Stay The Course

Psalm 119:1  You're blessed when you stay on course, walking steadily on the road revealed by God.

Stay the course. Stay the course. Stay the course. That is my mantra these days because it would be so easy to NOT stay the course.

Even when we got the repeated blood test results indicating low platelets and leukemia cells, Ruby did not show signs of being sick. Even when we found out what symptoms we may have seen that would have indicated the cancer, the symptoms didn't exist for Ruby. Even when we gave her a port, and chemo, and more oral meds than I have the mental capacity to remember the names of, and antibiotics (including one that blew her up like a balloon), Ruby does not appear to be anything other than very healthy.

So when the chemo gets wheeled into her room, it feels surreal. Like there has been a mix-up with her test results and we are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So when we hold her down twice a day for 2-4 oral medications to be administered, it feels like we are part of a crazy social experiment in stubbornness.

So when we spend day after day (after day after day) in the hospital with nothing on our agenda other than making our rounds to the garden, the play room, our speech cards, the garden again, it feels like we are locked inside of the zoo by mistake.

It would be so easy to not hook Ruby up to the chemo. It would be so easy to not give her the oral meds that she hates so much. It would be so easy - SO easy - to leave the hospital right now. I know her counts are low and she is very vulnerable to anything and everything, but her energy is so high and she is so healthy outside of her blood counts. It's all I can do some days to stay here and trust in what the doctors are telling us. Because when they tell us that we are still waiting on her numbers to go up before she gets to go home, followed by the reminder that we will start round three of chemo in our course of six less than a week after she goes home, it can be a bit overwhelming.