Post Hospital Night Thoughts

Written 7/2/2010Tonight I find myself wondering what if feels like to be a soldier and it seems from afar that the job of those who put their lives at risk may have their heads in a similar place as some of us who are working to survive leukemia. We face a battle with a clearly defined enemy for a certain period of time. I lay here in my bed with two big poodles, in the middle of the night, just home from the hospital. Awaiting the appointment next week to discuss the next plan of action in this battle against the cells that are misbehaving and causing the rest of my remarkable team of cells to falter, I find myself considering what the mind of the soldier must accept and defend. While many soldiers survive the war experience, are any of them left unchanged by its realities? While they physically prepare to battle in unknowable circumstances how does one mentally and emotionally rest in the seat of the heart of having seen someone you respected and admired not make it to another day? Or of having watched a stranger fall as all of us are witness to when the world burrs by on the screen and the page. In the face of a day of battle is there a degree of accepting what may come your way and simultaneously fighting diligently to win?The act of putting yourself in a high risk situation knowing that it may end your life, knowing that it will change your life seems to illicit a calm bravery of sorts. Does this romanticize the soldier, the patient? I don’t know.I do know, in trying to soldier around a life-threatening illness sometimes I wish there was somewhere I could run and hide. I’ve heard some cancer patients say being called a survivor doesn’t feel right because they didn’t do anything. “It’s like strapping yourself to a freight train and calling yourself fast,” said Ben a transplant survivor I met in preparation for my own. Survivorship is clouded by the idea that there is no choice in the matter. So it seems to be that surviving is about hoping for a true quality to the days you have left to live. The (could I call it a gift?) of having a diagnosed illness is, for me at least, an unobstructed focus on the preciousness of life. So in the grip of not knowing what is going to happen tomorrow or next month or in the next year in these quiet steady moments it seems to me that the toils of the details of life abate and in the single solitary moments that crowd together one by one to create a time and place, I have already won the war. At least that’s what I like to tell myself at 5 o’clock in the morning with no firm guarantee that the Leukemia will go away and no guarantee that it won’t.When I think about the men and women who at this moment are facing a new day not knowing how it will fall together (whether or not I believe in the merits of the war they are in) I deeply respect the courage they have to live through it.