When the Calm Descends

The blog address came from an earlier title I tried for this blog. Didn’t work. The new title is a better reflection of me – and if you’re here, I hope it’s a reflection of you…http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/search/label/Introductions

Everyone knows that hurricanes have eyes: “The eye is a region of mostly calm weather found at the center of strong tropical cyclones. The eye of a storm is a roughly circular area and typically 20–40 miles in diameter. It is surrounded by the eyewall, a ring of towering thunderstorms where the most severe weather of a cyclone occurs. The cyclone's lowest barometric pressure occurs in the eye, and can be as much as 15% lower than the atmospheric pressure outside the storm.” (wiki reference).

It’s easy to say that the past six months have left the impression on our lives of hurricane-like disaster. Panic, pain, disruption, breakdown, and exhaustion left us wrung out and completely out of our normal world.

Medical help surrounded us.

Sympathy was everywhere.

Then the chemo ended and my wife has rarely felt better – she certainly feels better than she has for the past year!

My secret worry though is wondering if we are in the eye or at the trailing edge of the hurricane. The calm that we feel may be the relief of seeing the hurricane move on past us – and the queasy feeling that it is wreaking havoc, destruction and despair on the cities farther north. The hurricane that devastated our normal life has moved on but new victims lie in its path. (My wife wrote about just this experience in her Caringbridge blog – click on the link to your right and scroll down to the June 15 entry)

But that calm may also be the one at the center of the storm.

I pray it is the first, but deep down inside, I worry if it’s the second. A good friend of mine who is going through the storm with his wife finished the initial chemo to find a month later that they are now in a battle against bone cancer lesions all over her skeleton that require radiation treatment. I wept for them when we first heard – and I now in utter selfishness, pray that this will not happen to us. I pray that we are waving goodbye to the hurricane and while I do not for one instant WISH this monster on anyone; I am breathing deeply and giving thanks that it is moving away from us.

I continue to cultivate confidence.

image: http://chemistry.csudh.edu/faculty/jim/cozmay06best/wilma.jpg