It's a Girl

Friday, a friend called Rosina from Northern California and said "I had a dream about you. You were having a baby. It was a girl!" Rosina replied "It was me!"

What a capacity we have for shifting the context of how we think about things. When you first hear about a big illness, you are shocked and sad - it compares so poorly to your regular life! And then, for a period of time (hopefully short), it becomes your regular life. You know the feeling of getting a hotel room that you didn't like, and a day later, it's absolutely fine? Like that, except ten thousand times more unpleasant. How do we do that, and isn't it great? Not Leukemia, not illness, but adaptation. Your goods and bads, highs and lows, losses and victories are assessed in a new framework, and it helps you make things better. It helps you cope. But here it doesn't feel like coping actually, "coping" still feels like reacting to a dent in your old life. It feels like new life. Along with the difficulties of this situation (and with perhaps many more to come), there have been many many meaningful moments, most of which are related to one thing - honesty! Sometimes you have to submerge to scrape the barnacles off the hull whether you want to or not.

Rosina is doing well, better every day, having visitors and watching her Neutrophils go up. This is the main defender against infection. They still have a long way to go, but the direction is up. We're expecting her hair to fall out anytime now. I think she's ready. Chemo effects cells which divide quickly, as the hair follicle cells do. So the hair goes (temporarily), and she will "own" bald! A couple of days ago, Rosina was singing an old carnival song that loosely tranlated was "We are the bald men, and when things get tough, we're the ones the women come to!" xo ph