trials at Children’s for the more common type of childhood leukemia, ALL.  I met Stan’s family – his wife and two daughters.  I told them thank you for the sacrifices that they have had to make to have a father who would spend so much time at work, in the lab.  Your money goes to real people, doing real amazing work.  When we fund cancer research we are putting more tools and time into the hands of these brilliant minds who work feverishly to understand the staggering complexity of cancer.  You free them up from having to spend so much time scrambling to cobble together enough money for the next trial.  You help them design and pay for that crazy cool piece of machinery that doesn’t test 10 samples of DNA but a thousand.  You help pay for the lab assistant who will run the experiment and enter the data.  All of this enables research to happen at a greater pace, speeding up the discoveries that lead to cures.  This is where your money goes.  Perhaps it still seems abstract, like just writing a check because you love Allistaire, your heart hurts for our family and you just want to do something, anything to help.  Well, for that I sincerely thank you, but just know…know that not only do we feel loved and supported by your act of giving, but it is making a real and tangible impact, not just for Allistaire but for many children, many adults.  Perhaps one day you will be the one to benefit from advances in cancer research.

Since I began this post many days ago, Allistaire’s ANC has popped up to nearly 300.  While Friday’s echo still showed an ejection fraction of 22, her heart rates are drastically lower and nearly normal.  The cardiologists have added two more medications to try to improve her heart function – Isosorbide dinitrate and Hydralazine.  There is no resolution of the ileus yet and she remains in pain but her cheeriness has improved and she’s actually joked around a bit.  Her legs have gotten stronger again and we’ve doubled the distance of each walk.  A PET/CT, brain MRI and bone marrow are all tentatively scheduled for Monday.

For Obliteride pictures and updates check out the Obliteride Facebook page and/or the main Obliteride website.IMG_0575 IMG_0576 IMG_0580 IMG_0584 IMG_0595 IMG_0602 IMG_0606 IMG_0611 IMG_0614 IMG_0620 IMG_0625 IMG_0627 IMG_0628 IMG_0629 IMG_0639 IMG_0642 IMG_0647 IMG_0649 IMG_0652 IMG_0663 IMG_0666 IMG_0669 IMG_0671IMG_0660

 

Jul21

Lead Bellied Clouds

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_0453IMG_0491The dark grey blue of cloud bellies move slowly east, sheets of rain stretching out, connecting sky to earth.  Thunder lumbers and bellows.  Rain hits hard on the roof.  A flash of lightning.  Quiet.  The storm moves on and the sky opens to blue.  To the west, to the south, the sun glints on the Spanish Peaks illuminating their vertical striations of rock and ridge, Beehive bright tucked behind.  Then shrouding of white, thin wisps of rain stranding from grey to light in the evening sun.

More thunder, cracks of power break open overhead, the darkness of more clouds heading this way.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I say to Dr. Cooper with a restrained wail in my voice, “I guess you have to just live each minute.”  There is always the before and after, a thousand points marked off, striating, separating then and now, what was, what is.  Eventually the “what will be,” becomes the “is.”  A hundred thousand test results, countless days and hours and minutes for the heart to beat hard with suffocating thud, anticipating the blade coming against your throat.  The wave rips you off your feet, dark weight pressing down on you, flailing, desperation to right yourself. Gasp of air and crashing wave grinding you down again and again.

Quiet.  Eery, odd, quiet.  Calm.  Flat face.  So this is how this goes.  This is how minutes amass to hours and days, months into years.  So this is how death comes.  This is how the thievery of your child’s bursting life gets stripped away, paint ripping in shreds from boards exposed too long in harsh weather, the slow erosion of flesh, the silent march of invasion.

Dr. Eagan, the PI (principal investigator) of the WT1 T-cell trial said Allistaire’s chloromas just amounted to too much disease to have hope that the T-cells would be successful, at least at this point.  In addition to the 6-7 chloromas in her spine, sternum and pelvis seen on the last PET/CT, four out of two hundred cells tested from her bone marrow aspirate showed Allistaire’s MLL (Multi Lineage Leukemia) mutation according to FISH (Fluorescence in situ hybridization).  The Flow Cytometry test showed 0% detectable leukemia in her marrow.  There was not even enough disease in the chloromas for corresponding masses to show up on CT.  Only about 5 years ago there would have been no detectable disease anywhere – there was no Flow Cytometry and PET scans weren’t used for leukemia.  Even a year ago Allistaire had never had a PET scan, only CTs to look for chloromas.  We would all think she was cancer free, in remission.  That was then, this is now.

Since we couldn’t move forward with the T-cells with any hope of success, the goal is to see if we can get her in a better spot.  Her heart is still far too weak to endure any intense chemo.  The accumulation of hard chemo has killed muscle cells in her heart that will never be replaced.  They are dead.  There is nothing new to replace them, only the hope that the surrounding cells can compensate for their loss.  The very weapon wielded against her cancer has cut her through, has permanently wounded her.  This is why there is no transplant on the horizon.  It is for now, off the table.  There is no plan to move forward with a transplant.

So Dr. Cooper, after much thought and consideration recommended the course of treatment that we have chosen to pursue.  She began five days of Decitabine last Friday which will be followed with three doses of Mylotarg (generic name: Gemtuzumab) on days 6, 9 and 12 of this round.  Gemtuzumab is an antibody which is bound to the chemo molecule, ozogamicin, which then binds to the CD33 antigen receptor on the cell surface of myeloid cells (which is the cell line that is cancerous in Acute Myeloid Leukemia).  Once the Gemtuzumab antibody binds to the CD33 antigen, the whole molecular complex moves inside the cell where the cytotoxic molecule, ozogamicin, kills the cell.  “Calicheamicins (of which Ozogamicin is a derivative) target DNA and cause strand scission. Calicheamicins bind with DNA in the minor groove, wherein they then undergo a reaction analogous to the Bergman cyclization to generate a diradical species. This diradical, 1,4-didehydrobenzene, then abstracts hydrogen atoms from the deoxyribose (sugar) backbone of DNA, which ultimately leads to strand scission.[6] The specificity of binding of calicheamicin to the minor groove of DNA was demonstrated by Crothers et al. (1999) to be due to the aryltetrasaccharide group of the molecule.”  I included that last bit from Wikepedia because I love the wild intricacies of our flesh.  And because I’m sick and tired of people offering me simplified cures for cancer.  Essential oils do not cure cancer. Juicing doesn’t cure cancer.  Cancer is a beast of a million, trillion heads with thousands of faces ever-changing, mutating, hiding and lunging out again to strangle the life out of you.

If you read about Gemtuzumab, you will see it has a dark past and was pulled by the FDA in 2010.  Allistaire is actually only able to get it on a compassionate use basis.  However, questions about the trial that caused alarm over its perceived toxicity and lack of efficacy, have shown that it may not have been the right move to pull it.  It has remained available in Europe and more recent trials have shown promise.  Allistaire will receive her first dose this Wednesday.  The primary concerns are immediate allergic responses like anaphylactic shock which she will be pre-meded with Benadryl and longer term concerns for her liver including VOD (Veno Occlusive Disease).

….That was Monday, today is Saturday.  In the week preceding Monday, Allistaire, Solveig, Sten and I drove east on I90 all the way home to Bozeman.  Dr. Cooper supported us going home for a visit – Allistaire’s first time home since she left in October.  Sten took the girls to clinic on Wednesday morning, July 1st so I could pack without them knowing in case labs were bad and we’d be thwarted at the last moment.  But labs were fabulous and when the girls opened the door, Allistaire asked why all the bags were packed on the floor.  “We’re going home to Montana for a visit, sweet girl.”  She was beside herself.  She couldn’t articulate her amazement and joy.  I’d say she was flabbergasted and it was the best.  I loved that joy.  After staying the night in Spokane as we have done so many, many times we continued on east through a land that all cells of my skin, eyes, hair, fingernails all sought to soak in, like dear friends with whom you have long yearned to visit – blue of Lake Coeur D’Alene, marshy grasslands before Cataldo in Idaho, my great big hill I plan to climb one day – a hill already turning yellow in summer’s heat but great and white in winter’s cloak and shocking purple in spring with billions of flowers of a name I don’t know, that curve of rock that repeats pinks and purples of setting suns, a great boulder over green water – a swimming hole I imagine diving into its cool deeps and drying out in the warmth of the rock, tumbling great rounded groupings of rock like a Flintstone landscape over Homestake Pass, the river bottom with Cottonwoods in Whitehall and up that great curve of road that will soon bring my eyes to rest on the Bridgers in the distance – the mountains that are mouth to my home, to Kelly Canyon with its aspens, Rocky Creek, Bridger Creek, magpies and coyotes, black bears and deer, scores of red-winged black birds calling their eery beautiful cry in morning and evening, pairs of sand-hill cranes who sound as if they have mistaken Montana for Africa.  There a multitude of colors of grass like waves moving in the wind over the contours of the land, punctuated by the silvery blue of sagebrush, that wondrous smell of moist coolness of night soaked up in their leaves and released like blessing.  At long last we were home, home.

Every joy paired with splitting pain.  The familiar strange smell of our house built in the 70’s.  Waking to light on the Spanish Peaks, light on leaves and flowers and the great evergreens on the hill, piercing blue of summer sky.  The feel of smooth tile underfoot as I stumble to my bathroom at night – no handicap bar just lush toilet paper.  Spying Allistaire sitting on her closet floor playing with her toys in the morning, her sweet blonde head ascending the stairs to greet the day.  Birdnest ferns and mother ferns, variegated leaves and leaves pink, leaves with purple, plump sculptural succulents and fuchsia of orchid petals, light broken in pieces of rainbow color by the prisms in the windows, the delectable breeze moving up the canyon and occasional ring of wind chimes.  Sitting down together for pancakes, four in a row along the kitchen counter.  Sending laundry down the shoot, into the wash and taking it out to the line to dry in the already hot day.  When I went into the garage I broke down.  Fishing poles and life jackets and bikes and buckets and pairs of little shovels and bug catchers and gardening gloves with childish patterns, hiking boots and a bike rack – a life once lived.  A life stalled.  A life paused.  A life cut short?  I think of going to Cliff Lake last year and my heart breaks open.  How desperate I am for the smell of campfire and the negotiation of how many marshmallows are reasonable.  I pant for Hyalite, for the simple extravagant pleasure of driving up that road and seeing water ringed by mountains, of packing coolers for picnics and the heft of a pack on my back as we ascend through the forest.  I watch the girls out the kitchen window, they head to the thicket of bushes where they made a fort last summer, the little blue bucket having finally been removed from the branch where it hung for months.  They play long with a caterpillar, lovingly making it a home to enjoy and hit jackpot when I find what I told them was a baby mouse, but I now think must have been a vole.  They carry it back and forth with gloved hands, tender in their care and wonder.

We had a wonderful week all together and time with family.  On her last evening home, we celebrated sweet Per’s third birthday.  Allistaire rode the tricycle in her yellow dress with great blooms – a french girl’s dress.  Up and down the sidewalk she went.  At last it was time to say goodnight, but not just goodnight, goodbye.  And I watched as simple hugs and goodbye’s were exchanged and suppressed the desire to cry out, to yell – “do you not realize you may never see her here again?”  Every joy sat side by side with the fear that these days would never be again, that I was witness to the lasts of many things, things simple, things mightily beautiful, treasured beyond all else I possess.  Next to the image of her yellow dress and happy face in the waning light sat deep sadness that she was alone, no one to play with, a child who has so seldomly been able to play with her peers, with really any children at all.  The older two, Solveig and Haaken, were off on their big kid adventures and Per was enamored with the little neighbor girl.  Next to the image of her that night, an image of seeming lighthearted joy, sat images of Carly’s face with tumors bulging, pressing tight and purple and shiny taut against the skin, eye distorted.  I saw Benton’s face deformed by numerous tumors that contorted his features.  I saw his face laying in a casket as I filed past, tears streaming.  I knew I had seen something that terrified me.  Something I wanted to ignore, to disregard, to cover with more plausible explanation, but I turned back to it over and over and over, examining, questioning – what do I see there?  Something seems off.  Her right eye, something is not right, something is not normal.  What is it?  What am I seeing?

Sten drove her back to Seattle on Thursday so she could begin chemo on Friday.  He came to Allistaire’s appointment with Dr. Cooper with a list of questions I had, questions with answers relayed and more questions lobbied back.  Nestled in amongst the questions of did we really know if Allistaire’s cancer expressed CD33 and how do you know how many days and on what days to give Mylotarg, was the question, do you see something off with her right eye?  Yes, ptosis, a droopy or falling eyelid, an effect on the muscles of the eye.  Sten’s voice on the phone, “He ordered an MRI.”  “Oh God, why?  What is he thinking it might be?”  Later Dr. Cooper and I talk on the phone and he was concerned.  It could be a tumor pressing on nerves in her spine or in her brain.

For days Solveig and I were alone.  Just the two of us.  Just like old times.  Times when she was my little buddy and we went everywhere, just the two of us.  How dear she was to me, how overlapped with my life.  Then I had a miscarriage, a DNC, months of trying to get pregnant again, fear of miscarriage all over again.  Sorrow, fear, acrid poisons seeping into the crevasses of my heart and mind, weighing down my finger tips and shoulders.  Sober.  A turning.  I couldn’t laugh as easily.  Other private wounds and weeping added one to the other, layers pressing down.  Desperate cries to the Lord, a turning to the Lord like never before.  My first tastes of Christ as my very life, Christ the very fuel of my cells, the brightness of my eyes, my longing, my aching need for Him and the sweet, sweet knowing of really tasting the beauty of the Lord.  Sober.  Deep expanses opening up, being broken open down into the very core of myself.  A fundamental tearing, sinews strained and snapping, bleeding out, faint.  In these four plus broken years I’ve felt too weak to love Solveig as she deserves, as I long to love her and gosh, oh man do I love that girl.  I hunger for her eyes, her giddy laugh, her brown ringlets she desperately wants straight, her skinned bruised legs from play, the magnetic irresistible draw of books, of stories for her budding mind, her unstoppable creativity, the ever request for a back rub.  I love Solveig Kailen Anderson and I have missed that girl.  I have missed so much of her life because of all this with Allistaire.  When she was only as old as Allistaire is now, we sent her to Montana to live with her grandparents while I fought alongside Allistaire in the hospital.  The first relapse meant 8 months away from home and four plus more months of constant week-long trips back to Seattle.  This relapse it’s already been 9 months with no end but the worst in sight.

For three weeks I had the joy of being with Solveig, the most time I’ve spent with her in all these nine long months.  When at last Monday came and loomed as the day I would lay down to sleep knowing something more, something of that eye, I talked with Solveig.  I attempted to prepare her for what may be coming.  Dr. Cooper called around 5:30pm.  It’s not in her brain, but there is a 2 1/2 cm mass of leukemia in her right sinus.  It has begun to erode away the bone.  The tumor, the chloroma, is putting pressure on the muscles which operate her right eye, that’s why it doesn’t look right.  Right there.  Right there smack in the middle of my little sweet girl’s face dwells an insidious tumor that threatens to take more, to distort, to ravage, to gnaw.  There is also a very small one in her left sinus.  Dr. Cooper knows of children in which the leukemia eats away the bone into the brain.  Why Lord?  Oh God please, please don’t take her this way.

With shoulders slumped I came to face Solveig, to tell her this latest revelation of the onslaught of Allistaire’s disease.  I asked her, gently pleaded, be kind to your sister.  You don’t know how many days you may have with her.  Don’t fight over toys.  Treasure her, for one day we may have no medicine left to stop her cancer.  One day we may need to bring her home to this house to lovingly surround her as she dies.  I tell Solveig that she will not be the same girl she once was.  She may not be able to walk.  Her face may be distorted with tumors.  Her eyes may not work.  Will she be able to speak?  The imaginings are so brutal.  It just ravages my heart to imagine this for her.  Oh God it hurts, it hurts so bad.  Solveig is silent and then sobs heave and tears stream.  I hold her close and grieve time lost and a possible future without her sister.  How I so loved the thought of two sisters growing up together.  Solveig by herself, just another sorrow, another gaping wound.

The thing is, I can see on the other side of these brutalities.  I can imagine a life filled with joy.  I can imagine being close to Solveig, years ahead together.  I believe that there would be a day far off in the future where losing Allistaire wouldn’t decimate every day.  But to get there, to walk the possible road ahead, oh how overwhelming, how utterly horrid.  It is like facing the blackest tunnel, believing that it will eventually open up to light, but Oh God, how far, how long?  You think, I can’t do that Lord, I just can’t bear the loss of my sweet little girl – you think this is some sort of barrier to it actually happening.  I look at her little face, with that one eye askew, having many, many times a day to face that beast that is taking her.  I love her.  My whole flesh cries out – I love her TOO much!!  I just can’t lose her.  But neither is my love sufficient to hold her.

For twelve days, I soaked up Montana.  I brought my bike and at long last made friends with it.  I actually now crave being able to get on that seat, feet clipping easily into the pedals and heading out onto the curves of my dear Kelly Canyon.  I imagine the many adventures that bike opens up to me.  Morning after morning I went out into the land with vast expanse of sky opening up overhead.  Glory.  Absolute resplendent beauty.  My sweet mother-in-law, JoMarie, so generously gave me her bike, an orange bike, a bike built for Obliteride, a bike to carry my flesh into God’s wondrous creation and a means to raise money to heal the sick.  I had a fitting done at Bangtail Bikes in Bozeman and then it really became mine – it is now aligned to my body, to my outward self, propelled by the inner.  Then Wednesday morning, as the first light shone blue behind the Bridgers, Sten took me to the airport.  We embraced hoping not to see each other before planned in August, desperately hoping some new horror would not rise up in the next few weeks.  Back to the battlefield, back to a strange life of seeming ease where I regularly drink Starbucks and sit around, but just below the surface, if you have eyes to see, is an effort of epic proportions, an unyielding fight, a straining, a grasping for life.

I returned to Seattle on Wednesday morning because Allistaire had an echocardiogram and cardiology appointment scheduled in addition to her first dose of Mylotarg.  I went straight from the airport to Ron Don to drop off my suitcase and then walked as fast as I could to the hospital to make it in time for Allistaire’s labs.  How strange to wake in my bed in Montana and so suddenly and utterly cast into a different world.  The best news of the day was that Allistaire’s heart has gotten a wee bit stronger!  Her ejection fraction rose from 29 to 36 and her shortening fraction from 16 to 21!  It felt like finally being able to breathe a bit.  But blast, just as we’re making some progress with her heart, her cancer is on a rampage, spreading in terrible places with still not much to combat it.  Later in clinic she received Tylenol and Benadryl as pre-meds for the Mylotarg.  Allistaire promptly fell asleep for the next four hours while I finally had a bit a lovely down time.  Thankfully she had no reaction to the infusion and all seemed well.

After ten hours at the hospital, we finally made it back to Ron Don and I was straight worn out, having gotten up at 2:30am Washington time.  Having slept so long, Allistaire completely missed lunch and now I had only a short bit of time to get dinner and meds in her.  On top of it, about 8:30 that night, I noticed she felt hot and the thermometer read 102.6.  Well, they were expecting this right?  This is why I was given a third dose of Tylenol to give her as instructed at 9:30pm.  The truth was I was wiped out and dreaded the fiasco of having to call the Hem/Onc Fellow to report the fever which I knew would result in being sent to the emergency room for blood cultures and possibly admission and antibiotics. Dr. Tarlock had warned me on Tuesday night that she may need to be admitted on Wednesday since her phosphorous and potassium were rising, signs of tumor lysis.  She may need to be monitored, but her labs had improved on her own and we had skated by.  But not calling in about the fever was a major failing on my part, really a huge mistake for any parent of a child with cancer.  We finally went to sleep after she threw up a wretched medicine twice – a medicine meant to bind with potassium.  I already had a laundry bin full when she had diarrhea twice as well and I had to change the sheets.  In between all the wakings that night, I continually took her temperature and watched it steadily descend to normal.  It was just because of the Mylotarg I told myself.

We were back to the hospital Thursday morning at 8am for electrolyte labs.  So here’s the deal, when chemo destroys cancer cells, the cancer cells lys – they die and break open spilling all their guts into the blood stream.  This is tumor lysis and it is detected by rising levels of potassium, phosphorous and uric acid.  It becomes dangerous when these electrolyte levels rise steeply, beyond the limits of what the kidneys can process.  Then you see the creatinine and BUN (Blood Urea Nitrogen) levels rise which indicate injury to the kidneys and the potential for kidney failure.  High levels of potassium can also cause arrhythmias of the heart.  So when Allistaire’s labs results returned this past Thursday morning, it was game on time.  Dr. Tarlock and Dr. Cooper were amazed to see overwhelming evidence of tumor lysis with all levels skyrocketing.  We were going to be admitted.  Then the plan intensified with measures being taken to have an Interventional Radiology surgeon install a second central line into Allistaire with the aid of Cardiac Anesthesia for the purpose of her beginning short-term dialysis immediately.  The goal was to respond quickly to this acute kidney damage and prevent kidney failure or long-term kidney damage by taking all of the burden off of the kidneys.  Because of Allistaire’s heart failure, her heart would not be able to endure the huge amounts of fluid that would be necessary to help the kidney’s flush out these electrolytes.  And because the kidney’s were already hurt, they could not endure the assistance of Lasix to remove the fluid.  So really, dialysis was the best option.  By 3pm we were once again in the ICU, this time in Forest level 5 room 321, exactly one floor down from where we spent 80 days in the ICU before.

In the time we waited for everything to be arranged, Dr. Tarlock consulted with cardiology about how much fluid Allistaire could handle on her own and she began receiving just 60ml an hour of saline.   To lower Uric acid levels, she was given a dose of IV Rasburicase.  She was also given Sevelamer to bind with phosphorous.  The problem is, Sevelamer can only bind with phosphorous in the gut, not in the blood stream.  Because Allistaire’s phosphorous was so high, Dr. Tarlock feared this would not be enough and we would need the aid of dialysis.  At last we were settled in our room in the ICU.  Yet when the labs drawn at 2pm came back, everything was trending in a much more positive direction due to the interventions already taken.  About ten minutes into a fascinating conversation with the Interventional Radiologist about collateral veins that a young body like Allistaire’s form when other veins are damaged, the ICU attending came in to say we were going to hold off on dialysis for now and continue to monitor labs.  It ended up being a crazy short and remarkably easy ICU stay.  Basically Allistaire just watched movies, got her meds and some IV fluids while I tried to get food in her and grumbled that I couldn’t eat in the room.  Because Allistaire was scheduled to get her second dose of Mylotarg on Saturday, we were just going to stay inpatient through Sunday with frequent labs to quickly deal with any issues if they should arise.  Friday morning we were to transition upstairs to the Cancer Unit except that they had no rooms available.  Finally on Saturday afternoon, we moved upstairs to the Cancer Unit into the radiation room – a room specially designed to give MIBG radiation to neuroblastoma patients.  It is a lead-lined room with most surfaces being stainless steel.  It’s not the most cozy room and the bed is about a foot to short due to having to accommodate the thicker lead walls.  But it meant getting the show on the road and I didn’t care.  I just wanted to get the Mylotarg in and get out of the hospital.  At long last, on Sunday afternoon we burst out of the hospital into the blaze of a 95 degree day, having completed the second dose of Mylotarg with absolutely no issues, no fevers and labs still looking great.

Yesterday, it was back to the hospital for labs and possible platelets.  I was pretty sure Allistaire would need them because of the small purple pricks of petechiae (tiny broken blood vessels) mixed in like a new wave of freckles on Allistaire’s cheeks.  A single round purple bruise adorned Allistaire’s forehead right between the eyebrows like some new-age tilak mark, in this case having bonked her head on the bar of the Target cart which she was eagerly driving when it rammed a shelf.  Sure enough, her platelets were 5 and so we spent the morning at the hospital getting her all tanked up.  Today we head back into the hospital again for labs and her third and final dose of Mylotarg.  Tomorrow, yet again, for the twelfth day in a row, we will be in the hospital for her clinic appointment with Dr. Cooper.  From there…well, we wait for her marrow to eventually recover, hope no infections get her and eventually plan to do another bone marrow biopsy and PET/CT to see how things worked.  After that?  Who knows.  If she were miraculously clear of cancer, we might be able to proceed with the infusion of modified T-cells (this is not a transplant).  If she has a partial response to the Mylotarg, it may make sense to try another round of it.  If there is no response or her disease has progressed, well, it all depends…of course we would investigate all our options for other treatment or the woeful possibility of being done.

Honestly, the next several weeks terrify me.  Obliteride is coming up – only 17 more days.  I wonder what life will look like as I ride that day.  By the way, I reduced my route to the 25 mile because I just haven’t had the time to train as needed to make the 50 mile enjoyable.  Three years ago on the afternoon before Obliteride, I was told that because Allistaire had disease after transplant, that she had a mere 5% chance at survival and probably wouldn’t even live 6 months.  I was decimated, inside and out, that day as I rode on my old mountain bike.  Last year, I physically had a hard ride, not being prepared for the 50 mile, but was propelled with determination to finish in light of all the pain and hardship Allistaire had endured.  But I rode that day with hope – having had Allistaire declared cancer-free only two months prior.  This year, who knows.  These are very scary times.  The Obliteride folks had invited Allistaire to be part of the Friday night kick-off party, but as her disease has progressed, I’ve had to say no to this, not knowing where things will stand on August 7th.

A little girl, Melissa, that I knew through friends, died of AML a week ago.  Last night, my friend Kiesha and I talked as she got back labs in Missoula.  It looks like Stevie has once again relapsed with AML and they will head back to St. Jude’s today or tomorrow.  As I was praying for her yesterday, knowing she was trying to get labs because of all of Stevie’s bruises, I put myself back in that place of waiting for news of possible relapse.  You have at long last returned to the magnificence of a “normal” life.  You gaze at your child in a way that no parent of a healthy child can fully imagine – your whole self rejoices at the smallest normalcies, ordinary becomes spectacular pleasure.  But when signs creep in that something is awry, the stinging is fierce and unrelenting.  It is like watching a black storm on the horizon, you see it coming and you know it is about to engulf your life and twist and spin and splinter you and your beloveds until at long last you are spit out on the ground, broken, with the life pummeled out of you.  It is a tsunami that sweeps you away from your life in an instant and you are put back in that place of fighting every day for life.  To just simply live is all you want.

I long for a better way.  I long for a day when cancer isn’t a ravager, a likely sentence of death.  I long, oh I ache, for a day when the way you fight cancer doesn’t cost so much life and destruction of beautiful body parts like ovaries, and hearts and brains.  I see my child.  I see the children of my friends.  A few have been released back into glorious life, but many stumble around from the horrific effects of radiation to the brain, limbs cut off, hearts faint, and some in caskets.  Cancer is the number one killer of children by disease!  I have asked many times, and I will ask again.  There are so many, many worthy places to invest your resources, your money.  But I am asking if you would consider giving it to further cancer research?  One in two men and one in three women will get cancer in their lifetimes.  You may be the one desperate for a better way, and if not you, it is almost certain that someone dear and close to you will be aching for a better way to eradicate, obliterate, cancer from their life.  Cancer is personal, it comes in close to each of us.  Will you join us in putting our resources to stopping this foe?  One hundred percent of all the money given to Obliteride directly funds cancer research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.  Do you live in Bozeman?  Do you know that the Cancer Center at the hospital is part of the SCCA – the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance which is a collaboration of Fred Hutch, the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s?  Giving to Obliteride directly opens doors for clinical trials that you in Bozeman may need!

Thank you SO much to the over one hundred different people/couples/groups that have already given to further cancer research in my name through Obliteride!  Yesterday, you helped me surpass my goal of $15,000.  But I know there are many of you still who profess your love for us, your desire to support us in any way, who have not yet given.  Would you consider honoring Allistaire’s fight in this way?

Click HERE to donate to Obliteride and directly speed up cancer research!

The research is taunting.  It is moving at such an amazing pace, but I often fear Allistaire will just barely miss the thing that would at long last put down this beast of cancer.  You don’t want to hear it.  You think I’m crying wolf.  And oh how I long for you to be right.  I long for the Lord to once again make a way through for Allistaire.  I know, I absolutely know He is able to heal her.  I listened to the Nigerian woman tell me to pray, to fast, to believe, to test the Lord and demand He heal her as she has done for her son who is getting a transplant for Sickle Cell.  She proclaimed her faith in the Lord’s ability to heal, over and over and over.  But that seems too simple to me.  I just don’t believe in some magic equation where enough people pray or my faith is somehow the right degree of strong and then out pops what I want.  God is too big for that.  He is too vast and complex and when it comes down to it – He is just OTHER than me.  He is utterly “other’ and His ways are not my ways.  I don’t begin to know how my little life and my little child are woven into His great plans.  But the thing is, I do, I do believe they are part of the bigger picture.  I don’t believe our “littleness” equals lack of significance.  And what is the purpose of my life, of Allistaire’s?  Is it not our great joy, fraught through with pain, to direct attention, to illuminate more the beauty of the Lord?  God does not need more glory.  He is not some pathetic being needing me to build Him up.  No, WE need to see the glory of the Lord!  We humans need to see Him for who He is that WE MAY LIVE!  That is why I yield my life to the glory of the Lord – because I love, because I know my own great need to be engrafted into His life blood, that I MAY LIVE!  And not just live, but live an abundant, eternal life.  And in turn, I am honored that my life may in some small way direct attention to the radiance of Christ as the only source of life!  May I be so audacious as to link my life to Christ’s?  Is this not exactly what Christ did on an epic scale?  He suffered and He laid down His life that life might spring up from His death!  This is the “otherness” of God!  Out of Christ’s death, the ground soaked by His blood, God overcame sin and death!  He resurrected the life of Christ and in so doing made the way for redemption!  Is there anything more wondrous, more mind-blowing, more exploding with glorious beauty than this?  THIS is what I am invited into!  In my own power, this awful road with Allistaire is just suffering, is just agony, is just death. But God is at work!  He is alive and HE will take this heart of mine bleeding out as He may not remove this cup from me and He will accomplish life!

I lift my eyes to these wonders.  Sometimes I am too frail and weak to even open my eyes and I need the Lord to come down low and tenderly care for me.  I went to church with Jo in Bozeman and heard God’s word preached for the first time in a long time.  I was reminded of God’s otherness. I was reminded of the way He blasts my rational understanding to pieces and shows me a better way, the way of life.  I could hardly sing the worship songs.  I just cried.  I cried because the last time I was in that place was to honor Jens’ life and to mourn his death.  I cried looking at the man playing the drums, wishing so desperately it could still be Jens.  I cried because the words of those songs were just too much.  “There may be pain in the night, but joy comes in the morning.”  Oh Father, oh Father, how long is this night?  The joy seems ever so far off – is there even a glimmer of light on the horizon?  Words about how our life is not our own, how we give it to the Lord.  That sounds nice.  You can agree to that right?  Your life is the Lord’s.  How lovely.  You sing it out with beautiful voice.  Sobs fill my throat.  Oh God, oh God, I do yield, I do lay down at your feet, but it is agony, it is ravaging, it feels like brutality.  I cry out with Christ.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  But I am given light on the horizon, the smallest hint of turning, I am given hope that this night will end.  I read in God’s word beyond that black moment on the cross.  I read of resurrection, of redemption, of light unyielding.  I stake my life in the hope of God’s promises.  I have tasted of the Lord and I will not turn back.

Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.  (Psalm 139: 7-12)IMG_0391 IMG_0403 IMG_0411 IMG_0418 IMG_0428 IMG_0441 IMG_0447 IMG_0449 IMG_0450 IMG_0452 IMG_0456 IMG_0465 IMG_0468 IMG_0469 IMG_0470 IMG_0479 IMG_0480 IMG_0481 IMG_0511 IMG_0521 IMG_0524 IMG_0530 IMG_0535 IMG_0539 IMG_0541 IMG_0543 IMG_0548 IMG_0549 IMG_0551 IMG_0555 IMG_0562 IMG_0565 IMG_0574

Jun24

Wednesday…come and gone

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_0340Maple frosting flakes off my scone onto the table top.  I pick up each little tidbit, placing its happy sweetness in my mouth, the sun reflecting in the warm gold of the table’s wood grain.  Even as my fingers grasp the delicate skin of sugar my mind contorts asking if it’s really a good idea to just pick something up off of a table and put it in my mouth, I mean you do realize you’re putting whatever is on that table straight into your mouth.  You don’t know what’s on that table.  You’re flirting with danger.  That’s not a good idea for Allistaire, you could get sick.  In defiance or fatigue I eat the frosting, licking my fingers.  Maybe I fixate on the warmth of my latte and this maple pecan scone because I am procrastinating setting my fingers to this keyboard.  Maybe I eat sweet decadence and feel the satisfying warmth of coffee down my throat because it feels like caring for myself, feels like the tender bandaging of wounds, of soft humming over tears.

The sun flickers through the heart-shaped leaves of the Katsura tree outside the window.  Why when I had a bit of time this afternoon after my meeting, did I head into the heart of the city and pay for parking, all to go into Anthropologie?  Am I materialistic?  Yes, yes I am and I wrestle it.  But too, Anthropologie is a feast for the eyes, groupings of color and pattern, of plant life, wood and ceramic.  There is a restfulness and cheeriness too to that beauty.  It is the closest thing to walking into my house.  Oh how I just long, long, with aching yearning to be home, to dwell in a place that is my own, that feels safe, that is familiar, that is of my own making, that is not intruded upon, that is not dictated by others.  I long for ordinary common life of grocery shopping and making dinners in anticipation of seeing Sten driving down the driveway, coming home, calling in the girls from the adventures in the yard, of looking out my kitchen window at the Spanish Peaks, of cows grazing in the meadow below, of aspen leaves flickering in the sunlight of June afternoon.  Rare is the occasion that I allow myself to even conjure these images, the tears just flow, the sorrow lancing out of me leaving me even more worn.  So I go to Anthropologie walking in the midst of beauty of someone else’s expression of creativity, trying somehow to satisfy that craving to create, to put my hand to craft, that desire that has no outlet.

I circle my computer, giving it wide berth.  It sits silent in my bag but demands that I attend to this blog, this accounting of Allistaire’s flesh, of my heart, of this ragged road I trudge, my feet tripping over stones, fatigue weighing down my legs, pressing my face flat.  Sometimes I want to yell back, “What have I to say?  What?!”  For when I sit to write, really I am calling out again, not just at night as tears slip hot down my cheeks, not just during the day as I plead for patience, for wisdom, for grace with Allistaire as I battle her over food, over taking meds, I am calling out to the Lord.  What do you have to say oh God?  What answer do you give to my weeping, my raging, my flat silence, the groaning of my spirit, the trembling of self exhausted?  I need more Lord!  I need new!  And sometimes it just seems like silence and I yell all the more and I cry out, do you hear me?!!!  And I question if He’s really there.  And I consider whether or not all my beliefs amount to nothing more that wild speech and desperate absurd hoping.  This query ever turns to smile in the midst of my tears.  Look at the beetle in all its wild extravagance of color, pattern and fanciful design.  Does not the beetle reflect in Technicolor the glory of the Lord?  The feather, the leaf, the shell, the flower, the seed…oh do they not all answer back with endless hallelujah that the Lord IS GOD?!!!!

So I yield, I bow, No, I fall flat before Him again.  I tell Him, I worship You, I really do fall down in adoration of You, because Your beauty…it just stops me in my tracks, it stuns me, it shuts my mouth and I cry because You are too much, too gorgeous, too resplendent.  But God, but God, do you see me?  Do you see me here, with my face on the ground, my heart tearing from sorrow.  Do you not see how broken I am, how spent, how undone, how torn and shattered, how desperately weary?  What do You have to say to me?  Be not only a majestic God, far off, above with eternal plans.  Oh Lord, my sweet God, hear my cry, come down, come down low, come down to this dirty ground with me, meet me in my desolation.  Can I ask such a thing of God?  God of creation?  God of eternity?  The Ancient of Days?  The first and the last, the beginning and end, the alpha and the omega?  But I do, I do!  Come Lord I plead, incline Your ear to me, bend low and look into my fearful eyes.  Oh Lord I need to hear your voice, I need to see your face, I am faint and need to hear your voice.  Don’t I love you as much for your condescension, for your coming down as for you greatness, you vastness and infinitude incomprehensible to me?  Perhaps more, perhaps more.  Perhaps it is that You, God of the Universe, creator of all things, sustainer of the universe, You who holds the elements together, don’t I love you most that such a God as You would see me, this vapor, this flower that fades, that you would love me, that you would care for me, isn’t this what makes my heart sing of your name, because of your tender love, your gentle hand.  Oh Father how I need you.

But I tell You how You must show up.  Don’t You see my sorrow?  Don’t You see this expanse of eight long months fighting this relentless battle, separated from Sten, from Solveig, from home, from family and friends?  This battle doesn’t let up and I need more, you see Lord!  And I despise what feels like silence and I do not want to accept that what feels like a slow smile on Your face.  My 21st Century Western-American self wants the next version.  I want the upgrade.  I need the upgrade.  Yeah, that was good Lord but now I need more!  Thanks for that old comfort, that admonishment of long gone days but I’m looking for a new word, to hear your voice provide me something that meets me now!  Silence.  Silence that feels like abandonment.  Silence that feels cold and uncaring.  Silence.

He speaks, speaks in His silence.  His silence tells me, my child, I have already given you all that you need.  I have already provided for you in abundance.  “Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own.”  Well thanks a lot for that Lord.  What good is that old trite, worn out saying?  How is that going to help me here, now?  “Eat the manna.”  Hmmmm.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Same ole same ole.

But He’s right.  I can pass over those old commands, those words as familiar as the curve of my nose.  So common they’re hardly visible.  I can disregard His truths because I’ve heard them before but I am fool to do so.  The Lord is telling me, I have already given you instruction on how to live these brutal days.  When I scoff and belittle His words, I lose.  I’m left floundering.  Panting and worn out.  Brittle.  Exhausted.  I weary of who I am.  Where is the water to satisfy, to cause flourishing?  I want to be the tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in season, even in wilderness.  Why deprive myself?  Why leave the path of the Lord?  Because it has become ordinary?  Because I weary of perseverance?  He draws me back.  He woos.  Entreating me, inviting me to once again rest, rest.  Will I worry about tomorrow?  Or will I worship Him as the God He is – will I entrust all my days to Him.  Oh my flesh flails and rages, wild with the desire for control, to be the one who decides, because I only see my tiny finite view and I bellow with cries for what I want.  A child in a tantrum.  The Lord asks me to look up, to lift my eyes, to take His hand and rest, allow Him to lead.  Will I consent to the simplicity of living this day, this hour, this very moment to its fullest?  My weak flesh stomps its foot and declares, “But I’m just tired of having to do that.  I want to be done with this hard stuff.  I’m ready to satiate my desires.  I want the good life now, here.”  Do I really believe what I say I believe?  Is this life what the Lord says is true or is it what my flesh proclaims is most important, significant, essential?

I shake my head, clamp my eyes and open again.  Baffled, I think, shouldn’t I be fine with all this by now?  Shouldn’t this be normal?  Shouldn’t I have figured out how to live this life after so long a road?  I circle back, wandering in weary heart from the Lord and then I circle back.  Over and over again, I return to Him.

It was a spectacular sunny Saturday morning.  Allistaire, with glee on her face, climbed the stairs and sped down the slide over and over.  The air was alive, bright, crisp blue skies.  We have to go Sweets, I tell her, we have to go now.  Her shoulders slump and her smile turns downward, feet grazing the ground.  I try to make the best of it but inside I grumble that we have to leave this lovely life, this world on the outside, and go sit in the hospital for hours to get a blood transfusion.  I sit in the darkened little clinic room scanning Facebook when I come upon a post about a 14-year-old girl, Ahmie, whose mom is praying for her quick and quiet death as tumors fill her body.  Awareness floods my body, heat, suffocating.  This girl has cancer, she’s been being treated here at Seattle Children’s and she is dying.  Likely today she will die and her mom will never hear her voice again nor see bright joy in her eyes.  I turn away from Allistaire to hide the tears that overwhelm me.  Hot, tight, hard to catch my breath.  And I scramble, where is that verse, where is it?  I must read it now.  What does it say exactly?  All I can think is “LORD GOD!  Do you see this?  Do you see what’s happening here?”  My flesh fails, it groans, it groans.  All I can think is, “The whole creation groans,” waiting for the Lord to return, waiting for the redemption of all things.  And I have to be thankful that my girl is merely lying on a hospital bed on a beautiful Saturday getting blood.  Things could be so different.  What an agonizing prayer that mother is praying.  What a horrid thing to have to ask the Lord for.

I find the verse.  I read the verses just before and after, and then, well I have to read that whole chapter.  Romans 8.  Wow.  I sit stunned.  I’ve read it before, so many times before, but wow, wow.   The little boat of our life had drifted and Romans 8 was like a great tether, binding us back into His truth, connecting all the maddening details of our days, lassoing, binding, weaving ourselves and our lives into the magnificent abundance of who HE is and what He proclaims this life to be about.  I circle back.  I’m invited to rest.  He  extends His arm, His hand and asks me to trust Him, that He is in control, in a glorious way that is beyond my imagining.  His finger points, directing my gaze to the manna, the sustenance, the nutrients of this day, this hour, this moment.  He reminds me that I am not alone, though I feel my whole world in a tenuous shatter, a terrifying vulnerability of completely unraveling.  I am bound into Him, by Christ, by His Spirit.  So do not mistake the simplicity, the familiarity of His instruction as something common place, as weakness, as insufficient, as elementary and unsophisticated.  Romans 8.  Wow.  If I had one piece of paper to read the rest of my life it might be that chapter.

As I write, Allistaire’s eyelids flutter, and there is a distance in her gaze as she goes under, as her consciousness wanes.  I laid her down on that narrow bed, the one that will slide into that great whirring circle of the mysterious machine, the one that will produce an image with brightness where there is increased metabolic activity, cancer.  Then a CT image will be overlapped to reveal any masses present, a complete picture of her disease outside of her marrow.  Still sedated, they’ll wheel her down the hall where Dahlia, the nurse practitioner, will plunge the great needle into  her right hip once again, for the 21st time, to pull back a sample of her marrow.  That wee vial will then make its way to the pathologist who will peer down at cells smeared on a slide, looking for evidence of flesh gone awry, of a creation broken, of cells groaning for redemption.  The pathologist at Fred Hutch will then send more cells from the sample, joined to radioactive isotopes, speeding past a laser – each struck with light causing an electron to be disrupted, its fall documented by a wave-length of light.  A scatter plot forms and zooms in the search for even the most remote evidence of leukemia.  By the end of today I should know the results of the PET/CT, tomorrow will yield morphology results and either by the end of Thursday or Friday we will know results from Flow Cytometry.

I feel chased by two wild hounds, snarling, rabid.  I grip Allistaire’s hand and we keep running, running, trying to outrun their ferocious intent to take her down.  Cancer on one side and heart failure on the other.  Her BNP was rising, all the way to 820 last Saturday and her ejection fraction was dropping, down to 26 a week and a half ago.  I knew this bone marrow and PET/CT would soon reveal the state of her disease and decisions would need to be made.  What would our options be?  Was her heart starting to slip backwards?  In April her ejection fraction was 38 and her BNP got as low as 231 (0-99 is the normal range).  Her ANC last week was down to 54.  What would her marrow do, how would it recover?  Her cells for the WT1 trial will be ready as early as July 22nd.  More chemo?  If there’s anything more than 1% cancer in her marrow, the modified t-cells are unlikely to succeed at stopping the progression of her disease.  What then?  More chemo?  Well, it would need to be more hard-core than Azacitidine if Aza hasn’t kept it at bay.  But what, what chemo can her weak heart handle?  Even if there is a chemo that is not directly hard on her heart, a more intense chemo will suppress her blood counts longer, more severely, leaving the door wide for infection, for a sweeping torrent that could once again overwhelm her heart, this time for good, no turning back.  But what option have we?  If there is much disease at all, we must do something!  We must take the risk.  Because if we don’t, we know the outcome.  We know the outcome.  We find ourselves stepping closer and closer to an edge.  I think of Ahmie and her mom’s agonizing prayer.  I shudder.  I pray.  I call out to the Lord.  But you see, He has not promised to save her. He has not promised some number of years in this life that we think we have a right to – there is no allotment promised.  I shudder.  I pray.  I pray.

Do not worry about tomorrow.  Trust me for tomorrow.  I will provide for all your needs.  Eat the manna before you.  Love her today.  Live your today to the fullest.  Live into what I proclaim this life to be about. Because it is not about granite countertops and painting the house a color you like.  It is not about traveling to that amazing country.  It is not about finally losing that awful belly fat that wiggles like a jellyfish.  It is not about having a job and a pay check that makes me feel good about myself and gets me what I want.  It is not about my comfort.  It is not about the hundred thousand things my flesh says I need and the world clammers to echo back endlessly.  Romans 8.  Wow.  The way of the Lord is so, so contrary to how I want to live my life.  His words are hard words.  I want to turn from them because they are hard, hard.  Oh Lord, don’t you see I’m weary?  Can’t you just let up for a while?  Can’t you just let me live my own life for a little while?  Can’t I just hunker down here and indulge?  Lift your eyes.  Lift your eyes!

So I lift my eyes.  I look for the manna.  I seek to love today.  I ask the Lord to help me walk in His Spirit today.  I yield tomorrow to Him.  I call my friend, my older sister in Christ.  I confess my sin.  I ask for the Lord’s convicting.  I ask Him to transform my heart, to love like He says love is.  Forgive.  Don’t keep a record of wrongs.  Don’t let the sun go down on my anger.  Believe the best.  I seek times and ways to worship, to fellowship, to not make the mistake of trying to walk this hard road alone, without the surrounding of His people.  I keep my eyes and heart alert.  I’ve dreamt of Jens.  Both times he gives me no answers.  He is just alive.  Alive.  Jens is alive.  He smiles at me in my dreams, his big sweet closed mouthed Jensie smile.  And I smile.  Jens is alive.  Though my flesh, it be destroyed, yet with my eyes, I shall see God.  I shall see God.  Oh Father, Father, hold my fainting heart.  My heart, my flesh it groans for You, for Your return, for Your redemption of all these woes.

It’s a few hours later.  Allistaire was still recovering in the PACU from sedation from her bone marrow and PET/CT.  It was minutes before 5pm.  I eventually got through to Dr. Cooper.  Ugh.  So wretched.  Six or seven spots of cancer bright on the PET scan – too small yet to show up on CT, but there, there and some in awful places you just can’t radiate – her spine, her sternum, her left humorous, her pelvis.  I couldn’t keep track of them all, the words blurring in my ears, my heart growing faint, heat up my neck, my legs weak.  “Can I see the scan?  I need to see the image.”  Sweet Olwen, the PACU nurse, wheeled us upstairs to the Hem/Onc clinic, Allistaire still too wobbly to walk and I clutching her in my arms, cheek against the extravagant softness of her fine beautiful hair, destined to be gorgeous and curly by the looks of how it’s coming back in.  Oh God.  Oh God.  Have mercy.  An out-of-body experience.  Looking on from afar.  So this is how this goes.  This is how kids die from cancer.  This is how the story dwindles and fades and wears thin until there’s nothing left.  “But I don’t know how to be done,” I quietly wail to Dr. Cooper, the tears in his eyes because he too has a five-year old child.  Dr. Gardner thinks it would be crazy to give her high-dose chemo with her heart so weak, so bound to fail if an infection comes.  So this is how you die of cancer.  I remember asking Lysen, our nurse, long ago, over three years ago, “explain to me, I don’t understand, how exactly does cancer kill you?  What actually happens?”  I watch our path from afar and I fear I know where it is headed and my whole flesh just simply falls, fails, quietly crashes.  She is too alive. Too alive.  How?  How do you stop the fight?  We’re not there yet, I know.  We need the bone marrow results.  We need to know how much is in there before we really no what options she has.  Go down in flames?  Go quietly?  What a brutal wretched quandary.  I despise, revile it all!  Oh God!  Oh God!

Incline your ear to me Oh Lord, hear the faint beating of my heart, my haggard breaths, the silent heaving of my chest.  Be merciful.  Of Father, Father, come down low, meet me here in this dark hole.  Hold my hand, bind me to you.  I put my hope in your holding of tomorrow.  Show me the manna in this day, direct my vision to your sustaining.  Hear my cry oh Lord.  Be gracious.  See our broken family, each of us ravaged in this trial.  Come Lord, come down to us.

Romans 8 New International Version (NIV)

Life Through the Spirit
8 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you[a] free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh,[b] God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.[c] And so he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

5 Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. 7 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. 8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.

9 You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. 10 But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life[d] because of righteousness. 11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of[e] his Spirit who lives in you.

12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. 13 For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.[f] And by him we cry, “Abba,[g] Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Present Suffering and Future Glory
18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that[h] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who[i] have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

More Than Conquerors
31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”[j]
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[k] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

IMG_0068 IMG_0081 IMG_0095 IMG_0098 IMG_0108 IMG_0129 IMG_0197 IMG_0207 IMG_0142 IMG_0147 IMG_0148 IMG_0149 IMG_0150 IMG_0165 IMG_0219 IMG_0222 IMG_0182 IMG_0292 IMG_0308 IMG_0316 IMG_0320 IMG_0322 IMG_0324 IMG_0330 IMG_0370 IMG_0377

Jun3

Consent

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_3193There is a woman on the other side of the earth who has offered up her life to my child TWICE!!!! Allistaire’s bone marrow donor from June 2013 has once again made it possible for Allistaire to have another chance at life!  The unrelated bone marrow donor search coordinator just called to say that consent has come through from Allistaire’s donor to use the remaining stored cells, from her original donation, to be used in the WT1 genetically modified T-Cell trial!  I am in awe and mind-blowing crazy thankfulness for her generosity and compassion!  Thank you Thank you Thank you woman out there who I long to one day thank in person!!!!!!

It will take a few days to coordinate the paperwork and begin the cell processing.  The cells should be ready in about 6 weeks but must be given in coordination with Allistaire’s chemo schedule.  There are certain thresholds for count recovery (recovery of her blood counts/marrow) written into the protocol that must be met before she can receive the T-cells.  It would be ideal if the T-cells could be ready at just the right time to be given to Allistaire once she’s sufficiently recovered her counts so that the cells do not have to be frozen and kept until she’s ready.  We want MAX viability of those cells!  We want them as agro and hard-core as possible!  But it’s all a guessing game.  Today marks two weeks from the beginning of this chemo cycle.  Last time it took 9 weeks from the beginning of one round of chemo to sufficient count recovery to begin the next round of chemo.  Of course we can’t predict what her body will do this time.  It could take longer, it could recover quicker.  But if they began the cell processing in the next several days, we would be right at about 9 weeks from the beginning of this current round of chemo when the cells could be ready – it could work out beautifully.  I’d really like to avoid yet another round of chemo.

I am overjoyed!  Thank you Father above!  Thank you for overcoming what seemed an impossibility!!! You can read about the wonders of Allistaire’s transplant and this woman’s generosity from two years ago HERE.

Also, if this blows your mind that this woman has been able to offer life to Allistaire TWICE and you think – WOW! that’s so cool!  Guess what?  You too can give this gift to another person!  Go to Be The Match and sign up for free to be on the registry to be a bone marrow donor.  Sten has actually been called and he is the backup person for someone who needs a donor – if the prime person selected falls through for some reason, Sten is going to have the opportunity to donate his marrow!  What a glorious gift to offer your life to another person, a stranger!  It is just so seriously beautiful!!!IMG_2932IMG_2974 IMG_3267 IMG_2954

May31

Jail Break

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_3589I used to think I was safe, that wild animals, the beasts, the possibility of having my flesh torn off of bones, lay up there, out there, far off in dark mountainous woods.  I thought it would be easy to simply steer clear of such terrors.  As though somehow my own willing of my footsteps could keep me from entering their realm, that by hope, optimism, some silly assumption of impenetrability, it would not be so hard to keep those ravages at bay.  I walked in a sunlit land, blithely believing, perhaps not even believing but never even thinking that they might tear down the hillside at terrifying speeds, absolutely bent on destruction.  They do not see a heart full of hopes, of dreams, of ideas, of lists of yearnings, eyes bright.  Their horrible feet carry them, saliva flinging back behind as their daggers flash, crazed eyes.

Flood waters tearing homes in half, separating husband and wife with children.  Father of Solveig’s classmate, life cut short from heart attack.  Jens on a mountainside.  Nine year old girls sold into slavery by Isis.  Kassidae home from yet another T-cell trial that utterly failed to stop her cancer.

What is it like to have no more options?  How can I fathom a journey where suddenly the road simply ends.  No destination reached, just a faint trail blending into nothing, melding into the landscape.  And then what?  And then what?  Where does one go from there?

I see a small child standing alone in an open space.  Nothing in their hands.  No clothes.  No defense.  Utterly vulnerable.  I stand and watch, unable to move, unable to raise my hand to stop what I know will come, what is coming.

The child shivers, confusion in their eyes.  And then you sense it, before even sound reaches your ears.  Some sort of terrible rushing, some silent invisible foe rushing through the forest.  At last it breaks through the trees, snarling, feet hardly touching the ground as it bolts for your child, savage mouth wide.  And do you turn away?  Can you stand to watch the beast tear into your child’s flesh?  Dare you know the moment their life is extinguished?  How much will be ripped and torn before their eyes go limp and lifeless?

I heard these words in a beautiful song, a song meant to comfort, a lullaby.

“Quiet your heart
It’s just a dream
Go back to sleep

I’ll be right here
I’ll stay awake as long as you need me
To slay all the dragons
And keep out the monsters
I’m watching over you

My love is a light
Driving away all of your fear
So don’t be afraid
Remember I made a promise to keep you safe

You’ll have your own battles to fight
When you are older
You’ll find yourself frozen inside
But always remember

If you feel alone
Facing the giants
And you don’t know
What to do

My love is a light
Driving away all of your fear
So don’t be afraid
Remember I made a promise to keep you safe”

My heart was breaking as I listened to these words.  Hot silent tears slid down as I drove, facing forward, intent on the task of getting there.  “You’ll have your own battles to fight when you’re older.”  But no, no, Allistaire did not get to be older before she had her own battles to fight.  She was just 21 months old when her battle against this ravaging beast first came, intent on taking her life.

“Mommy, I like that part, ‘you feel alone, facing the giants, and you don’t know what to do.”  Her soft sweet voice came to me from the back seat.  Of all the words in all the songs, these are the one’s she speaks out loud, repeats back to me, the words that most resonated with her little girl heart.

You think, unconsciously believe, that as a parent you can protect your child, that somehow, by force of will you can magically keep them from harm.  Surely there is nothing more core to being a parent, to being a mother, than protecting the life of your child.

But my love, oh my love, so fierce, stuffed full with all my might and zeal, my hope…it is powerless to protect against some enemies.  I never made that promise to keep her safe, I just assumed it would be true.  Of course she will be safe.  Of course I can wrap her up in a hug and overcome any giant.

No.  There may come a time where there are no options left and I will hear the rushing of wind through branches as that beast comes tearing through the forest, breaks out into the opening and sinks its wretched brutal teeth into the one I love, this time sparing nothing.  I may be left with my heart bleeding out in the open space, tattered, wounded, ravaged child in my lap, never again to see her bright eyes, never again to hear the most beloved sound on the whole earth, her laugh, her voice full of wonder.

But I know this.  She will not stand alone.  If such a time comes, I will stand with her, hand gripped in mine and I will face that beast with her.  I will not turn away and I will not leave her, and that may be all that I can do.  My eyes will weep until my own flesh is laid to rest.

To Shannon, to Kate, to Susan, to Becca, to Rachel, to Julie, to Beth, to Devon, to you many more mothers who have walked this road, who stood with your hand gripping your child’s as that beast came to devour, my heart weeps with yours and oh how I desperately long for a better day.

For those of you who know that Allistaire was discharged from the hospital almost two weeks ago, these words must come as a surprise.  What you see on the surface is so far from the full story. People constantly comment, “She looks great!”  They ask, “How is she doing?”  How do I answer that question?  On Monday at the playground, after having climbed up the slide twice in a row, Allistaire suddenly said she didn’t feel well, she was panicked and in pain but couldn’t explain what was really happening.  There was terror in her eyes.  I cradled her and hoped she would calm down. Maybe she just overexerted herself a little.  She cried out in anguish, “Mommy,” over and over, yet I could not understand the source of her pain or her fear.  I asked my five-year old daughter, “Do I need to take you to the hospital?” as though she could answer this question.  Was she overreacting?  What was she feeling?  She threw up in the bathroom.  Well, she was on day 6 of chemo and this was the first time she threw up, so really not concerning in itself.  Of course nausea can be a sign of heart failure too. I scan through all I know in my head, assessing her energy, her sleep patterns, her appetite, food consumption.  Could it be her heart?  She continued to freak out after throwing up and we left the bathroom.  “Mommy, can I feel the sand?”  I took off her sandals and gently sat her feet down in the sand at Golden Gardens.  Immediately she calmed.  Immediately she was fine.  What was real?  What is true?  How much of that was based on something of significance?  How much is her just working herself up?  I dreaded having to relay this incident to the cardiologists.  It’s a lovely day at the park, but just below the surface are constant swirling realities that threaten to steal it all away.

In the first days of being out of the hospital, Allistaire and I gorged on our sudden freedom, on sunlight and bird song and starlight and bright moon, on playgrounds and sleeping without interruption, on hours of daytime without nurses and doctors and hospital food trays.  Solveig and JoMarie arrived last Wednesday evening and my heart swelled with the joy of their laughter and heads clustered together in play.  Everyday playgrounds, picnics and beaches, throwing rocks into water and sun glinting off lapping waves.  Caterpillars on fingers and squealing.  My faced beamed with delight, with wonder at simple ordinary life.  How much more wondrous it is than people realize!

You think that leaving the hospital is some signal of victory, of progress, of normalcy.  And so it may be, often is, though not always.  We left on May 18th, not having accomplished what we came to do.  In some ways the girl who left the hospital was worse off then the girl who came to Seattle back in October.  The great victory was that she successfully weaned off Milrinone.  A huge accomplishment which has made way for a few options, far more than none.  But her heart is far too weak to endure a standard transplant for AML which includes TBI (Total Body Irradiation).  So we left the confines of this hospital after 130 straight days, her only moments outside were the 30 seconds here and there strapped onto an ambulance stretcher as she was transported to and from The University of Washington for radiation.  We went straight to the playground.

For 11 of the past 12 days since she was discharged, Allistaire has been to the hospital for a variety of appointments.  On Tuesday the 19th she finished focal radiation to her left leg where one new chloroma (solid leukemia) showed up on her last PET/CT scan.  On Wednesday she saw Dr. Todd Cooper, her new primary oncologist.  Dr. Gardner is pregnant with twin girls and so we are making the transition to having Dr. Cooper, who is the newly hired head of the leukemia department and an AML expert.  He is the doctor that Dr. Pollard had hoped would come to Seattle Children’s.  He has been tasked with developing a High-Risk Leukemia program for Seattle Children’s.  So when Dr. Gardner asked who I’d like to have as Allistaire’s new primary oncologist, it was a no-brainer to ask for Dr. Cooper, a kind man from Atlanta who is a super smarty pants AML doc.  In our first outpatient visit with him, he relayed that Dr. Pollard had called him about Allistaire to make sure he was up to speed with all the details of her medical history.  I cannot tell you how amazingly cared for I feel here at Seattle Children’s.  We are blessed beyond words by the team that journey’s with us.  After seeing Dr. Cooper, Allistaire began seven days of Azacitadine, the same chemo she got last time.

Prior to leaving the hospital, I met with Dr. Gardner and Dr. Marie Bleakley, the transplant doctor we’ve worked with at several significant points.  It was really great to have them both present for the conversation.  Dr. Gardner began with explaining her reasoning for waiting so long for Allistaire to begin chemo again.  I had grown frightened with the incredible amount of time since her last round of chemo, knowing the immense need to keep her in remission and being aware that she was a month beyond the traditional time of starting a new round.  Dr. Gardner stressed that because Allistaire’s marrow has been so incredibly slow to recover, her greatest immediate risk is that of an infection that one: she wouldn’t have the white blood cell defenses to fight and two: that could overwhelm her heart.  So finally, nine weeks after the beginning of the previous round of Azacitidine, Allistaire would begin another round.  She also stated again that given Allistaire’s heart, TBI, known to have long-term consequences to the heart, was not in her best interest at this time.  Dr. Bleakley went on to describe a “midi-transplant” which has much lower levels of radiation (4 centigray as opposed to 12 in TBI) and heavy-duty myeloablative chemotherapy, and a “mini-transplant” with even lower levels of radiation (2 centigray) and non-myeloablative chemotherapy but high-dose steroids.  I’ll forego going into the details of how each of these work and the pros and cons, but suffice it to say, the mini-transplant is not a good option as it is intended to extend life in the old who cannot endure hard-core conditioning.  It is unlikely to provide a cure and has a lot of potential for GVHD (Graft Versus Host Disease).  So while the “midi-transplant” is an option for Allistaire, with a gleam in her eye, Dr. Bleakley had a different proposal.

I left the room with hope.  With fear yes, always there is fear, we walk ever into black, into unknown.  But with hope, with a bit of upturned grin.  Dr. Bleakley has proposed that Allistaire’s best option is to participate in the WT1 trial.  This is a trial through Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research and uses genetically modified T-cells which have a specially designed receptor to bind to the WT1 protein found on 90% of leukemia patients cancer cells.  Normally a bone marrow test would be done to confirm expression of the WT1 protein in the cancer cells, because if it is not present, the receptor is useless.  However, because Allistaire has not had any detectable disease in her marrow since she relapsed in October, they decided to proceed without this info for now.  At the end of this round of chemo, she will have another bone marrow test performed and if there is disease, they can then test for the WT1 protein.

So far 17 people have participated in this trial.  Of the people who were in remission going into a bone marrow transplant and remained in remission leading up to getting the modified T-cells, 100% have remained in remission for over a year that they have been followed so far, this in light of a normally high relapse rate post-transplant.  There are two people who relapsed after transplant and then got back into remission and then received the modified T-cells.  This is the arm of the protocol that Allistaire would fall into.  I believe I was told these people are also remaining in remission. The remaining group relapsed after transplant and did not get back into remission and despite having the T-cells are not doing well or have already died.  It seems the T-cells work best when there is little to no detectable disease.  We will know the state of Allistaire’s disease after we get results from her next set of tests around June 16th.  How I pray she remains in remission, but she has been receiving very mild chemo and has gone great lengths of time with little to no defense.

What makes Allistaire unique in this trial, is that, should she be able to get these TCR T-cells, she will be the very first child to do so.  I will have to ask again if this is being done anywhere else, but she is certainly the first child ever to have this sort of therapy here (Seattle Children’s/Fred Hutch).  There are many kids with ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia) who have by now received modified T-cell therapy.  But the targets are quite different.  In Lymphoblastic leukemia, the cancer is in the B-cell line and CAR (Chimeric Antigen Receptor) therapy is used to destroy the cancer and in doing so, it forever destroys the patients’ B-cell line, requiring life-long transfusions of Immunoglobulin.  The first child ever to receive this therapy was a little girl named Emma in April 2012 at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia).  She has remained in complete remission since then.  Seattle Children’s Research along with the Ben Towne Foundation has provided this therapy to a growing number of children with great success.  People are coming from around the world for this treatment.  A month ago I met a woman named Solveig from Germany who was here with her son, Nicolas, who was getting CAR-19 T-cell therapy.  Allistaire’s cancer (Acute Myeloid Leukemia) is found on the myeloid line – cells that you cannot forever destroy and rely on transfusions for, cells like red blood cells, platelets and granulocytes.  Thus the scientists have needed to find another way to attack these cells.

The folks at Fred Hutch have been incredible.  I am amazed, honored and humbled by their passionate desire to make a way for Allistaire to participate in this trial.  Through conversations with Dr. Bleakley, Dr. Dan Egan (the principal investigator on the trial) and Dr. Phil Greenberg (the head of the lab who has designed this therapy), it is so abundantly evident that they see Allistaire as an individual and they see her as the child that represents the children who are also in desperate need of this therapy, children who have run out of options, children “destined to die of their disease.”  They have re-written the protocol to accommodate her, to make way for future children.  The original weight requirement was 30kg because of the numerous blood draws required for testing.  They worked it out to reduce the limit to 15kg, Allistaire was 17kg at the time they made this change.  Additionally, because this weight change equals treating much younger patients, they went through a lengthy, involved process to set up approval to give this therapy at Seattle Children’s.  Up to this point, the youngest patients have been in their teens and were treated at The University of Washington where adults are treated.  They have worked hard to make a way through for my girl.

On Sunday evening, May 17th, I was delightfully honored to be invited by Julie Guillot to the Premier Chef’s Dinner, a fundraiser for Fred Hutch.  As I have mentioned before, Julie and her husband, Jeff, lost their son Zach to a complication of his third transplant for AML.  At that time they were helping fund the research that would create T-cells that would give Zach another measure of defense against AML.  When Zach died in February 2014, Julie’s zeal and wild fiery passion to bring an end to AML and better treatment options, only intensified.  When Allistaire relapsed in October 2014, she invited Allistaire and I to a little party for Dr. Greenberg’s lab to celebrate the $1.7 million dollars Julie and Jeff had helped raise for his research thus far.  It was at that time I first met Dr. Greenberg in person and introduced he and his lab staff to Allistaire.  Jeff and Julie were the challenge fundraisers for the fundraiser on May 17, 2015, having pledged to match up to $400,000 of money raised that evening.  In making this commitment, they were given the privilege to direct where the funds would go.  Their whole motivation was to see the immunotherapy through Dr. Greenberg’s lab flourish and accelerate.  By the end of the amazing evening, $1,280,000 was raised to accelerate targeted cellular immunotherapy research at Fred Hutch.   I had the joy of standing up and representing the hopeful first child to benefit from his research.  Dr. Greenberg spoke to me on two different occasions during the evening, each time with multiple hugs initiated by him.  You could see the eager joy and hope in his eyes.  It was a wondrous thing to stand alongside a man who has dedicated several decades of his life to this research, generous donors, a fellow cancer mom who lost her son – for whom this therapy is coming too late, and I, the mom of a child who is desperate now and who needs this treatment immediately.  The full circle was there – scientist, patients, donors.

Doors are opening but still the tension remains high-pitched.  There is the illusion of normalcy, there is light-hearted laughter on the surface, but there is a mighty undercurrent, ever threatening to pull Allistaire down, deep into the suffocating dark.  First financial approval for the trial was required which was confirmed by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana this Wednesday.  This allowed the Unrelated Donor Search Committee to initiate their part which is to request Allistaire’s original donor to be contacted and for a request for consent to use remaining donated cells for this trial.  At this point, unlike the CAR t-cell trials, the WT1 trial must use bone marrow transplant donor cells.  While Allistaire is not in a position to get a transplant at this time, she thankfully does have cells stored at Fred Hutch from her original donor from her transplant in June 2013.  Extra cells are stored for two years at no charge and then you have the option to pay to have them stored.  This June 18th, will mark two years.  I pray this woman can be found quickly, quickly and that her heart will be moved again to give, this time solely of her consent.  It feels sort of terrifying to know that Allistaire’s one shot is dependent on a woman on the other side of the world, but then again, she gave once in a much greater way, we so hope she will help make a way through for Allistaire again.  If we can gain her consent, processing of the cells will begin and takes approximately a month and a half.  Speed is of essence.  The T-cell therapy much be coordinated with Allistaire’s chemo schedule.  It is my great hope that there may be a way for Allistaire to get these cells prior to needing to begin another round of chemo.

This therapy could be Allistaire’s cure.  That would be BEYOND AMAZING!!!!  And if not a cure, we pray the T-cells will buy her more time, time for her heart to heal, time for her heart to gain strength to enter the next battle of a second transplant.  What’s so wild to me is that Allistaire would be inpatient for ONE day for this therapy.  ONE DAY!!!!  And this T-cell therapy does not result in the intense cytokine storm response as it does in the CAR T-cell therapy which puts most kids in the ICU for some period of time.  No one in the WT1 trial has had to go to the ICU.  In fact, Dr. Gardner told me that Allistaire would not be able be eligible for the CAR t-cell therapy because of the extreme dangers it can pose.  For the WT1 trial, they would ask her to stick around for a few weeks for some blood draws and observation and then remaining blood tests could be done at home and simply mailed over to Fred Hutch.  It all seems too good to be true.  What a wondrous world it will be when this is the way cancer treatment is conducted.  Can you even imagine?!  I must highly, highly recommend the documentary, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” by Ken Burns!  It is based on the book of the same name which is also extremely fascinating and worth reading.  It is simply thrilling to see how far cancer research and treatment has come and the heightened hope that immunotherapy will change the course of how cancer impacts our lives – for one in every two men and one in every three women who will get cancer at least once in their lives.

I am weary, so utterly weary.  But what choice do we have but to walk on?  And we do.  We walk forward, giving thanks for so much blessing.  Sometimes it feels like there being a way through for her is an utter impossibility, but then I am reminded of how many “impossibilities” have come to pass, how the insurmountable has been overcome.  My yearning for her life is like a burning fever that never lets up.  Every moment is on high-alert, racing through the myriad of questions to try to determine how she is doing, to assess what is going on for her.  There are now so many interwoven layers of medical complexity and reality.  There is cancer, there is heart failure, there are medications (13 different ones every day – 26 doses), there is being deconditioned by months lived in the cramped confines of the hospital.  I see her on the play ground and I watch kids younger than her charge a hill or climb with confidence.  She tires quickly, she is fearful.  Her legs hurt.  Is it cancer on the move?  Is it lack of blood getting to muscles?  Is it simple fatigue brought on my muscles that have not been asked to do much in so, so long?  Is she nauseous?  Is it from chemo?  Is it from the magnesium she must take because her Lasix makes her waste it, magnesium that causes tumultuous abdominal cramping?  All her pain signals are mixed up so that she just finds herself in a frenzy of discomfort, in a frightful maze desperate to get out but with no clear direction.

Leaving the hospital balloons the craving for normal, it makes you think you should be normal, all the standards shift and you see your child not as one among the many other sick kids but among the normal.  At the same moment that I am delighting in the warm day and Allistaire playing in the sand, going back to the lake shore to fill her bucket again, I am aware of the dangers in that sand, in that water.  I’ve put parafilm on the end of her tubies and tucked them tight into her swim suit.  She wears her sun hat and is lathered in sunscreen.  Her medications make her more sensitive to the sun, more likely to burn.  I’d like to avoid skin cancer.  She doesn’t know what to do when the other little girl approaches silently to play with her and share her toys.  She is fearful and defensive.  My heart sighs knowing how little interaction she’s had with other children, how to navigate such situations.  In her cardiology appointment the great nurse, Jason, calls her precocious.  Yes, yes, she seems to be quite articulate for a five-year old.  There are ways that her deficits are glaring and there are odd ways that she has walked so much further in life than the vast majority of five-year olds.  What I know is that I love her dearly, I long to keep her safe, to see her have long life.

I pray to God, I seek to be reminded, imbedded in the truth of His infiniteness.  I ask Him to remember that I am finite.  I ask Christ to pray for me as He prayed for Peter, that my faith would not fail (Luke 22:31-32).  I ask Him to help me to lift my eyes, to take in the long view, to help me in this brutal moment, these series of endless days, in this tedious fight against cancer, in this relentless tumult to see His face throughout all these circumstances.  We go to the playground.  We look for the first stars at night, our necks craning back.  Alllistaire points eagerly at the moon, not framed in the hospital window, but in the vast expanse of the evening sky.  We listen for birds and bend our noses to flowers.  Our feet follow little paths through marsh land and cat tails, spider webs bright in the afternoon sun.  We live, we delight.  We go to the hospital again and again into little rooms with blood pressure cuffs and vials of blood that tell of the world within which eyes cannot see.  We walk forward through this intertwined life, messy, unclear, wondrous, of such enormous precious value.  We give thanks to the Lord and ask for more.IMG_3470 IMG_3483 IMG_3588 IMG_3591 IMG_3597 FullSizeRender-6
IMG_3626 IMG_3636 FullSizeRender-2 FullSizeRender-3 FullSizeRender-4 FullSizeRender-5 FullSizeRender IMG_0003 IMG_0013 IMG_0018 IMG_0021 IMG_0022 IMG_0023 IMG_0024 F7E5F4EF-4C94-4A4F-858B-10F1CE61C502 C7860EE9-0E66-45B9-954A-93ABD4DF8346

Help The Hutch 2015-355-(ZF-8131-68186-1-002) Help The Hutch 2015-486-(ZF-8131-68186-1-001)

Lyrics above are from J.J. Heller’s song, “Keep You Safe.”

May5

Roar

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_3369Often music fills my ears, pushing back, pushing out the distraction of sounds around me, pulling my thoughts inward, attempts at gathering all the scatter into some sort of coalescing.  Today the gray-green waves of the Pacific roar relentlessly.  A sound of static unceasing, pleasing perhaps because of the immensity of its raw power, the deep core knowledge that this is water, this is the essence of the earth expressing itself, that monotony that is staggeringly beautiful, from which you can hardly turn away.  A line of dozens of surfers bob like black buoys waiting for some moment indiscernible to me, waiting to launch into those few seconds of thrill before the white ferocity takes them down.  Eight pelicans, one behind the other, skim the surface, effortlessly, lazily.

The still quiet of my home in Montana knows nothing of this clamor, just shocking liquid quiet punctuated here and there by bird song.  Perhaps in storm the land sings with ocean, clouds fill the valley making their way up the canyon with surprising swiftness, the wind proceeds them, the trees bending from the power and the constant rush of air through millions upon millions of evergreen branches, aspen leaves shuddering, flashing.  There is that thrill, that giddiness to witness such power, wondrous terror that nothing can stop what’s coming.  And so the waves reach for the shore, again and again, a longing never satiated.

I have wondered, would I like to live near the sea?  No, sea sounds too pretty, too small and timid and kind.  This is ocean.  This is a vastness and an infinitude to give the word some beginning of meaning.  This is force unyielding.  There is absolutely no letting up.  Would that sound haggard me?  Would its backdrop to every day and every action invigorate and calm or fatigue, cause restlessness, unsettledness?

This is our life, a pounding raw power that never lets up, is always, ever-present.  Cancer, and now heart failure too, have been the backdrop to every day and every action for nearly three and a half years.  The relentless static ever demanding to be heard threatens to swamp every view.  We dared to plan a trip to San Diego, a chance to finally get away and take a break.  Canceled plans, thwarted hopes, desires cut short – these have marked us.  But there he is, Sten on the beach below the hotel room, black wetsuit and blue board receiving instruction and soon to paddle out into that fierce green fray, lit now like liquid precious stone by sunlight breaking through clouds.  The contrast of breaking waves, white, so strangely satisfying.

Allistaire’s life, ever tenuous, overlays all thoughts, undergirds all visions of future.  All seems well.  You sleep in comfy bed, you eat tasty fish tacos and then there it is, because it has always been there but something causes you to tune into that roar, that relentless pounding of cancer like the wolf threatening to blow your house down.  The barbs of cancer puncture and sorrow seeps into those lacerated places, saturating the tissues.  Now there is another layer, another strata of sorrow, ever-present, silent but pounding, roaring its reality into unnoticed places.  Jens is dead.  We repeat it to ourselves in disbelief.  I saw his body laying there on the table, clothed in plaid flannel and dirty Carhartts, a most common image.  “They didn’t do his hair right,” Jo exclaims through tears, lovingly running her hand through his hair, “he never did it that way.”  A sad smile because Jens really never did do his hair, that’s why it doesn’t look right.  I held his hand and felt the shocking cold of his arm under the shirt.  I told myself, this is Jens, he is dead, he is dead but I could not fathom it, I cannot fathom it, I don’t know how to take it in!  We sit, we walk and there suddenly we are confronted with something that brings Jens rushing to our minds.  We stare at the amazing stretcher from the ambulance, awed by its engineering design and there is Jens.  We walk down the sidewalk and see the “corn hole game” and there is Jens.  We hear Dave Matthews in the restaurant and there is Jens.  Someone mispronounces Sten’s name, I correct and go through the list of the four brothers with the norwegian names and there is Jens.  I send out a group text to give an update on Allistaire and there is Jens.  My husband’s green jewel eyes fill again and again like pools, and there is Jens, Jens.  His sweet brother is gone, gone.  His name pounds through our hearts, punctuating our days endlessly.

I don’t know if I can live with this unceasing roar.  I feel desperate sometimes, wild with the desire to use my wee force to make this all stop, turn around, never come this way again.  We have no choice.  It is unyielding, it is a reaching, a groping that will never be satisfied, not in this life.  We will never again hear Jens’ voice in this life, nor see the green of His eyes, the eager excitement in his story telling, the silly contortions of his face to make us laugh, the gentle tug of pulling Jo into his protective warm chest, the wrestling with how to live out his days – his desire for satisfying work and play.  Oh dear Jensie, I cannot comprehend that you are really never again going to walk through the door.  Surely you are just away, or more likely, I am simply in Seattle with Allistaire and you will visit or I will see you when I get to come home again, you will walk through the door for one of our big family get togethers, arms loaded with tasty food.  You will join the circle of your brothers, beer in hand and I will stand back and take in with swelling satisfaction the joy of our family together, the hope of more little kids.  But I saved all the baby stuff.  I saved it for YOU!  For you and Jo.  I wanted to see those sweet little clothes that encircled the bulgie flesh of my two little girls, on your children.  I couldn’t wait to see what they’d be like.  I have imagined you Jens over and over, holding that new warm bundle of life in your arms in awed amazement, in wonder at what you and Jo had made, Jo next to you looking on, equally rejoicing in a new little life and seeing you as a dad.  For you Jens, were to be such a sweet, sweet dad, full of joy and play.  And it is not to be and what is Jo to do with those bags of clothes, of baby gear I thrust on her?

There now, just to the side, in parallel to the bright thread is now the dark.  Every remembrance is dual, joy and pain.  Jens is dead.  There is now no hoping, no imagining his future.  There is only sadness of what might have been.  Allistaire’s future remains ultimately unknown, though there is already cost, already deep gouges in her flesh that cannot be undone.  On a Wednesday we sat huddled together on the couch at Sten’s parent’s house, Jo and all her family, the Wilsons, and all of Jens’ family, we the Andersons.  We gathered to draw together tales of Jens, bright threads of his life intertwined with ours, sorrow and joy all tumbled together.  I sat on the edge with the phone shoved up against my thigh, ever aware of its presence, that its ring might suddenly clatter into this sacred space, slicing, and telling us what is to come.  Hours passed with no word from the doctors, despite knowing that surely by now her PET/CT was complete, results would be back and final results from her bone marrow biopsy should also return soon.

When our time of remembrance wrapped up, I shut myself in Lowell’s study and sat on the carpet as close to the heater as I could get, right up against the window, staring out, watching the slow consistent fall of snow.  The day before had begun with sun and sixty degrees and then the evening turned windy and fat flakes began to fall.  All through Wednesday the snow fell.  I sat with apprehension, knowing that at any moment the next twist in this journey with Allistaire would be revealed.  I sought to prepare my heart for what might come, to see the news as from the hand of Christ.  For I believe in God who determines all of our days before one of them has come to be, God who holds all of our life in His hands.

But it gets messy see?  I seek to follow my finite mind, a trail, a nubby fiber of reasoning and it all gets mucked up.  Did God cast Jens off that mountain?  Does God command the swirling rotation of electrons around the atom’s nucleus?  Is He Lord over atom binding to atom to form molecule, joining countless others to form the cell?  Does He declare, “here your proud waves halt?”  Does he pour forth the snow from its storehouses?  Does He count the number of hairs on my head?  Is He alert to my every rising up and laying down?  And what of another head sliced off by Isis, another body rotting away from Ebola?  Where is God in these moments?  Is He God?  What sort of God? Is it His prerogative to decide if and when cancer finally gnaws away Allistaire’s life?  Is He good?

The snow falls and I wonder.  What if it’s all just a bunch of crazy talk?  I’ve read the Bible, I know.  There are wild tales there.  Mysteries.  Paradoxes.  Seeming contradictions.  Countless questions left unanswered.  Answers that make me twist and arch in discomfort.  What if there’s no point at all, simply an incredible accumulation of mutations over eons resulting in a staggering fancy arrangement of atoms?  Who cares then?  What is Allistaire’s life?  Its loss is only sadness.  And what is sadness?  An illusion?  Another blind accomplishment of evolution, a component of survival of the fittest to get me to fight for the life of my offspring so my species can go on?  Is my love mere firing of neurons?  And what of Jens?  Was he just dust laying there on the table, soon to go back to join the rest of the earth to one day become a blade of grass, energy produced as the bonds of atoms burst in that furnace burning up his flesh, to go up and join the energy of clouds and wind and light?  Is Jens simply a molecule in the scale of the fish I will eat?  But where was Jens when that body lay on the table?  For he was not there.

The snow falls and I wonder and I feel sick to my stomach.  What is the point of all this, all this agony, if all she is is a bunch of atoms?  Let her go, let her go.  Walk away.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  It’s all illusion, all dream, all for what?  But I cannot go there, the very fibers of my being rail against that view.  I have seen beauty.  I have learned of kinase inhibitors, of heart muscles beating in unison, of atoms seeking electrons to at long last be at rest.  I have looked into Allistaire’s blue eyes flashing with delight.  Jens was no longer there, just beautiful, beloved dust.  I choose one unprovable over another.  I have seen the Lord.  I have heard His voice.  I stand with Job, having tasted a bit of loss, and I yield to the Lord and allow Him to instruct me.  The waves pound the shore.  The ocean speaks of the depths of God’s love.  The sky, as far as the east is from the west, speaks of His forgiveness.  Mountains fall into the sea at His voice, declaring His power.  The stars in all their vast infinitude, well, He calls them out one by one.  I smile.  My heart yields and I stand in awe and I know that when the day comes that I see Jens again, I will have first fallen on my face in adoration, in delighted submission to the God of the Universe who orders my days.

I walked down the hall into the kitchen where folks were about to head out to another family gathering in this week of sorrows, of mourning.  In that moment I was struck with the shocking suddenness and swiftness of Jens’ death, those sixty startling seconds.  I was struck by the contrast of that quick death with the nearly three and half years that Allistaire’s life has hung as by a mere thread, numerous times dangling over seeming insatiable jaws of death.  There is no leukemia in her marrow, I tell them.  No detectable cancer in her marrow and all of the six previous spots of solid leukemia as seen on PET/CT – gone.  There is only one small new spot of likely cancer.  A 1 cm brightness on the scan shows up on the outside of her left leg in the soft tissue.  The doctors are shocked.  With her ANC plummeting to zero, they assumed they would find a marrow packed with cancer.  But no.  Again her life is sustained against all probability.

After I return to Seattle, a biopsy confirms the spot in Allistaire’s leg is cancer.  Last Thursday, with giddy excitement, Allistaire was transported by a critical care ambulance to the University of Washington for a radiation simulation and consult with Dr. Ralph Ermoian.  Her leg may be deformed in terms of its long-term growth.  It may end up being shorter than the other but radiation should be effective at eradicating the cancer in this location.  Of course any part of the body exposed to radiation is also more likely to become cancerous down the line.  The barbs snag against our flesh, but we are well acquainted with such stings and give the warnings no attention.  Allistaire is set up in the CT machine to line up her leg and create a foam form around her leg and foot to keep it precisely in place during radiation.  Lines are drawn along her shin and upper thigh to align the lasers and two tiny jail-house style tattoos are etched into her knee, needle dipped in ink and scraped into tiny dots.  She screams and trembles in fear.  How many times have I had to tell her, “I know it hurts, I know it tastes yucky, I know it is scary, but we must do it, we must, or child, you will die.”

Radiation will begin on Wednesday when Sten and I return.  The hope is that Allistaire can make it through all of the ten days with no sedation.  She will be alone and must stay totally still for approximately five minutes “in the vault” each day, with several 30 seconds blasts of radiation.  It will be wonderful if she can do this without sedation.  While the three episodes of cardiac anesthesia (for her bone marrow biopsy, PET/CT and biopsy of leg) went great, sedation does pose its problems for the heart, specifically in reading the signs of how well the heart is functioning.  Each sedation brought lower blood pressures and an increased BNP.  Sedation requires no eating for long periods of time, impacts energy and can increase nausea.  The cardiologists feel that Allistaire is very ready to wean off of her Milrinone and have been eager to give it a try.  But sedation would confuse all the indicators of how well her heart and body would tolerate the wean.  They decided to turn down her Milrinone from .3 to .2 on Saturday and will keep it at this dose until after radiation on Wednesday.  If she does well without needing sedation to stay still during radiation and the wean of Milrinone appears to be going well, they will then turn her down to .1.  Today’s echo showed an ejection fraction of 31, down from the last one of 34 which was done from the prior at 38.  Each three of these echos the cardiologists say look essentially same, but boy what I wouldn’t give for better numbers.  Exciting times and nerve-wracking times.  Times of ever waiting.

If you walk in the Allistaire’s room, you will encounter a sweet-eyed five-year old girl bursting with joy and life and an insistent plea that you play with her.  What you see is the vibrant life of a girl we are so passionate to save, but there are happenings below the surface that constantly reveal another story.  She tested positive for C-Diff (Clostridium difficult), a bacteria in the gut, which has meant she’s been not only in ordinary contact isolation, but now contact enteric which means she hasn’t been able to leave her from for the last two weeks.  Her course of antibiotics wrapped up yesterday and if she remains symptom free, she will likely be allowed to roam the halls in a few days.    We hope she can fully get over this as sometimes C-Diff can be pesky and keep coming back.  Her other challenge is that her marrow has been incredibly slow to recover.  It finally did recover from her heavy-duty round of chemo that began in January but with this most recent round of chemo about six weeks ago, her ANC plummeted from nearly 1,700 down to 8.  The chemo she received, Azacitadine, is not supposed to be very count (marrow) suppressive but clearly her marrow has just been beaten down so relentlessly.  The major problems with this is that it means her blood counts aren’t recovering well enough on their own, resulting in continued red blood and platelet transfusions which tend to be hard on the heart (they are a big fluid increase and the fluid is heavy/dense).  Also, with such low white blood counts, she is far more vulnerable to infection of all kinds and it takes far longer to get over infections.  On top of it all, Allistaire still has cancer that needs to be warred against.  It has been six weeks since her last round of chemo began which means she’s two weeks past when she would normally begin another round of chemo.  The door to cancer cells has been left wide open.  She needs chemo.  She needs her marrow to recover.  It is all such a delicate balance and requires decisions to be made with no guarantee of outcome, just hope, hope.

The most recent bomb dropped on us unintentionally came when Dr. Ermoian talked to us about radiation.  He referenced the conversation he had with Dr. Gardner about the pros and cons of this focal radiation.  He mentioned that she said Allistaire would not be able to get TBI (Total Body Irradiation).  My mouth dropped.  My heart dropped.  Heat clamped down on the back of my neck.  Allistaire was not able to get TBI in her last transplant.  It is a core part of her hope to finally be cured of AML.  It can have long term serious consequences for the heart.  Oh God.  Here we are again – your most powerful weapons to kill the cancer are the very weapons that will in turn take your child’s life.  There are no letters to sound-out the agonizing wrathful rage and sorrow I feel at this plight.  I want my child to LIVE!!!!!  Then Dr. Ermoian says that it is not even clear how effective TBI is in the long run.  Dr. Gardner’s words from months ago come flooding my mind, “We like TBI so much we give it to babies.”  Her point was that they so believe in the worth of TBI that they even give it to infants – to infants!!!!  Do you know what TBI is?  I will quote again what the Fred Hutch website says, “it is like being near the epicenter of a nuclear blast.”  Your baby, my little girl, intentionally placed near the epicenter of a nuclear blast?!  Would you ever do that?  You would, you would if it was your only hope that your child might live.  But what wretched, agonizing choices, not really choices at all.  You may be weary of me asking you to give money to cancer research.  But I’m going to ask you again, if you haven’t already, would you consider giving to Obiliteride? Obiliteride is a fundraiser where 100% of donations go directly to cancer research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research.  Donate HERE.

I have been so thankful for Jo’s heart in the face of losing Jens.  My heart and faith have been encouraged as she has sought the Lord, His directing, His holding her up, His provision.  She has determined to be on the look out for what He will do, what He is up to.  Her fight has only just begun.  These days I have felt so weary, circling endlessly in this eddy, little to no seeming progress forward, no end in sight.  Mine has been a choosing to lift my eyes to Christ for three and half years.  Jo’s soaring spirit admonishes mine to look back over the bounty of God’s provision, of His faithfulness, of His words etched into my heart over these years.  And really, Jo’s fight to have eyes to see the Lord did not begin on April 11th with Jens’ body hurled over cliffs, nor did mine begin with Allistaire’s diagnosis.  No, long before these days, in long years past, a seed was planted and the root has gone down.  Our thirst for our Father, a scanning the horizon of our days for His face, came long before.  Do not wait for tragedy to seek His face.  Determine to seek Him now.  Thirst.  Hunger.  Yearn.  I believe lie when I live in wait for my circumstances to line up with my desires for how my life should look, waiting to truly live, to know rest and satisfaction.  The Lord IS my life!  The Lord IS my dwelling place, my home.  My Father is my sabbath rest now, now!

With Jo’s permission, I have copied below her words from Jens’ memorial service and a link to the video of the service HERE

“Jens.
 A single. Mighty. Syllable. Four letters that align so solidly beside one another, providing a foundation on which to build a life, develop character, cultivate relationship, grow ever more in integrity.

Jens.
 A name woven deep into the tapestry of my soul, your fibers reinforcing my own at their weakest places and adding depth and beauty to my places of strength.

Jens. Jens. Jens.
 I hear your name with each beat of your heart and with it I am transported, whisked away to cold, foggy early mornings in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone, peering with anticipation through darkness as we wait for the first signs of dawn to show itself. Another heartbeat and I sit in the passenger seat of the 4-Runner as we bounce along dirt roads of Montana, nowhere to be but right where we are. My heart beats again and I find us snuggled in the tent perched high in the mountains, your face lit up as clear as day with each bolt of lightning that cracks above us, your eyes gleaming, awed by the display of power and beauty of our God. Another thump of my heart and I look over my shoulder to see you flex your strength against the waters, navigating the raft down the river or the canoe through the lake, you tirelessly paddle and steer as you smile back at me. My heart beats and we wake up and our eyes meet – we both smirk and shake our heads in wonder of the ball of black and white fur that so masterfully weaseled his way between us in the night – Peyto Dog was ever faithful in keeping tabs on his pack, even as he slumbered. Another beat and you’re making popcorn, pouring copious amounts of butter over the top. The next beat sends me to the garage where I serve as your third and fourth hands as you skillfully craft another beautiful wooden piece with those rough, weathered, hard-working Yensie hands. Another beat and we’re gathered around the table at your parent’s house, everyone talks and eats and talks some more. I find you on the couch or in the hammock reading, another Ivan Doig book down, another rich classic finished. I find myself on skis, skinning up a glistening, iridescent blanket of snow off the Teton Pass, following you and Peyto Dog up, up, up… and surfing the deeps back down again. I see you crawling around endlessly on your hands and knees, a thick furry blanket over your back as you delight Allistaire with your bear grunts and tickles. I walk around beside you around the park at night in the cold, your big red hat covering your head, every now and then a wisp of smoke rises as you puff your pipe. I find you lying on your back, head in a cupboard, fixing a leaking pipe, repairing the garbage disposal, troubleshooting the dishwasher that’s on the fritz. You come to bed late the night before a backcountry venture, waxing skis, ensuring you’ve packed appropriately, pouring over weather forecasts, condition reports, and the next day’s terrain on google earth just one more time before you rest. Another heartbeat and you‘re in your fleece trout pajamas being the goofy guy I so love, making up silly dance moves and striking poses, all to see my face light up and hear laughter pour out. Another beat and we’re sitting around the fire, watching for hours as the embers dance their way to the inky, star-studded sky. I blink and the night sky is still there, but the dancing embers have been replaced by the mesmerizing green + gold + white dance of the Northern Lights in Norway…

These heartbeats and moments in time continue on and on and on, filling me with memory of you. Other heartbeats are shocking, excruciatingly painful, visions of what could have been, working through the complexities and beauties of this life as we would have grown older together… these beats are unavoidable and meaningful, our unfulfilled dreams that will hang in the balance.

I press my ear to your chest, hoping to hear and feel our heartbeats align. Yours is a mighty, sure rhythm, the metronome stomping out a rhythm for your life. Oh how I marveled at it… this steady beat was at the center of all other creative rhythms you so incredibly pounded out – whether on pots and pans as a young boy, the steering wheel on road trips, the drum set in the northeast corner of the house, or as you poured out yourself on Sundays. Days you played at church I would intentionally show up after the music had already begun as I so loved pulling into that parking lot and stepping out of the car and hearing the only audible noise from inside filling air: Yens stomping out a rhythm on the bass drum, an extension of your wildly loving heart, pumping life through your body, through our family, through this community and beyond as you gave yourself with abandon to worship the Giver of all Life.

My heart has been privy to gentle whispers over the last decade of life… the first, before I knew you well, was God’s soft nudge and raising of my eyes to see you as he said, “That’s HIM”, something I never told you until 4 years later and we were husband and wife. My heart also endured a recurring dream over the last couple of years… I was always spared details about what took your life, but found myself widowed due to a ski accident, a burden that always fell to Peder to relay to me. I had this dream, this preview of life to be lived out without you by my side, and though it pained me so, it brought no anxiety. We would talk about it and you always refocused my vision, for you firmly believed that your task was to live fully vested in each day, deeply committed to taking responsibility for your actions to best preserve your life + the lives of others. The rest was up to the Giver of Life, who numbered your days before he fashioned your large cranium, wavy blonde locks, green eyes, and heart of gold in your momma’s womb… when this day came, it would matter not what you were doing, you would be ushered swiftly from this earthly realm to the feet of our Christ, our King. When the avalanche report came out detailing your accident and producing the exceptionally rare statement that there is, essentially, not a single explanation for what occurred on April 11th, my heart somehow found rest in that this was the day I had been prepared for over the last couple of years.

Your above and beyond efforts to be safe in the backcountry – from obtaining your Wilderness First Responder and Avy 1 certifications and rereading through your course materials a couple times every season to the so-called “over packing” of extra first aid and survival items – has preserved the lives of your brothers and friends over the years, and for that I am exceedingly grateful.

As my heart beats on, flashing through fifty-some treasured memories and painful dreams a minute, I have yet to hear it muster “Why God?? Why now? Why my Yens??” …Instead, all I hear is the persistent inquiry, with a tone of expectation, “What are you up to, my King?” For God, you still sit enthroned in my heart and in the heavens and beckon me to love you more deeply… and you even sweetened the deal, at Yens’ request, I’m sure, by gifting me with seasonal favorites of mine, heaps of spring snow followed by blue skies and radiant spring sun, both of which bring such promise of renewed LIFE. I’m on to you, Lord, I see you moving and shaking, and extending such Love, that same wild love that brought such vigor to the heart of my grizzly bear.

So… I implore you who listen in today, on behalf of my best friend, my love, my sweet honey: slow your selves long enough to picture the four chambered organ just beneath your sternum, a perfect + harmonious balance of electricity, chemistry, pressure, and tone, a gift with at, without any conscious effort on your behalf, send the gift of life throughout your body to sustain you. WONDER. MARVEL.

Jens’ big, giving, powerful heart beckons me and you to march onward in his wake, embracing the grace and freedom he wrapped his life around, to continue to stomp out that rhythm that we’ll hear the most loudly when the thunder clouds roll in and Yens takes to his drum set in the sky and makes a mighty ruckus with THE KING.

You are dearly loved, deeply revered, immensely missed by a greater group of people than you would have ever fathomed… I cannot wait to look you in the eyes again, see you smile, and fall on my face beside you in worship at the Throne of Grace.”  (Written by Jonell Anderson for her husband, Jens’, memorial on 4/18/15)IMG_3254IMG_3102 IMG_3109 IMG_3119 IMG_3163 IMG_3193 IMG_3200 IMG_3201 IMG_3202 IMG_3211 IMG_3227 IMG_3232 IMG_3234IMG_3237 IMG_3257 0419151428 SubstandardFullSizeRender SubstandardFullSizeRender-2 IMG_3292 IMG_3299 IMG_3320 IMG_3325 IMG_3322 IMG_3323 IMG_3331IMG_3335 IMG_3336 IMG_3337
IMG_3361 IMG_3374 IMG_3375 IMG_3376 IMG_3382 IMG_3400 IMG_3415

IMG_2846 IMG_2854 IMG_2859 IMG_2862 IMG_2866

Apr13

Tragedy

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_1346Jens died.  Two words that I cannot comprehend fitting together.

My sweet brother-in-law, Jens, Sten’s youngest brother, died on Saturday skiing with their older brother, Peder, and two friends.  A relatively small avalanche swept him over a cliff and was dead when Peder found him a minute later.  Here are the reports:  Bozeman Daily Chronicle      Montana Avalanche Report

Here is a recent video account of the accident by Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center

I flew back to Bozeman yesterday and will be here for the week.  The memorial service for Jens will be this Saturday, April 18th at 3pm at Journey Church.  I hope to get more details out soon for those that live in the area and want to help.

Below is a post I started a week ago.  I will leave it for you as is.  It is about needing to grieve, about needing to be given permission to let loss be loss, weighty, aching loss.  Whether in sudden death or long tortuous demise, the loss is real and we must give room and allow the dark to be felt, the ravaging pain to sear.  There is hope, there is beauty but please, don’t cut short deep cavernous grief.   It is in truth, a strange accounting, a survey of all that was good, that was treasured and dear.  To cut that off, to force its dilution is in fact requiring one to forgo assessing the bounty.  Let the sorrow come, the tears flow and flow, the gut ache, let every joy past be remembered and every future, earthly joy lost, be mourned.

My fingers shake this morning as I call the hospital from my kitchen counter in Bozeman.  Once again I fear the numbers.  With an adjustment of meds, Allistaire’s heart has actually once again improved after a drop two weeks ago.  Two Mondays ago, her Ejection Fraction dropped to 23 (previously 35) and so she was put back on .3 of Milrinone, the Isosorbidedinitrate-Hydralazine was dropped and a very low dose of Carvedilol was added.  The idea is to keep her at .3 for a while and maximize her oral cardiac meds.  Her Ejection Fraction last Monday was 34.  She is set to get another echo this morning and today her BNP is 369, a beautifully low number. So I am hopeful that her heart may continue to slowly improve.

What has my hands trembling are her dropping blood counts.  We are mere days from the end of this 28-day cycle of chemo and yet Allistaire’s ANC today is 18.  It has continuously dropped over the month, and this in the face of a chemo that is not supposed to significantly suppress blood counts.  The other concern is her rising Uric Acid and Phosphorous numbers which can be a sign of tumor lysis, specifically leukemia.  A flow cytometry test was done on her peripheral blood last week looking for leukemia.  Thankfully the test came back zero percent leukemia.  So the question is, are these dropping blood counts from a severely weekend marrow that collapses at the slightest insult and the electrolyte numbers askew from the result of other meds?  Or are these all evidences of a marrow packed with leukemia cells, not allowing healthy cells to grow.  We will soon know.  On Tuesday she is scheduled to get her first bone marrow test since December.  The cardiologist feels that the improvement in her heart function makes the risk of anesthesia reasonable.  The procedure will be done in the OR with the aid of the cardiac anesthesia team because the risk is still greater than it normally would be.  Depending on the timing, we should hear results as early as Wednesday evening.  If Allistaire handles the anesthesia well, a PET/CT will also be scheduled.

I already had a plane ticket to fly out here for this coming Wednesday night, not having the bone marrow test yet on the radar.  Once it was scheduled, I realized that this could be a wonderful week with good news, or a devastating one.  If Allistaire’s marrow has a significant amount of cancer, at most we might have one last round of chemo to try.  Or we may have nothing left.  Despite all of this, she herself is full of joy and life and delight with long luxurious lashes and the softest light brown fuzzy hair.  We have been up on the cancer unit for a week, enjoying a fantastic view and the joy of familiar loving faces.  She has not been in pain and is eating okay, throwing up just every now and then.  My wonderful parents will be with her for the week.  I am blessed to have their amazing help.

And then without warning, without the slightest hint of foreshadowing, a sickle came hard and fast and swept away the life of Jensy.  Who can understand these woes?  Lord we call out to you even as we know it is You who determines our every single day, from first to last.  I find myself once again standing with Peter.  Many of Christ’s disciples and followers walked away because of His, “hard teaching.”  Jesus asks Peter if he too will leave.  Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”  The ways of the Lord are past understanding, sometimes all seems just brutal.  But to whom shall we go?  To what truths will we cling?  Some are not necessarily content, but more content to live with the unanswerable, because much is unanswerable.  Yet, as for me, I stand with Peter who went on to say, “You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”  For Christ’s words are spoken to us all.  It is true, there is an element of leaping to faith, to my faith.  There is a choosing to trust in an unseen, an unprovable.  But my faith is not blind, it is a faith with eyes wide and roving, seeking, alert and my eyes have seen the Lord and so I walk trembling, but fixed on Christ.

Hebrews 11:1-3 & 13-16

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.  By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible…All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

I rejoice that Jens is with the Lord in that heavenly country, and one day we will be reunited with him and see our Lord with unveiled face.

Post started last week:

I eye the stairs with envy, with desire.  They are swept, brushed clear of the tens of thousands of millions of pink petals, fallen like decadent snow from the cherry trees that frame the stairwell.  Time and rain and thousands of feet turned them into brown decay, so quickly replacing their fleeting soft tender beauty.  To stand in the cold spring air and sweep, step after step, cherishing and loving the temporal beauty, not condemning it for failing to live on, nor accepting its smeared muck as beauty any longer, pure pleasure, contented joy.  Joy for the fleeting beauty and acceptance of its passing.

Allistaire’s body moves slowly across the bath tub floor, delighting in the strange sensation of buoyancy, so long missed in the PICU with nothing but wee plastic baby tubs in which to bathe.  Tears prick my eyes and ever the simultaneous push and pull to give in to them and hold them back.  Sometimes I yearn to just be allowed to cry and cry and cry.  Cry without end.  Weep and cry out with face distorted by sorrow without caring who cares or who sees.  It comes to me that I would choose Allistaire again, even if I knew it meant this, all of this.  I would choose her again if such a thing were mine to choose.  I take in her small body with the quarter-inch of light brown fuzz, blonde along the hairline, her lashes long and dark, the scars and the white tubes protruding from her chest draped above the water and wrapped in Press ‘N’ Seal meant for left overs in the fridge, not life lines.  I wish to be left to cry without having to restrain, without feeling the responsibility to balance with gratitude, without having to consider another’s assessment of me, of my grief.  I don’t want to have to explain, to tell you the countless tales that have formed this mountain, this deep pit of grief.  I don’t want to need to substantiate my rightful place to feel my flesh ripped off.

But there it is, you see she is still alive and I know I have much to be thankful for but it feels like unless I stand before a grave, I am compelled to look for the light, the life, the joy, as though I have no right to see the darkness, to call it black.  And I do look for light and life and joy and I want to, but sometimes I just want to be let alone and wail in the night and weep as I fold laundry in the hospital laundry room where you have to fear your clothes stolen if you don’t get there right when your load is done and your must use the provided little capsules of detergent.  You are not at liberty to use your own detergent.  I want to pound the bed at Ron Don that feels like sleeping on a precipice on the far edge and rolling down a hill into the center.  My very sleep blares how everything feels wrong.  Everything seems askew and out-of-place and I weary of it.  I weary.

Sunday was a strangely hard day despite my attempts to make it fun for Allistaire complete with a cute dress, easter eggs filled with candy and eggs hidden around the Unit for a wee hunt.  Oh she was happy with it and only longed for more eggs to find and the nurses rejoiced to see a child out of bed, walking around in clothes from another world, taking delight in an act millions of children have done throughout childhood.  But somehow I could not muster the joy I so wanted to have.  All I could feel was loss, was sorrow, was agitation.  I found myself being short with Allistaire, short with Sten.  I had leveled an emphatic “NO” to his idea to look into VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner) as an option for our lodging for our upcoming trip at the end of the month.  Without realizing it, I hastily rejected an idea that screamed insecure to me, far preferring the normalcy and seeming trustworthiness of a reservation at a hotel where I could read through nearly a thousand reviews if I chose.

It took time and apologies and challenging slogging conversation to realize that a culmination of individual saddnesses were all piling one on top of another, threatening like an avalanche to sweep me off my feet.  I had the distinct feeling of rage at Allistaire’s leads that insist on alarming on the monitor at her every movement.  I severely lacked patience when it came to another meal time, another two plus hour stint in which I ceaselessly admonished her to take a sip of her juice and put a bite in her mouth.  When I finally pulled back, I saw my heart swapped with sadness to be in the hospital for yet another holiday, another Easter where eggs lay at nurses stations and nestled in curves of brightly colored tape to label IV pumps rather than with family around a meal and out in the grass searching for those eggs.  My heart already sagged with the knowledge that in a mere day, Sten would be gone again, not to return again for another month.  Separated again.  Alone in the fray again.  Eighty days in the PICU, nearly ninety in the hospital, with no end in sight, no guarantee of outcome.

Out of the corner of my eye, as we turned to the right from her room rather than our usual left, I saw the room down the hall flooded with lights, countless bodies in teal scrubs and masks.  We were instructed to cut short our normal loop, forgoing the last segment, first because they were putting in a line, then more activity, then a code.  Even at five in the morning when I left to exercise, the room was a blaze with light.  And then, later in the day, between walks, the room had simply gone dormant.  I recalled that the curtains had finally been drawn and then it was just empty.  Empty.  No more the lone figure on the outskirts with the orange Caregiver badge.  Empty.  I asked the nurse who I knew could not answer my question, was not allowed to tell me the truth, I asked her if that child died.  She looked at me slow and asked, “Are they still there?”  No. No.  The room is empty.  And I am just to keep walking, walking my child around this endless loop while rooms fill and empty, fill and empty and we, we languish ever walking loops.  And we are to rejoice, because we walk, we walk.

The caustic fear has diluted after countless storms and rain that washes and washes, the fear ever present but saturated in endless details and hours and days and nights.  As I walked into the hospital that Sunday evening, light staying longer, bright fierce green of new leaf a delicate airy shawl around trunks and branches, I thought, “the worst that can happen is that she dies.”  A thought so stark and naked and unadorned and assaulting and simple and brutal and calming.  A call on my phone from the nurse that Dr. Rosenberg, the attending oncologist, is looking for me, wants to talk to me.  Yes, I’ll be right up, I’m on my way in, I respond.  And suddenly it occurs to me that it can’t be good if she is calling, if she wants to see me.  We head to the quiet room where things anything but quiet are discussed.  She tells me Allistaire’s Uric Acid and Phosphorus are on the rise.  This is evidence of possible tumor lysis, of cancer cells breaking open and spilling their contents into the blood.  This is the unique mark of leukemia cells to be specific.  She has ordered a Flow Cytometry test done on Allistaire’s peripheral blood to look for cancer cells.  It won’t be definitive, not nearly as telling as bone marrow test would be, but all we can do at this point.

We talk of death.  We talk of hospice, a word so forbidden, so taboo, you fear even uttering it as though doing so will bring it into a living reality, a throbbing, visceral death.  I cry out that I do not know how to let her die.  But strange peace has seeped in, silent, filling the crevices, comforting and rocking my heart, telling me that I do not need to know, for no one does.  No one who faces this loss of child knows how to face it.  Peace tells me that my feet must simply walk and hands move, heart beats and I eyes open and close.  My body must live out whatever days and hours may come.  My heart will follow along, pulled by the body, inseparable but living out its own actions, its own bleeding, its own screaming and silence and smiles seemingly misplaced but never truer.  And I knew too, the Lord will lead my heart.  He will hold it tender even as it bruises and threatens to lose all its life blood.  Peace seeped in, like light imperceptible which ever so slowly turns darkness to day.  The slightest, barest hint of light, the sort of light you look at straight on and cannot see, light not seen by eyes, but by that essence of ourselves, that part of ourselves that knows without our knowing how.  She told me that parents who talk to their dying child about the reality of their dying rarely regret doing so.  And as her words filled the air from her numerous experiences with patients dying, I saw my one child’s face, the one with whom I have had far more occasions to talk of death with and of the life to come, the hope for a new body that can never again die – more occasions than most children will ever have with their parents forced to face the fleeting beauty of our lives.

It was actually Monday evening that I talked with Dr. Rosenberg.  For on Sunday evening I was panicked with fear, no, with terror.  Terror.  With Allistaire’s rising BNP, and the next day’s impending echocardiogram, my flesh was on high alert, ringing fear of realities the next day would hold.  I have bit by bit come to see in prayer that I need not shield myself from God.  I need not cloak my nakedness, my ugly, unlovely flaws, my tender, vulnerable, finite flesh, so desperately weak.  I am learning to not simply say that I need Him but to confess the details of my fears, my fatigue, my sorrow, my anger, my confusion, my desperate hopes.  I confess not as though sin, but of speaking out truth, of yielding the details into His care.  As the clock declared it morning on yet another Monday, I left the hospital in darkness to go exercise, robins sang, calling out one to another over and over, knowing somehow that the earth was still revolving, turning inexplicably ever again toward light despite none being visible.  Like the robins, whose calls declare such expectant hope like no other sound I know, I found tender, thriving sprouts of peace rising up, invisible but present, pressing their form into my heart without force and yet causing my heart to yield, to give way.  It was not hope that all would turn out well with Allistaire, but rather peace, peace in the face of whatever outcome.

When Dr. Hong finally arrived to convey the results of the echo, heat threaded up my back and neck and a lump formed in my throat as she told me her heart was worse, her ejection fraction down to 23 (from 35 two weeks before).  As I suspected, that forward steady march toward healing was not to be.  Her labs had been trending in the wrong direction despite her continuing to look great clinically.  She still had energy and appetite and her profusion seemed ample.  She said that she would not adjust Allistaire’s Milrinone yet but keep it at .1 until she could discuss things with the rest of the Heart Failure team.  I went to Magnuson Park to sit in the sun surrounded by fresh air and light and blue water

IMG_1354 IMG_1349Solveig & Jens 1 Solveig & Jens 2 Solveig & Jens 3 IMG_1066

Mar29

Quiver

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_3065I can’t tell you what it’s like to lose your child.  I simply don’t know.  But I can tell you what it’s like to walk through this world with your child’s life ever, ever hanging by a thread, ever threatened, the wolves snarling, the glint of teeth.  I see the girl in her soccer uniform with her mom and little sister as I descend the escalator in Target.  My legs weak and muscles quiver, drowning in some sort of chemical sorrow, trying to catch their breath.  Such beautiful normal life.  People out living their extraordinary, ordinary lives and I feel perpetually trapped on the other side of a glass wall.  The little blonde haired girl sucking her thumb in the coffee shop, wearing the same tights I once bought for Allistaire, tights not too small to wear, just irrelevant in the world of the hospital.  I walk through the clothing section for little girls, barbs pierce my flesh.  I buy her clothes because clothes mean you are alive, you have a life.  But I don’t buy a size up with a future in mind, even clothes that acknowledge the change of season only serve to declare her plight, a life lived inside where temperatures never change, wind never blows nor rain falls.  I see people out in their yards raking, mowing, digging, flowers bursting and I envy, I envy.  I long to be on knees, hands in dirt, pulling weeds, clearing the dead debris of winter and sinking flowers into soil.  My life is lived in strange parallel, at moments seeming to cross over but ever tied to a rope threatening to pull me down, pull me under.

I have routines that on the surface create the ruse that there is normalcy, but these days are only normal because they repeat without seeming end.  Weekends are strangely hard.  They are a gift because they are a chance to be out of the hospital while my parents stay with Allistaire and I get two nights of unbroken sleep.  But they are spent alone.  Alone I go to the movie.  Alone I eat at a restaurant.  And I have chosen this.  There are many who would join me but I have preferred to be alone because I so weary of the constant barrage of human interaction every day, all day and night at the hospital.  I am desperate to flee from it and yet, I don’t want to be alone.  I want to be with my family.  I want to be doing ordinary things like waking up together in the morning, making breakfast, doing laundry, going to the grocery store, sitting in my chair by the window, sweeping up the incessant needles from the fir tree, making dinner.  But I am cut off from these ordinary pleasures and so I pass through spaces, silent, appearing to be apart of the world of the living, but like some agonizing spirit, dwelling in the space between.

My mind feels gripped in a vice, pressure now intensifying, now releasing but ever-present.  The numbers are relentless, my brain analyzing them ceaselessly, turning them over this way and that, holding them next to sets of numbers from other days, trying, trying to make sense of it.  What am I seeing?  What do they tell me?  I look at her and I see bright thriving jubilant life that could and would flourish all the more if we could just escape the grip of this place.  We have officially passed the mark of 365 days lived within this hospital, one year of her life spent within the confines of these walls.  Twenty percent of her life has been lived constrained to Seattle Children’s Hospital.  Sixty-five percent of her life has been spent fighting for her very life.  I weary.  Oh how I weary and yearn with panting desperation at times to just get away, get out, flee.  But there is no escaping, there is no breaking over the walls in the night and running and running until you can’t anymore.  The only way out is to be released.

Last week the doctors had a planning meeting.  On that day, Allistaire’s BNP was a beautiful wee little 500 or so and her kidney function numbers, her BUN and creatinine were gorgeous, proclaiming happy kidneys profuse with blood.  Most of last week was an ongoing struggle with her being nauseous, throwing up consistently once or twice a day.  Sometimes she would just be nauseous in the morning and throw up once, having no issues the rest of the day.  Some days she would eat well, getting in all her needed calories and fluid, just to throw up ten minutes after going to bed.  I felt under tremendous pressure, knowing that nausea and lack of appetite can be signs of heart failure.  Helping her get in the necessary calories and fluids is totally my realm of responsibility and I was desperate for her to demonstrate that she could do it.  Yet each time she cried out in terror of impending throw up, clutching the little gray basin in front of her chest and out would come hours of effort, I felt such overwhelming defeat.  Each time she threw up it meant we were behind on calories, behind on fluids and with far less time to get them in before the end of the day.  The moment she finished throwing up I had to put milk or juice and food in front of her again, pushing, pushing her to consume.

There are so many layers of reasons she would struggle to eat.  Three years of chemotherapy has created plenty of negative associations with eating.  Incredible gut pain from typhlitus has made her on much higher alert in terms of stomach pain.  Her entire system of stomach and intestines were at complete rest for nearly two months during which time she was on three types of hard-core broad spectrum antibiotics.  Everything is slow and any pain, whether from gas, need to burp or nausea all gets mixed up in her mind and triggers her to throw up.  Her gag reflex has intensified dramatically.  It has all led to an all day long effort to get in food and drink with repeated defeats.  I don’t know if there is anything more core for a mother than the need to feed her child.  I feel it throughout my flesh and far beyond the workings of my mind, this desperate need to provide her nourishment and all the while fear of how it will be interpreted by the doctors.  Thankfully, both the PICU attending and our ICU Continuity Care doctor, affirmed that Allistaire has many reasons to struggle with eating and that they were not overly concerned about it being directly tied to her heart function, given how encouraging she looked clinically and with all her labs.  I finally felt some relief, having been given permission by the doctors to let down my guard a little.

I was encouraged to, “look at the trajectory.”  By all other measures she was doing great.  Her BNP was bouncing around in the four to five hundreds and all her other labs were good, especially once they transitioned her from IV Lasix to PO (“Per Os” in latin which means “by mouth”).  The thing is though, a slight bump of the numbers in the wrong direction sets you on high alert, the ringing fear rising.  Yeah it’s a little blip but it could be the beginning of a frightful trend.  And so it has been, her BNP slowly rising from that beautiful low, each day a little higher and today 861.  Her BUN too slowly rising from a happy 21 to 31 today.  But the mind bending thing is, she just looks so great.  She looks great!  She’s happy, she is playful and less nauseous, rarely throwing up now.  Her average heart rate has gone up but at least some of this is due to the fact that she is far more active these days.  Ashlei, our social worker, saw her Friday after a week and a half gone, and exclaimed that she just looks so good, far more her normal self.  It’s true, her cheeks are pink and she has a delightfulness to her being.  It is a hard contrast to these numbers trending in the wrong direction.

Are we about to be dragged down again under those dark suffocating waves?  Was this just some fantastic lull, a beautiful blip?  May it not be.  Her echocardiogram is scheduled for tomorrow morning.  I know to expect her BNP to be high tomorrow as it has been each time she gets a red blood transfusion, which she got this morning.  We’ll see what her BUN and creatinine are.  I feel terror, terror.  What will I know tomorrow night?  How will the world tilt and spin in these next 24 hours?  I don’t know what to wear.  It sounds absolutely absurd, but it’s supposed to be sunny and 66 degrees but some how in some stupid way I feel distressed to wear cheery clothes that may be paired with weary tear strewn face.  I thought we might order Pagliacci’s for dinner tomorrow.  It’s always fitting, whether in sorrow or rejoicing, but which will it be tomorrow?

For so long I have been tossed this way and that, flesh shuddering against stone walls, the force bruising already bruised body again and again.  I am battered, tender and any new hit hurts deep and hurts sharp.  Like Allistaire’s chemo weary heart, so deeply wounded from relentless assault, so is my heart, my being thrown against the rocks so many times.  Am I overly dramatic?  Perhaps.  Am I asking for pity?  No.  But I find the tears so close to the surface on so many days.  It feels easier to quarantine my life to that of the hospital world rather than having to confront the extravagance of other’s ordinary life, a life for which I am ravenous.  I had allowed my mind to wander with hope for escape.  I told Allistaire there were daffodils and tulips blooming outside.  I have yearned with a keen intensity for her to be outside.  I am desperate to see her out on a playground with shoes on, not slippers.  The hoped for plan was that Allistaire would be off of Milrinone completely sometime this week.  She has weaned down .1 every three days or so and is now, as of Friday afternoon, at .1.  All she had to do was finish these last few steps, spend 24 hours in the PICU with no Milrinone and then transition upstairs to the cancer unit for a week for monitoring and getting her at the right dose on a few meds.  Then, then we would be free.  We would be released like birds too long in a small cage.  I could taste the beautiful sweet hope and see its translucent yellow ethereal light.

Like some triggered trap snapped closed, these numbers have shut out such lovely hopes.  Perhaps I should not have hoped.  Perhaps I should have kept those black blinders on my eyes, a beast of burden commanded to look only at the path immediately before you, be not distracted, keep your view small.  I have not figured out how to make this hurt less.  The only solution seems to be to be less tied to her, to loosen my grip and gain some distance, watching as if a movie, a story of some other life.  But I can not.  I can not.  I can not want less to see her live.  And even as I feel such ripping soaring hope for her to live, I fear too what sort of life she might have before her.  I want her to live that she might be ravaged all over again by transplant.  Who might she be on the other side of that?  I see the ravages other children have endured to keep their life, ravages that keep devouring more.  But wouldn’t I want a broken Allistaire rather than no Allistaire?  I would take her broken in a heart beat over having her no more.  But is this just my selfish wish, for my own good?  I look at her bright, cheerful face, her endless pleas to play hide-and-seek, her wiggly joy and I think, no, it is not just my wish.  How could I walk away from this bright spark?  How could I let up for one moment attempting to keep that flame fueled with life?

I am lulled by the cycle repeated over and over and yet shocked that it is once again Sunday afternoon and I am preparing for another week in the hospital.  Today marks her 80th inpatient day of this stay.  For seventy-two days, she has been confined to the PICU.  And here we are, on the cusp of another week and another echo.   The snow falls, flake by flake, finally amassing to something visible only when millions have fallen, though each flake so beautifully unique, intricate, designed.  The season passes and returns again.  The snow falls and is eventually blanketed by another layer, and another.  On and on it goes, year after year, individual snowflakes bound one to another and pressed down, compressing under the weight above of snowflakes past and snowfall present.  With imperceptible motion, gravity pulls at the enormity of the glacier, drawing it down, gouging sheer rock from its place of such seeming eternity.  And one day you stand in that magnificent space, that airy immensity of openness where once there was rock and now there the indescribable joy and feeling of exhilaration, of peace silently emanating from an emptiness between ridges of mountain, bright blue lake before you and green sweeps of valley rising all around, blankets of wild flowers, tender and tenacious.

What is the Lord up to?  I cannot tell you.  I stand in the storm, snow falling all around, each individual flake unique and perfectly designed and joining the masses to become indistinguishable.  I may never see with these earthly eyes, that breathtaking mountain valley, blue lake reflecting blue sky.  The Lord’s ways are not my ways.  His story, His creation spans eternity and I and this story of Allistaire are but a breath, but a passing vapor, not insignificant but designed, intricate, unique.  I don’t know what to pray, my heart too weary to muster words, but I fall at His feet.  I am so very weak Lord, so bruised and tender, tired, so tired.  Why so downcast Oh my soul?  Why so downcast?  Put your hope in God, put your hope in God.  He is my only hope.  He is my anchor in this storm, this thrashing back and forth, this constant buffeting of wind, I am tied to Him, in Him.IMG_3016 IMG_3019 IMG_3021 IMG_3022 IMG_3024 IMG_3025 IMG_3034 IMG_3036 IMG_3037 IMG_3041 IMG_3049 IMG_3055 IMG_3056 IMG_3058 IMG_3067

 

Mar16

Buoyant

Posted on by
Standard

FullSizeRenderIt’s amazing how your whole world seems to shift when you suddenly see that crack in the door that seemed so thick and dark and impenetrable, but there it is, this crazy brilliant blaze of light, flooding, arching, enlivening the air around you!  Your foot steps out with greater stride.  You yearn for a jaw and muscles of cheek that would enable a bigger smile, a fuller beam from your face.  You want to stop people and tell them, you want to lift your throat to the blue, blue sky and declare, “My kid might make it!”  I’ve been stopping to smell the flowers, the ones that smell like jasmine and fragrant the air going up the stairs to the parking garage.  The sound of birds in the morning, birds in the evening, they now sing a song you feel yourself singing – a song of declaration that life cannot be held down by death.  I careen my neck backward and stare up at the blue of sky broken with criss-cross of pale pink blooms, thousands of petals on cherry trees.  You rejoice that one can buy daffodils and tulips, even if you cannot because you inhabit a world where no plants are allowed – but they are there, exulting that spring has come, wild, exuberant, lush spring has come again to the world!

My rejoicing at the coming spring came at the very first signs of its presence, at the crocuses pushing through the soil, at the tender buds on seeming dead trees, at the sound of that first robin.  Spring makes my hear soar, soar.  In the midst of my darkest days over the past few months, spring has quickened my step, reminded my heart to hope, to be on the lookout for life, for rejuvenation, for overcoming the cold grip of seeming death.

But today I was amazed as I walked up to the front of Metropolitan Market – the absolute extravagance of life just exploded with glorious color around me.  I wanted to tell the people to stop and stare and gape and be in awe of how rich and overflowing this life is!  Look at this life!  It is a wondrous, wondrous, mind-blowing sensation to realize your child, the one seemingly doomed to death, might just make it, might just have a way through.  I tell myself to restrain, to not hope too much.  The end is yet veiled.  But I DON’T CARE!  I am full of swirling, bubbling joy at the hope, the possibility made more tantalizingly real, that Allistaire Kieron might just do what was said probably couldn’t, wouldn’t.

My dad, who spent the weekend with Allistaire, texted me as he left the hospital yesterday, that Allistaire would have an echo today.  Sudden heat of fear swamped over me.  I thought it was going to be a chill Monday.  I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about another echo until next Monday.  I scanned and scanned, running over all the details I knew about Allistaire, looking for a glimpse into today’s echo results.  What I knew is that Allistaire’s appetite had continued to improve and her energy level was nearly off the charts.  The girl was so full of wiggling, giggling life!  Signs of the wean off Milrinone failing would be fatigue, lack of energy, nausea, lack of appetite, increased BNP, increased heart rate, decreased profusion, weaker pulses, slower capillary refill, worsening kidney function numbers – none of this – there was not one indicator that the drop from .75 last Thursday to .6 had any negative effect.  If anything the girl just seemed like she should explode out of the ICU out onto a playground.

This morning I awoke with a prayer that is prayed nearly everyday as my alarm goes of at 5:37am.  “Lord, hold me up, come what may.  Lord, oh God, well you already know what I so desperately want – you know I want Allistaire’s heart to regain its strength so she can go onto have her transplant and onto life without cancer.  Help me to yield to you.  Oh Lord, hold me up, hold me up, come what may.”  The labs showed an ANC of 808, a BNP of 669 and great kidney function numbers.  Did I dare hope that today’s echo could be, well, could it be, maybe, a wee bit better?  Such a frightful thing to hope, to stick your neck out rather than roll into that protective ball like a potato bug.

The echo was wrapped up by 9:19am and I was comforted by a giant font of a heart rate on the monitor that came in about 115 beats per minute with a respiration of about 20.  So, so much better than two months ago when her heart rate was in the high 180s and her respirations in the 60 plus breathes a minute.  Then the hours wore on and on.  Allistaire’s been popping up each morning about 8am and has been in rounds with myself and the doctors nearly every morning.  She loves it.  They love it.  I love it.  I don’t think a patient in the ICU has ever participated in rounds before.  But the 8am wake-up makes the day seem two hours longer than in times past.  I had lots of time to work on writing a pile of thank you cards that had been harassing me for weeks.  I asked the nurse nearly every hour to check the computer to see if the echo results had been posted yet.  By 1:30 I asked the nurse to page the cardiologist to let her know Allistaire naps at 3pm and I’d really like to hear from her by then.  At about 10 to 3 she said she’d be there in 15 minutes.

Jenn, the Child Life Specialist, was in doing some medical play with Allistaire where Allistaire gets to do to a doll all the sorts of procedures done on her and she and Jenn talk nonchalantly about it while Jenn gathers intel about what Allistaire prefers when she gets a shot or has to have her lines flushed.  Allistaire is joyfully oblivious and just likes putting bandaids on the doll, now named Jewel.  I know the time is coming, it’s coming, at any moment Dr. Kemna is going to walk through that door.  I suddenly realize it could be worse, oh what if it is worse?  How utterly disappointing.  I pray.  I remind myself that God is in control of every detail of Allistaire’s flesh.  No matter the results, they come from God’s hand.  He will be the one handing me the results of this echo.  Will I look beyond this moment, beyond this detail of what I so desperately want.  Will I lift my eyes and look out, up, wide, high, deep, not just temporal, but eternal? Hold me up Lord.  Hold me up.

When Allistaire spies Dr. Kemna, she immediately dives underneath her blanket, a quiver of barely constrained glee.  She has clued me into the game we must play.  Jenn and I begin to fear the soaring of dragons looking for some tasty girl to munch on.  Oh dear!  Where can Allistaire be?  Oh it looks as though the dragons already got her, she is nowhere to be found.  The blanket is a roiling flowered sea of five-year old delight with periodic poking out of legs and little fingertips gripping the edges.  Dr. Kemna joins in and only amps up Allistaire’s joy.  Finally she emerges and Dr. Kemna listens to her heart and I restrain myself a few more seconds from demanding the only number I care about today.  Finally, finally she turns.

Dr. Kemna tells me she doesn’t think Allistaire’s heart has improved as much as the number indicates.  She has an ejection fraction of 35 (up from 21 last week) and a shortening fraction of 15 (up from 11).  My heart leaps and squeals with unfettered joy!  In further conversation, Dr. Kemna tells me that Allistaire’s heart does look a little better, but she’s not so sure it looks as good as an EF of 35, maybe more of an EF of 29.  Huge smiles!  Massive elation!  29?!  That’s awesome too!  I mean, good grief, 35 is spectacular but even if 29 is the conservative number – that is so totally glorious!  She says there is a clear improvement from the echo three weeks ago when her EF was 11 and the most clear improvement is that the mitral valve looks better.  Apparently, once the mitral valve begins to go, as was so clear on that awful echo three weeks ago, the heart just begins to lose steam and try as it might, it just gets worse and worse.  Once the heart is so dilated that the mitral valve begins to fail, the blood regurgitates back into the chamber and efficiency is lost.  This makes the heart have to work harder which dilates the heart still further, only worsening the whole situation.  But Allistaire’s mitral valve is on the mend and this, Dr. Kemna said, is the most encouraging sign for her heart.  The other great thing is that Allistaire is still not even on the maximum number of meds that may be able to help her heart recover.  As her dose of Milrinone goes down, the cardiologists are hoping to add Isosorbid dinitrate & Hydralazine.  Once she is stably off Milrinone, they would add on Carvedilol as well.  I’m all for as many option to help sweet girl’s heart as we have available!

As Dr. Kemna gazed at Allistaire, now frolicking to an even greater degree with Jenn and Ashlei, our social worker, she asked what is keeping Allistaire in the hospital.  “Milrinone,” I said, “only Milrinone.”  She’s off TPN and lipids and is successfully getting in enough fluids and calories each day, her neutrophil count is far over the needed threshold of a minimum of 200 and she is taking all meds by mouth with the exception of one dose of Lasix each day which can easily be converted to by mouth.  Even her chemo, Azacitadine, which is set to start sometime this week, can be given out-patient.  Dr. Kemna agreed that Allistaire is definitely ready to take the next step down in her wean off Milrinone and ordered the dose to drop to .5.  When the heart failure team met last week, they all agreed that Dr. Hong’s proposed .1/week wean was far too slow.  A typical wean is in drops of .25 every couple of days, “So,” Dr. Kemna told me, “a .1 drop every one to two days is still very cautious.”  From what she explained, often you can go a bit quicker in the wean in the middle of the doses and then just slow down more when you get toward the very end.  At this point, she will be checking in on Allistaire each day and will reassess whether or not she can drop to .4 either this Wednesday or Thursday.  “If she continues to look this good, she’ll have no problem with the next drop,” Dr. Kemna told me.

Bright, crazy beautiful beam of intoxicatingly beautiful light!  Oh, and Allistaire is no longer a baldy top.  She’s more of a fuzz top now.  So soft and so seriously adorable.  Thank you God.  Thank you!

And here’s a little gem for you to enjoy – Allistaire as a star in a short bit on PBS about music therapy 🙂  Click HERE

Feb27

Bewilder

Posted on by
Standard

IMG_2817Bewilder.  Is that the right word?  I startle to find myself out in these woods, not sure where I am, sometime between night and coming day, or is the day done and night approaching?  I am out here, cast in the land between lands, this already and not yet, ever tension.  But she is so alive?!  “So to summarize,” I say when there is nothing left to say, “You don’t believe she will make it?”  All heads nod.

I didn’t want to cry.  I didn’t want to have my heart tearing out of me be seen as with audience by these eight.  I fought the tears knowing the all consuming fatigue they bring, all the cells of my flesh flattened under crushing weight, silent and unrelenting.  I studied the tree tops beyond those panes of glass, never seeing them.  “Her heart could suddenly stop.  She could have an arrhythmia.”  Gutteral cry, “Oh God.”  It was not hard for the images of doctors swarming her to come vivid.  Throughout the day and night the speaker in the hallway, the speaker in the room declares, “Rapid Response Team, Code Blue,” always joined with the location.  “Code Blue Ocean 8 in front of the lab.”  “Code Blue River 5 room 307.”  I have seen the flood of doctors and nurses responding like blood gushing a wound.  Instantly I can hear the words, “Code Blue Forest 6 room 321,” and this time it would be my sweet girl.  I know if it came to this it would be the end.  While they might be able to bring her temporarily back, there would ultimately be no return, no recovery.  But yes, yes, yes try to bring her back because I want to gather those who have so cherished her.  I want that time to surround her with faces who hold her dear.  I want that chance to say good-bye one last time.  I want to blow her kisses.  I looked into the cornflower blue of her eyes and mourned that the one beautiful thing I clearly gave her might be lost.

Dr. Kemna, the cardiologist does not think there is a very good chance she will be able to recover the degree of heart function necessary to qualify for transplant, that far off ejection fraction of forty-five, if she can recover at all.  At some point in the future, they will try to wean her off the Milrinone.  Her ability to successfully wean off Milrinone or not will be an indicator of the likelihood that her heart can recover some function.  So while Milrinone does nothing to help the heart recover, whether or not it is needed to function well in terms of things like breathing and profusion to the rest of her body, will signal how severely her heart has been wounded or the possibility of resilience.  If she is unable to go off Milrinone, it may be possible to move her up to the cancer unit, or even possibly to Ronald McDonald House, but these moves would solely be to maximize quality time with her.  It would foretell the end.  If she can successfully wean off Milrinone she would continue on oral heart meds and consistent monitoring to see if there is any improvement in her heart function.

All efforts to improve her heart function is dependent on the resource of time.  It will take time.  The question is whether or not her cancer will allow such time.  As noted before, we are working off the assumption that she is in remission given that she started this round in remission in her marrow.  The extremely poor condition of her heart continues to make sedation unnecessarily risky.  The PET/CT scan can physically be given without sedation, it is just a matter of whether or not Allistaire can stay still enough for the 45 ish minutes it would take to do the scan and get a good image.  She can certainly lay still for the very brief 30 seconds a CT requires and so we may start with that.  Dr. Gardner said the down side of CT is that it can show lesions that are actually healing rather than solely active leukemia, with no ability to tell the difference on the image.  The advantage of the PET scan is that it shows the active metabolic cancer.  Thankfully, a PET scan carries no risk as it is not a form of radiation and so the worst that could happen is that we try it and it doesn’t yield a clear image because Allistaire doesn’t stay still enough.  For now a bone marrow biopsy is not an option, but they will be drawing peripheral blood upon which the pathologist will conduct Flow Cytometry.  While it will not be conclusive, it will be comforting if there is no leukemia present which would in turn more affirm the view that she is in remission.

Without any further treatment, Dr. Gardner says Allistaire only has about a 10% chance of staying in remission.  I can’t imagine doing nothing further.  So once her ANC reaches 1,000 she will begin getting Azacitidine.  Today her ANC is 348.  Neither Clofarabine or Decitabine are options because they suppress blood counts too much.  At this point, any further bacterial or viral infection for Allistaire could easily and immediately tip her heart over the edge.  She has no reserve.  The hope is that Azacitidine will be enough and have the same success it did in the seven rounds she had after her bone marrow transplant.  Another upside is that it can be given outpatient.  If she still has chloromas, the solid leukemia seen on PET/CT, there is the possibility of doing focal radiation which would likely be very effective.  However, radiation is given under sedation for someone as young as Allistaire.  You must lay completely still in the exact position they place you in.  Radiation is incredibly precisely targeted.  A styrofoam form was created to lay Allistaire in the last time she had radiation and three permanent little dots were tattooed on her body in order to line everything up with the rigorous calculations done in preparation.  Allistaire would be left totally alone in that room with the foot thick lead door.  I really don’t know if she could do it.  If Allistaire is not in remission, every single thing changes.  If she is not in remission, she is done, done.  There is nothing left to offer her because anything that has the potential to get her back in remission would be far too harsh for her body to endure.

One other possible option, which like transplant, requires substantial improvement of heart function is the WT1 trial with the modified TCRs being conducted by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. (Click HERE for details on this trial)  This trial requires that Allistaire’s ejection fraction be 35 or higher.  Typically the cell manipulation is done with donor cells left from a stem cell transplant, however, in Allistaire’s case they could ask the donor to donate cells directly for this trial.  The scientists would engineer the donor’s T-cells to specifically target the WT1 protein expressed on the surface of her leukemia cells and in turn destroy the cancer cell.  Check out more about TCRs (T-Cell Receptors) at Juno Therapeutics some of whose scientific founders include Dr. Phil Greenberg at Fred Hutch and Dr. Mike Jenson at the Seattle Children’s Ben Town Research Center.

The other topic that was discussed was the potential use of VADs.  The other day when I logged onto the Seattle Children’s Hospital Family Network, their website popped up and the main page was featuring the expertise at Seattle Children’s and extensive availability of a variety of VADs – Ventricular Assist Devices.  My face lit up with possibility and terror at such a possibility, such an extreme measure.  It said that VADs can be used for patients with heart failure to allow their hearts to rest and recover.  I immediately tracked down the cardiologists and said I wanted to discuss a VAD as a possible option for Allistaire.  Apparently Dr. Gardner had the same idea and discussed it with the cardiologists before our care conference which occurred yesterday afternoon.  The short of it is that a VAD is not an option for Allistaire.  You cannot go through a bone marrow transplant with a VAD.  The context in which they are successfully used in the short-term is for patients whose heart has an acute hit, from a virus for example, but was previously healthy.  The VAD can indeed give their heart the rest it needs to recover and the relative health of their heart can also recover from the actual damage done by implanting the VAD.  In Allistaire’s case her heart is exhibiting the cumulative effect of all the harsh chemo she has endured.  It has been compensating a very long time and likely cannot bounce back.  A VAD in her case would only be possible as a bridge to heart transplant, which as one with cancer, she is not eligible for.  The thought of a heart transplant is insane to me, insane.  But I won’t deny that if she were in this plight on the other side of her bone marrow transplant, I would not let up, we would walk forward to the transplantation of her most core organ.  The cardiologist noted that in cases of chemotherapy induced cardiomyopathy, it doesn’t usually show up for another 10-20 years.  That sounds like a long time.  But really, Allistaire would still only be 15 to 25 years old with a heart that has failed.

It is uniquely woeful that the very treatment that has extended Allistaire’s life these past three plus years is what has so damaged her heart.  Yesterday the cardiologists wanted an X-ray of her lungs to look for edema.  They put the little lead heart on her groin again and it was like a knife twisting in me.  In the care conference I found myself internally crying out, “You’ve already taken so much from her, so much…now this too, this?!”  I’ve already yielded her ovaries.  I’ve already acquiesced to the reality that TBI (total body irradiation) would impact her cognitive abilities.  I know her growth and bones have already been harmed.  She has already lost so many days as a child, and now her heart too will be gouged out?  It is like cutting off someone’s leg and saying, be happy, you still have one leg.  And then, oh wait, we must cut off that other leg and an arm.  Limbless, you are thankful to be alive.  But you have been harmed you see?  You have been ravaged.  The exchange for your life has cost so very much.  But it turns out you cannot live without your heart.

I asked Dr. Brogan, our main ICU doctor, if he had any wisdom he could offer, having witnessed so many families over the years walk this road.  “I don’t know how to do this,” my voice bleak.  “No one knows how to do this,” he told me.  It is not natural that a child should die before their parent.  While it happens often enough, it is not the natural order.  He was very gracious toward us.  I am so very glad to have him on our team, and like Dr. Gardner, I have invited him and asked him to speak to us honestly if and when he believes we have exhausted our options.  Dr. Gardner told Sten and I yesterday at the end of the care conference when it was just the three of us, that she thinks of Allistaire every single day.  That is all I could possibly ask for.  I just need to know that she is being fought for, that she is not being given up.  And if they believe the time has come, let them speak and at last we can yield, at last we will rest from our relentless pursuit of her life.

For now, we press on.  It is not yet time to lay down and rest.  We press on, we endure.  We put our face to the wind and cry out in anguish and fierce determination.  There may be a way through, there may.  There are so many mysteries of how our God works, of his sovereignty and the intertwining of our prayers.  I am humbled, brought low, so low with gratitude for thousands who cry out to the Lord on Allistaire’s behalf, on ours.  Thank you.  Thank you my brothers and thank you my sisters, bound eternally by the blood of our sweet savior Jesus Christ.  Thank you for sharing our burden.  Thank you for standing out in the wild night under that sweep of stars, that dense shimmer and gauze of Milky Way and crying out for the Living God of the Universe to hear your one small voice!  For we are calling out to you Oh GOD!  We do not understand your ways.  What you are doing is here is so unclear, it seems so dreadfully wrong.  How will you ever, ever redeem this loss?

I find myself again standing with the blaze of roaring furnace behind me declaring that I know my God is able to save, but even if He does not, I will not bow to any other god.  I will stand in worship, though the fire consume me.  Am I fool?  Many will nod, yes.  But you see, I have seen the Lord.  I have heard His voice.  I choose to turn my face to Him.  I will again fix my eyes on Him.  I will yield again to His call to trust though the mountains fall into the sea, for the joy set before me.  For the joy that will come, but the joy too that is, that is in this present time.  I seek to be fully present to these minutes, these gritty seconds that accumulate to the sum of minutes, hours and days.  I instruct Allistaire to consider her tone with the nurses when she is irritated with their presence.  It is not about manners, it is about love, love.  I seek to love.  I seek to love Allistaire.  I seek to love Sten and Solveig.  I seek to love each nurse, doctor and person that I encounter.  For this is my life, to love the Lord my God and to love His creation that bears His image.

Thank you to so many that have given generously to further cancer research.  Thank you for your heartbreak over Allistaire’s broken heart and a yearning that there could be a better way.  If you would like to stand with us in funding cancer research so cures for cancer can be obtained without costing so much life, please consider supporting me in Obliteride which gives directly to cancer research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Also, my dear friend and fellow cancer-fighting mom, Pam, has organized a time to call out together to God on behalf of Allistaire.  The details can be found HERE on Facebook.  The time is set for next Friday morning, March 6th, Allistaire’s 5th birthday.  Please do not send any birthday gifts.  The truth is, she has enough in the way of toys and such.  If you wish to honor her life and the hope for more life, again I ask you to consider taking that desire and investing it in cancer research, and certainly, please pray for my girl.  Prayer is not some magic equation where enough prayers by enough people yields the desired result.  Philippians 4:6-7 says much to instruct us:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your request be known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”IMG_2804 IMG_2809 IMG_2824 IMG_2822 IMG_2813 IMG_2802