Brain…clear. Spine…clear. And the areas of fluid they’ve been watching? …smaller!
Chase’s doctor said that the images were perfect and exactly what they’d hoped for.
It’s official. Chase has finished his chemo therapy with no signs of cancer.
How I wish his scans would stay like this forever! They may, and they may not… but either way, they are clear right now and in that we have so much joy.
Last night, I wrote about a second day of testing. This has now been moved to next week due to some scheduling issues and the post-procedure counsel of the ENT.
We’d so appreciate continued prayer for Chase, especially tonight as it’s been a long day and the anesthesia was rough. He’s having significant ear pain – a common side effect of the procedure – which has him screaming at anything pitched over a whisper in the house right now. We have been told that it will pass in the next 24 hours and we pray that’s true.
Thank you for coming on this amazing journey with us. God is good.
Moment by moment.
Chase resting at home tonightI couldn’t resist adding this picture as well. It takes a pretty amazing dad to escort his child into the OR *and* rock the outfit while doing it. 🙂
Chase has completed the ear portion of his time under anesthesia without complications. Our hope is that the procedure they did will help him hear better as he has continued to show signs of losing his hearing. He is still under anesthesia right now and has been moved to MRI. As we began earlier and he walked from the waiting room into pre-op, he turned back to Bob (who was staying in the waiting room to work) and said: ” Don’t worry, Daddy! I will come back to you!” That child… Moment by moment.
“So, Chase’s counts are back… Are you sitting down?”
The moment of silence stretched out as the sick feeling in my stomach took firm root…she realized where my mind had gone and quickly filled the gap: “In a good way! It’s a good thing!“
Chase’s Thursday labs came back higher and better than they’ve been in weeks…dare I even say months? They were in fact so high, that his team wondered if I’d forgotten to take him off his daily cell regeneration injections (which cause a false high in the counts) because his white count alone was truly remarkable.
After expressing my shock and joy, I had to ask: “But, how? How is this even possible? …when he’s this far and his body is so depleted ...how is it possible to have counts this high?”
She laughed and said that she didn’t know what to tell me. Maybe it was that these last chemo rounds weren’t as harsh as the induction last Fall, or maybe it was because he’s healthy (with no colds or line infections) but truly, there was “no medical explanation” for his current numbers.
I got off the call with the phrase “no nedical explanation” ringing in my ears. Of course. Why not? That sounded right up Chase’s alley… This is why we so often say “It’s Chase“: because we frequently see his team and hospital staff confounded by Chase’s stubborn tenacity and well being in the face of what they know this cancer can and should look like in a small child.
But this particular day…this phrase…this was different. This was a reminder tailored for my heart.
You see, the end of treatment is incredibly scary. We leave our secure second home and walk back into the light of day. We face post-chemo therapies which will several-times-a-week remind us of huge obstacles Chase has to overcome in order to function. We stop being an active cancer family and start being a passive one living in a world where the majority of people we know assume life goes “back to normal” when chemo ends.
Facing this upcoming change is a middle-of-the-night fear. Terminal cancer and rushing to the hospital and walking around with a crash kit and never being in one place long enough to make eye contact with life have all become so second nature to me that I hardly remember what living was like before now.
And then the news of Chase’s inexplicably good counts…
Quietly, in my heart, Job 40-42 replayed – God’s challenge to Job in the face of what Job thinks he understands about life. Similiarly, Chase’s counts burst into the middle of my Thursday afternoon filled with quiet worry… The challenge: “You think you know what his counts should look like now? You think you know what lies ahead?”
All I could do was marvel as all my pre-concieved vanished like mist in the face of Grace and respond:
“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” Job 42:2
This is where we’re living tonight. No particular reason…just because we never stop needing to think about life this way…
Life is a troubled and winding road…switchback after switchback…and the point of biblical stories is to help us feel in our bones, not just know in our heads that God is for us in all these strange turns. The life of the godly is not a straight line to glory. It’s more like a dark and seemingly unkown trail through the mountains. There are rockslides, and slippery curves and hairpin turns that make you go backward in order to go forward, but along this hazardous, twisted road that doesn’t let you see very far ahead, and may even make you feel like you’ve been led to the edge of a cliff, God gives us encouragement and hope that all the perplexing turns of our lives are going somewhere good. Often, when we think God is farthest from us or has even turned against us, the truth is that He is laying a foundation for greater happiness in our lives. God is plotting for our joy. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ. That is a sweet and bitter providence. ~Piper
