Life Back Home

As you can about imagine, it feels so good to be home! To just be in the same household, eating at the same table together, hearing my family’s voices, it’s all been such a gift.

Even though home is exactly where I want to be, it hasn’t always been easy. A bone marrow transplant brings your body to the lowest of lows, and then works hard to build itself back up, and I’m definitely feeling that at times. Having to go back to the hospital this past weekend was difficult. It felt like I took so many steps back, but as my PA told me today, you have to remember that it’s usually one step back and then two steps forward. And she’s right. It was only a day and a half at the hospital, but it felt like an eternity. I got the fine tune up I needed, and was able to go home pretty quickly. But it still felt like a big setback.

The chemo that is used for a bone marrow transplant is intense and causes many side effects. So intense that it’s some of the hardest chemo one can be on. One of the many side effects I’ve had is a loss of appetite, where everything tastes like metal. It’s an odd sensation and yet frustrating at times because I need to get the calories in. Some other side effects are discoloration of the skin and loss of hair, which I am now a bald woman! Hats have become a norm, but half the time I forget I’m even bald until I look in the mirror. I suppose for once, I look like a cancer patient. There are plenty more side effects, including neuropathy in the hands and feet which led to my hospitalization, but they remind me of what my body has been through. They say it can take up to 6 months to feel like yourself again, and at the moment, that feels like a LONG time. Yet I do see day-to-day improvement! I am just impatient and ready to get back to “normal” life. But that life will be a long time in coming.

Fighting leukemia after a BMT also feels like a full-time job. Between all of the appointments, labs, infusions, phone calls, etc., by the end of the day, it feels like cancer has a grip on me. But it only does if I allow it to. I have to remind myself that even though I’m a cancer and heart failure patient, it doesn’t define who I am. I desire to become completely God’s, but I can’t let even cancer, get in the way of that. Believe it or not, I have to accept this season of life with gratitude, knowing God has everything I need to get me through this.

Have you ever heard a bird sing in the dead of winter? Earlier this winter, I remember being outside and listening to a bird just singing away. It was a beautiful tune and unique all to its kind. It had me wondering if I still sing in the “winters” of my life? The drab, cloudy, difficult days. Do I sing? Am I like that simple bird, that God created, who can still sing in the gloomiest of days? That’s who I want to be.

I don’t know what these next few months will entail. I know they will consist of many appointments and healing, but in all reality, I have no idea what tomorrow will hold. If you told me I was going to go back to the hospital 4 days after getting discharged, I would have cried. In fact I did cry. But I am thankful that God doesn’t always clue us into what’s next. All I know is that today, I can sing. Even in the difficult times in life, we can still sing, with gratitude in our hearts.

What do you need to release control of so that you can be completely God’s and sing in the circumstances God has allowed in your life? God doesn’t make mistakes, but allows what he does for our good and for the good of those around us.

So let’s SING. Let’s belt out a song of gratitude for what God has given us TODAY.