Just call me "One Stop"

Since we live in Seward, which is about 2.5 hours away from Anchorage, I have been doing my best to combine as much stuff as possible in a single trip. The people making my appointments have generally been very understanding and helpful with making this possible.

So next Thursday, I'll be getting a heart test at 9 a.m. to make sure my ticker can handle one of the chemo drugs (anthracycline, which can damage the heart muscle), then see the surgeon at 11 a.m. for a pre-op appointment. At 12:30 p.m. I'm slated to begin participation in a study about "chemo brain" that will go until about 2:30 p.m., when I need to start an hour's worth of "cancer training" that's required before I can begin chemo.

Then Friday, I'll need to be at the hospital bright and early for the surgical port placement at 9:30 a.m. Chemo starts that afternoon. Today I called an Anchorage medical firm that someone suggested might make trips to to small communities like Seward to provide chemo meds. But alas, that's not their purview, so these hauls to Anchorage have gotta happen.

It can feel overwhelming, sitting at the beginning of this process. All that driving, the side effects from chemo and what those things will mean to my girls, my husband and our family as a whole. I've been reading about things like "chemo brain," mouth lesions, fingernails/toenails that may all out, all-consuming fatigue and ever-constant vomiting or lack of appetite. And of course, hair that falls out by the handfuls.

And yet. If God hadn't allowed us to move to Seward when He did, I'd be making a 3-hour ferry trip to Ketchikan and catching a plane to Seattle. My family would maybe or maybe not be able to join me - with Kate in school and John being our breadwinner, it would be tough. Suddenly, these trips to Anchor Town don't seem all that challenging.

The side effects - those still seem pretty challenging to me right now ... and weirdly fascinating, in a horrific kind of way. I'm going to be living in a first-person science experiment that will mess with me and (hopefully) heal me at the same time.

A wonderful pastor we know once preached a sermon about having "an attitude of gratitude." I'm sure getting a whole new perspective of what that means nowadays.