Gideon’s Cancer Story

The ups, downs, and success in Gideon’s Cancer Story

Some Useful (I Hope) Articles I’ve Written, Part One

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I hate it when bloggers just sort of fizzle out, but that’s what has happened here. I’ve been writing for this website, under various site titles, since the summer of 2014, when my son Gideon was in the hospital with cancer. I had set up a website to sell my first book but didn’t think I had anything more to say. Then he got sick, I started writing about his progress, and I fell in love with blogging. But this blog/site was never intended to be one of those monster, nonstop, new-recipes-every-week behemoths. Nor was/is it any kind of “lifestyle” blog, whatever that means. For six years I’ve basically kept an online journal, with random thoughts, recipes, and books. Now I’ve pretty much said what I want to say in those areas. I believe I’ve listed my four favorite food blogs in a previous post but I don’t see that material now and don’t want to spend any more time looking for it, so here they are again:

Half-Baked Harvest
Pinch of Yum
Sally’s Baking Addiction
Smitten Kitchen

If you want some sort of home decor blog I highly recommend Young House Love, both the blog and the podcast. As I’ve said, and now repeat with perhaps a little more clarity, my main writing emphasis from now on is over at my music blog, Behind the Music. This is not a blog about music theory or performance; it’s about choral music texts. I hope, even if you don’t think you’re interested in the subject, that you’ll head over there anyway. The blog part of the website gets new posts only during the performance season of the Cherry Creek Chorale, when I write a post a week about various pieces we’re singing for upcoming concerts. I’m working on making the site a resource for choral directors, creating a clear index for every post I’ve written since 2013. This project is a big part of my writing goals for the summer. In addition I’m continuing to write short books about masterworks, with two new recent ones now finished.  Notes from Ireland is up and available on my website along with my other three books on choral music, with a series of chapters on a set of Irish folk songs that we sang at the final concert of our (sadly truncated) 2019-2020 season. My editor and tech guy (i.e. my husband) now has the text of my book on the Rutter Requiem, which I expect to go live within the week. The great thing about doing material such as this is that the supply of subject matter is inexhaustible.

In the meantime, to close out this blog, I wanted to post some pages on which I’ve spent a great deal of time and planned to make into some sort of e-cookbook. But that’s just not going to happen, for many reasons, the main one being that the last thing the world needs is another cookbook. So over the next couple of weeks I want to at least get these pages out to you, my faithful blog readers. Here are two general info ones to get you started:

“In Which I Modestly Present a Theory of Hospitality”

“Helpful Tools and Equipment for Great Food and Great Serving”

 

You can’t appreciate what you can’t see.

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I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy:

Level 1: Choices controlled by actual health conditions: true food allergies, celiac disease, diabetes, etc.
Level 2: Choices controlled by conscience or conviction: vegetarianism because of discomfort with the suffering of the animals killed for meat, keeping kosher either because of personal religious beliefs or because of a desire to maintain connections with family members who hold those beliefs, etc.
Level 3: Choices controlled by preference or by belief in the efficacy of a certain diet or lifestyle, often based on faulty information and often harking back to an idealized vision of the past.

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Time Refuses to Be Managed.

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This building clearly shows the passage of time, don’t it?

Today I sat down to go through an accumulation of notes I’ve taken over the past couple of years, mostly from sermons at my church and lectures at Bible Study Fellowship. I was particularly looking for ideas that I’d scribbled down in the margins about possible blog posts, while also reminding myself of the wonderful spiritual truths that have been showered down upon me from various speakers. I don’t know that I intended to spend quite as much time as I did, but now I have a manageable little pile of notepaper with various areas highlighted. So I decided to go with the idea that ended up on top, quoted above. Here’s the entire quotation:

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A Partially-Consumed but Worthwhile Book

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Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler, 2018. Available in Kindle, hardback, and audiobook formats.

I heard about this book from an episode of “Fresh Air Weekend” that kept me sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant recently and made me decide that I must get hold of it immediately. So I used one of my Audible.com credits to get the audiobook, thinking that I’d love it as much as I had the interview. I was going to plunge into it and not emerge until I was finished. It was going to be great.

Well, not so much.

I managed to get through about half of the audiobook, finding myself less and less willing to get back into it. Finally, yesterday, I started it again and then thought, ‘I can’t do any more of this.’ I may or may not go back and listen to the final couple of chapters, but I’m done with the ongoing story.

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The Ordinary Is the Extraordinary

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Girl with a clock face on her face with icons and a city skyline in the background

I wrote in the previous post about my weekend in the lap of luxury and how much fun it was. Today? Back to normal, ordinary life. I’ve just wasted some time trying to find a couple of quotations that I wanted to include in this post but decided it just wasn’t necessary. Let’s just get on with the ordinary day!

Any number of people have written about their lack of appreciation for the mundane until it’s over. Normal life is going on without their paying much attention, and then it stops. Maybe it’s something that just happens in the normal course of things: the last child goes off to school, or leaves home. The aging process moves along until one day you realize you can’t do something you always took for granted. You forget to water the new bushes and they die. (Not that that has ever happened to me!)

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We are very thankful today!

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Gideon wearing brace and hair starting to growWe are down in North Carolina for Thanksgiving visiting our wonderful relatives with whom we used to spend every Thanksgiving and Labor Day weekend.  Dear Uncle Gordie had called Gideon while he was in the hospital this summer and urged him to visit.  So we decided to come for this week.  I know I said that Gideon had signed on to a picture a week while his hair was re-growing, but his patience is pretty limited for this type of thing.  So this isn’t a very good picture, as it’s kind of distorted, BUT YOU CAN SEE HAIR!!!  He’s starting to look more like a Marine and less like a chemo patient.  The braces will still be in place for a few more weeks.  But it’s probably just as well that he kept them for this trip, as we’ve done a TON of walking  plus getting in and out of the plane and also a very small rental car.  Gideon’s back was bothering him a little bit, not from any cancer problems but just from doing much more activity than he’s used to.

People have been so kind!  We had three get-togethers while in Virginia and DC, with our friends making great efforts to include unexpected guests in the outings.  I’m writing this while digesting dinner.  And what a dinner it was.  Just in the sweet potato/squash department we had three entries.  I made my dressing recipe and it was a great success, although the sausage I used was pretty spicy.  Head on over to the entertaining section and see what the finished product looked like.

We have two more days here and then we’ll be back in DC for another wonderful Sunday morning service at Capitol Hill Baptist Church.  Unless something drastic happens, I probably won’t post during the trip.

The braces are off and the hair is back!

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Gideon looking healthy, with hair and no bracesI said that there would be one more post on this blog and then, unless there’s something big to report, that would be the end of it.  Of course, no story on earth ever really ends.  “And they all lived happily ever after” won’t be true until we get to Heaven.

HOWEVER, this part of the story is over for now.  I’ve been waiting and waiting to use the title for today’s post.  Yesterday we finally got into see Dr. Anant Kumar, Gideon’s spine doctor/neurosurgeon, and he gave the go-ahead for him to take off the braces completely.  While Dr. Rifkin, the oncologist, is a total ray of sunshine, Dr. Kumar tends very much to the darker view of things.  He said that Gideon’s Tae Kwon Do activities are probably now in the past, that there will always be weak spots on his backbone, and that the readings of scans are always a result of human interpretation.  He pointed out a space on Gideon’s tailbone that still has not grown back, saying that represented a “lesion” that was still there.  To me, the word “lesion” means “tumor.”  I usually find myself trying to argue with him when he makes these rather dire statements, and yesterday was no exception, but what’s the point?  He thinks what he thinks.  I was a bit down in the mouth after this appointment, to be honest, but Gideon was quite upbeat.  He pointed out something I’d forgotten:  the tailbone tumor (or TT) did not get radiation therapy back in May since it wasn’t threatening his spine and they were trying to give him as little radiation as possible.  So that tumor didn’t go away completely until well into chemo, several months later.  I would hope that in a few more months that bone will have regrown, too.  But there’s a limit to how many scans can and should be done.  There’s a third PET scan this Friday and the monthly visit with Dr. Rifkin next Wednesday.  We expect there to be no new news from either of those.  Now comes the anti-climactic but almost harder part:  getting back to normal physically.  Dr. Kumar gave Gideon some neck-strengthening exercises to do, as he hasn’t been able to turn his head since May.  He suggested swimming, so we need to get going on a rec center membership.  School starts on Tuesday for Gideon, and he’s taking 18 hours.  The internship that he didn’t get to do last summer is pretty much on for this one.  We’re through this chapter of the story, but there are lots of new ones to come.

Thank you so much for all of your prayers and expressions of concern.