I am about 2 weeks behind in sharing Chad's post about Mike. Here is Infusion 2. To read more by Chad, please Click here.
Cancers are not ever good, but I guess some can be better to have than others. Where Mike’s chemo treatment is more like an insurance policy to make sure all the margins around his removed tumor are healthy other people are taking chemo to shrink tumors that are still in their body. I looked around the waiting room of people wondering why everyone was there. Each of them has a unique story and is pursuing a journey of recovery as best as they and their doctors can figure out.
Mike looks really good. His color is better; his blood count is better; his wavy hair will probably stay attached to his thick skull. Others in the room don’t look so good and their stories read like Stephen King novels where you pray for your favorite characters to survive.
The story Mike was most interested in yesterday wasn’t his own. While he sat at one end of Boise getting chemicals pumped into him, a sweet child that was named after him was in the hospital across town having an operation on her liver. Her cancer and her treatments make everyone that have heard the details feel heavy. It makes Mike call his own infusions “chemo lite.”
We always laugh when we are together, but there was tension yesterday too. Mike held up the tube running into his body and said that he felt like he was tethered to the chair when all he really wanted to do was get up and go to the other hospital and sit at that family’s side. His ever present smile faded and his bright eyes brimmed with tears feeling not his own suffering but that of Michaella’s. He didn’t have his head bowed or his eyes closed, but I recognized his posture as one of prayer. I didn’t raise my camera to catch the emotion because it felt holy; so we just waited there.
When the drops stopped falling the tether was removed and Mike quickly got himself across town. He was running down the hallway as they were pushing Michaella into her room. She was free of the ventilator and already asking if she could eat. Better yet the surgeons were giddy. They only had to remove 10% of her liver when they had planned on up to 50%. And if the lab results are favorable the two lung surgeries she had scheduled for this week won’t need to happen either.
By the end of the night Mike was spent. He sat in my living room surrounded by his friends drinking up other stories of God’s beauty, and occasionally feeding us a morsel of truth to chew on.
It was a good day of communion, infused with grace.
Yesterday (May 7) was round two of chemo for Mike.
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