Waiting is Living

A scan, advent, and the lights that guide our steps

Dear Friends —

So many of you have been in good touch over these past many weeks, knowing I’ve been moving through another set of steep stretches of my mountain climb. Your texts and calls and prayers are like the world’s best water bottle for these steps; a quench for moments when I’ve been thirsty for companionship and support up so many switchbacks of chemo.

I’ve completed four Foxy rounds since October. Is it like how it all was back in the fall of 2019, some people ask? Yes. And sort of. I generally feel absolutely lousy during the 48 hour cycle, and my sweet fingers sting with piercing pain whenever I touch anything cold. Dull and deep aches are common. A persistent feeling of dread surrounds every minute of those 48 hours. When the cycle is done, I usually need about three days to begin feeling myself again, but myself these days feels consistently about 30% off. Hard, but at least for now, not decimating.

Within these cycles, new hints have emerged with subtle reminders that no body can endure an unlimited number of chemo rounds. All in, I’ve completed 32 since July of 2019. Could someone do a 100? Or is 64 some kind of stretch goal for most? No one knows, and that’s because every body is magically unique. A 27 year old endurance athlete might be able to tolerate dozens of rounds; a 79 year old may be valiant in her quest to complete as few as 10. A slightly fabulous 51 year old might surprise everyone by enduring more than anyone thought possible.

Faithful readers will remember that my mountain has emerged to have two intertwining and seemingly contradictory truths: I’m doing remarkably well, which is to say, I’m strong; and I’m carrying a deep fragility, which is to say, every step on this climb is its own important miracle.

But where all these steps leading? This week I’ll have a scan to see how Foxy’s hard and magnificent chemical compounds are faring against the itty bitties in my lung. I’ve been through enough scans to know that the “wins” here will likely be modest, and hopefully revealing. Here’s what we hope to find out: the mets in my lung are a little smaller, and we also want new insight for how many more rounds make the most sense for both me, and the itty bitties.

Every mountain comes with places to pause to take out the map. Sometimes the map gives an urgent set of instructions: go higher, get out of this dangerous place. Other times a map can remind you it’s time to pause, pitch a tent, savor the view.

Most of the time, a map — at least my map these days — only gives clues. Hints wrapped in data, lab results, patterns from previous scans, my own core instincts. My medical team and I will study all the hints as carefully as we can, debate it all, and make carefully considered decisions about the next leg of the climb.

This won’t be formulaic. For my beautiful left-brained friends who would like for the map to reveal clear algorithms for next steps, I’m here to tell you you’ll need to find another patient to walk alongside. Instead, the days ahead will include an abundance of judgment calls, “what if” ideas, new opinions, mystery.

All of this feels exactly right for these quiet and increasingly dark days of advent. This is a season of waiting, of expectation. Of preparation and waiting some more. Of stirring hope mixed with heavy monotony.

Mostly it’s about having eyes to discover the flickers of light that guide our mysterious waiting days. Those lights that remind us why we’re waiting at all — we wait because we know a wondrous stirring is at work, an ever growing confidence that hope, and even healing, is on the move. A deep belief, as the scriptures say, that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

For some, emerging advent lights might spotlight a gorgeous sense of clarity. And wouldn’t that be lovely.

For most of us, I imagine our advent lights are more like candles, elegant flickers that dance and invite us to an even holier place. A place that is governed as much by faith as it is data, a place that embraces trust that there are always more trails on our maps than we can see.

So this week as I stretch out flat on the hard surface of the scanner bed, my hands clasped above my head, and while the stiff plank moves forward and backwards, I will hold my breath and then release knowing that I will leave the scanner, and I will wait.

While I wait, I will wonder where all this climbing is leading me. I’ll marvel at my new altitudes. I will want answers, knowing I likely will receive subtle directions.

I’ll hold something CS Lewis once said close: “reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

Waiting, then, is an invitation to be guided by reason and imagination — to draw ever closer to both truth and meaning. To embrace the wonder that strength and fragility aren’t paradoxes at all. Instead they are companions, twin lights forever making the other more beautiful, and illuminating.

Waiting, then, is discovering these lights anew. Surely this is living.

May your advent be full of strength, fragility, and most of all, light.

xoxo