First Chemo

Dec. 5, 2014...Zine's first chemo treatment...

Here's an update that I wrote as we began our day...

There have been so many moments of feeling certain that I am going to turn around and life will be back to the way it was. But yet, continually reminded differently. Some moments are lighter than others! Thank goodness. Some moments just make me physically ill. Some moments God uses His word or some of my friends to speak 
His love. Some moments stress just causes pain in my body. Some moments I cry. Some moments I am afraid! Thankful that in each of those moments God is there! Thankful, that even though my body feels sick from the stress and it is an experience today that evokes much fear in me, I know God is with us. And He even promises us hundreds of times in scripture to not fear for He is with us. Claiming that promise as I begin my day today. God is in the moments of life! And He is going to be in the moments of my life today! Thank goodness!!

Not only is it a first chemo day...Chloe is sick!  Is she sick sick or have her emotions made her sick?  Nonetheless, for a mama to walk out and leave their 14 year old daughter in bed with a low grade fever and throwing up only to go face a chemo treatment.  Not sure that there's anything more heart wrenching for a mama!!

Here we are sitting in the infusion center, trying to not throw up...waiting on the first chemo treatment.  Amidst this chaos, it is so refreshing to have sweet nurses taking care of you.  Every nurse here is as sweet as sweet can be!

First things first, blood work!!  Always the first thing they do here!

Then they start an IV that gives antinauea medicine.  This will take about an hour to hour and half for it to be done.

And now...it's time for chemo.

The chemo is blue.  Smurf blue!  The nurse who came to administer the drug is dressed in rubber gloves, rubber gown, covered face, quite unnerving to say the least.  Zine said, you have to dress like that to put this stuff in my body and I'm letting you put it in me...there is definitely an issue here!  But even so, the poison begins to drip.  And as the posion begins to drip in his body thru his port, my lunch that I didn't even eat feels like it is coming back up!  So glad a bathroom was nearby!  So here I stand in a bathroom in the cancer center.  The walls in the bathroom are literally spinning around me.  I am sweaty, clammy, hot.  Tears are rolling quickly down my cheeks.  And what am I doing here...I am praying.  I am praying that God would heal, that God would intervene, that we would not have to do this.  But yet reality is we are still doing it!  But right there in that bathroom, I prayed God for now, just calm my anxious heart.  And that's exactly what he did.  I regained my composure, I went and rejoined Zine.  Before this bag of chemo has dripped thru, every ounce of color leaves my love's face!  He goes from looking like a healthy person (other than the fact he uses a wheelchair) to a sickly looking person.  Oh how my heart hurts!  And then his mouth becomes dry and his voice sounds shaky.  We give him something to drink.  

And then I think...who else spent some time in a garden asking for "this cup to pass from me", who else was given a drink as he hung on a cross.  Yes Jesus understands where we are.  He's been there.  His cup wasn't chemo...it was a cross.  The cross wasn't to save his own life...it was to save mine and yours.  I can't even begin to go through chemo for someone else.  I'm not even getting the chemo and I'm pretty sure that neither of us would agree to take chemo for you or our neighbor down the street.  Just a reminder that I needed that God does understand.  I may never understand on this side of heaven why we are allowed to endure such heartbreaking events.   But Jesus does!  And He understands pain and heartache!  At least we're not alone!

I Am Not Alone