A Decade of Leukemia - Coming Full Circle

For ten years now, I have written or blogged at times about a significant part of our family's journey, and this could well be my last post on the subject.  Over the last decade, thousands of you have walked with us through arguably one of the most horrific situations a family can experience:  the diagnosis of cancer (and more specifically acute lymphoblastic leukemia - ALL) in the life of your child.  You walked with us through the months of Brad's thirteen-year-old life on a razor's edge as he was hospitalized from the initial bacterial septic shock that hurtled us down this path.  You walked with us through three-and-a-half years of the first horrible treatment and then another two-and-a-half when he relapsed - a nearly seven-year span of treatment in all.  You walked with us through two hip replacements and two hand/wrist surgeries since then to deal with the damage from all the treatment. It has been a difficult ten years - especially for Brad.

Nine Years and Normal Again!

As my life has filled with ever more activity (of various degrees of value), my blogging has ground to a near halt.  Looking back, I see that my last post was a year ago today – wow!  Well, I cannot let August 29 pass without looking back over the last nine years, particularly this last one.  August 29, 2009, was the day we almost lost our son and it became a defining moment in my life.  When you have had a child with cancer (leukemia in particular), it redefines everything.  Spending years on end dealing with the horrifying reality of the cancer itself, as well as the ongoing damage from treatment, can easily consume you.  It impacts everything: child, job, siblings, marriage, time, finances, spiritual life, sanity and even the dog.

Life is Struggle

As I sit here in the pre-dawn minutes of December 27, 2016 with my favorite coffee mug and a quiet house, I am getting a few minutes to think – something that seems rare for me these days.  The last seven years since Brad was diagnosed with leukemia have brought a range of life events I never anticipated.  I never dreamed we would deal with our child being at the brink of death so many times.  I never anticipated our entire life in many ways would revolve around this unwelcome illness.  We learned to be extremely grateful just to be out of a hospital for holidays.  I remember the Christmas of 2009 when Brad walked again for the first time in four months, and our whole family broke down in tears of gratitude.