Living with Uncertainty

Hello dear family and friends,

Life's events are, at times, truly beyond words.  Do you have your seat belts fastened? This rocky boat I'm in called "My Life" is pitching and heaving all over the place!  Even with my own seat belt securely fastened I can barely hold on sometimes.  I hit a big "swell" yesterday in Dr. Chuang's office when he said the tumors (one on each kidney) have "the look of cancer".  75% of tumors in the kidneys are cancerous apparently.  Somehow I got lured into thinking this new episode was going to be no big deal, cancerous or benign.  Looking back now, I think I just couldn't fully accept yet another "heavy" setback.  This was partly based on a number of comments various people, including doctors, had said.  But Dr. Chuang is the expert and the surgeon at Kaiser who would remove them.  Needless to say, the schedule for a Bone Marrow Transplant is once again up in the air.  Uncertainty, Uncertainty, Uncertainty.

"Delicious Ambiguity".  I wanted a perfect ending or at least some hope of an ending to this long incredibly bumpy journey.  I'm learning -- the very hard way! --  that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. My ego cries out "This is unfair!  I've had enough!  How 'bout a little peace and still waters for a change?"  I imagine waking up to a day of playfulness and good feelings and I realize again that I am the one to create those feelings, despite what is happening externally.

My dear friend and mentor, Kathleen Singh, told me last week to stay in the moment by focusing on just one thing...it could be a pleasant sensation in the body, a bird chirping outside, the feeling of a cool breeze on a hot summer day, and to be cautious about "conceptualizing." What this simply means is that once I step out of THIS moment and begin to ponder my life, conceptualizing will usually take me to my "story" of the day and thus feelings of discouragement, despair, pain, depression.  Sometimes those feelings are so very powerful they whisk me off my feet before I know what's hit me and then I'm "down the rabbit hole", utterly engulfed in emotion.  Yes, sometimes it's good to let those emotions just "be", without judgment.  It's a fine line, a delicate balancing act between repression and acceptance.

The surgery for one of the tumors -- the largest -- is set for a week from this Friday, June 27.  After I've healed from that surgery, they will take the next tumor out.  Hopefully I'll be back on track for the bone marrow transplant by August or Sept.  That will be a full year since I first started the BMT trek.  A year of mysterious setbacks.

Setbacks are odd things.
They may be masquerading
as delays, but behind their
tricky grins or grimaces
They actually set me forward'
in some strange ways
I do not comprehend as yet fully.

Thank you for your love, support and ongoing prayers!

Heidi