Almost Home

After ten days of high fever and sickness the likes of which I've never seen before, and hope not to see again,  my wife is out of the hospital and "at home" with me in the Seattle apartment we rented for the duration of her stem cell transplant protocol.  We--mostly I--have logged three months in this return to the not so glorious  days of living like newlyweds  and the novelty, if there ever was any, has worn off.  It's time to go home.

If all continues to go well, her doctors have told us we will be home in time for Christmas.  This comes as a welcome surprise as we had expected to be in medical stir until the end of the year.  We're ready to get on with the rest of what we hope to be our otherwise fun filled  retirement.  Frankly, until this past couple of years, I had always just assumed what we had would just blissfully go on forever.  That's stupid I realize but what do you expect from a guy who has never had anything more than a cold and never spent a day in a hospital.  Sickness and accidents were for other people, not me.   Linda, on the other hand, has had numerous health problems in the past but none as life altering or threatening as a war with cancer.  Through this now two year dance with large B cell lymphoma she has been non complaining and courageous.  After undergoing the latest five days of doctors zapping her body with the equivalent of what Fat Man and Little Boy did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only once did I hear her let slip a "why me?"  There is no question she is a better person than I.

So, we move on.  Home for Christmas, probably, and different people for sure.  Certainly we've learned that not only good things come to all of us who wait, but ALL THINGS good, bad and in-between.  A quote from a poet, I regret I cannot recall, summed it up nicely when he said, "Great nature has another thing to do to you and me...What falls away is always.  And is near."