Where I Have Been…

It has been a good long while since I’ve written a thing on this blog. At first it was because I became so disillusioned with the news of the world with which I was being bombarded every day; it just seemed like the human populace had lost its collective mind, and what could I possibly say about all of the insanity around me that would matter to anyone anyway?

And then, in the Fall of 2013, in the midst of my aggravation with the world as a whole, a much more pressing personal problem arose when my youngest son, at 23, called to say he hadn’t been feeling well for a few months; just tired and run down at first, but then fevers and night sweats for no apparent reason. I made him make an appointment with an infectious disease doctor who, in a matter of minutes, determined that he had lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes. It was obvious on his physical exam.

I can look back on this past year and a half now with more calm, but only because my son is thankfully still here and was in remission for about a year, giving him and the rest of us a window of opportunity to gain perspective. Now we are back at it again with chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant planned in about six weeks.

When I sat down to write about it, and almost never being at a loss for words,  I thought it wouldn’t be difficult, but I determined after pages of prose that I couldn’t properly write about it, or rather that I didn’t really want to share the experience with that degree of intimacy. Everything I put into words seemed trite, and I realized I simply could not express properly what has happened to him, me, his mother, his brothers, his fiance, his sisters-in-law, and his “Dad #2” (my husband) in the process of going through this. Oh, I can describe it, but no description seems to accurately capture the feeling of where we have been. It has changed us all, that’s all I know, and everything about it feels too personal to share completely, though some day that may no longer be true. I’ll keep the writing of that story on my “list of things to do” just in case.

January, 2019. Well, this story is definitely due for an update. When I wrote it I didn’t think about the fact that it was a cliffhanger. So…Sam underwent back-to-back stem cell transplants with chemo and radiation. He was very sick but his doctors at The Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis had a trick up their sleeves with a new protocol from Stanford University. And now…he’s back to his old self, healthy once again. He married two years ago and he and his wife have a very interesting life now in St. Louis where she is an artist and he is a partner in the game company Butterscotch Shenanigans. We don’t know what life will bring going forward, of course, but we are very grateful.