On the Friday before the Friday before my favorite holiday, as I was preparing to hostess out-of-town family for the first time in several years, the day I'd been dreading came.
It was the blood disorder I'd been diagnosed with a decade ago.
Manifesting as nothing more than wonky lab work all these years, now suddenly, my gums and nose were bleeding. I had multiple blood blisters in my mouth and signs of bleeding under the skin on my legs. Lab work revealed dangerously low platelets and red blood cells. I was evaluated at the ER, then whisked away by ambulance in the middle of the night to the big-city hospital an hour away.
The condition that had reared its head was CLL, a slow-smoldering form of leukemia I'd helped hold back for 10 years with whole food, meditation, reiki, acupuncture, yoga, exercise and stress reduction. My mainstream doctor told me my condition would likely one day catch up to my intentional life, a theory I hoped against, that nonetheless kept me in a state of perpetual anxiety and wait.
What would an uptick in disease look like? Would it constitute a life-threatening emergency? Would I, who never takes so much as a Tylenol, end up taking the strong immunotherapy drugs I never said I wanted? How would I differentiate between what I had to do to stay alive and what was simply the opinion of the doctors? I had no family in the area. My children were scattered, two of the three out of the country at present. Who would support and help me navigate all this?
Now, smack in the middle of this season I love, the day of reckoning appeared.
As did a cornucopia of friends and family.
And most importantly, my best, strongest self.
My friend Lisa took me to the hospital and stayed the day, and others joined. My daughter got on a plane, as did my sister. Another sister and her husband began making plans to come. Multiple friends drove the hour to the hospital with cozy socks, smoothies, homemade soup and my favorite quilt. Many more texted, called and messaged. I was encircled, and this didn't stop.
For eight days in at the hospital, I was poked, prodded and talked at. I passively stuck out my arm countless times, "Here, take it, it's yours" for vital signs, blood draws, IVs, infusions and transfusions.
And yet, however passive was my arm, there was nothing passive about the friends and family surrounding me as Thanksgiving neared, nor the strong voice that marked me captain of my own ship.
A former medical journalist and nursing assistant with a family full of nurses and nurse practitioners, I had for a decade been arming myself with talking points, including synopses of latest medical approaches. I knew how to be a cooperative, affable patient while also discerning and advocating for myself.
This is not to say I wasn't afraid. My numbers were startlingly low. There were ups and downs in the hospital, including a frightening moment during an infusion when my blood pressure dropped precipitously and stayed there for two hours. There was no sleeping in a busy hospital, hospital food and concerned family to navigate. Treatments I said I never wanted were urged by adamant doctors.
Yet I never wavered from the core of me. I kept my crochet and a bag of yarn handy, I brought a lamp from home to soften the room, I asked the doctors, why this pill, this treatment? Can this wait? What does the research say? I made friends with the nurses and stayed close to the wisdom I'd spent a lifetime cultivating.
As it turns out, I got better. Not cured. But the bleeding stopped. My lab work stabilized enough that they let me go home the Saturday before Thanksgiving, to be with my family, where I could ease into some decisions about more treatment going forward, where I found 12-hour nights of sleep, opportunities for clear thinking, and an upturned Thanksgiving.
There would be no 25 around the table this year. My sister was sick and could not come with her full family. But her 20-year-old daughter still wanted to come. I would not cook. But my niece and two of my three children insisted on preparing all the dishes they'd watched me and my sister make all these years. They sat me at the end of the kitchen in a chair like Aunt Pitty Pat and would not let me get up to as much as stir the cranberry sauce I've made every year since 1994. I surprised myself by gladly relinquishing my apron.
We don't know what we are capable of in a given situation until we are faced with it. For a decade, I had not only carried this disease with me, but the fear of it. I never knew what treatment or hospitalization would look like or how I would handle any of it.
I won't say I'm grateful the day finally came. But now I know. With the help of so many more family and friends than I thought possible, I held and handled more than I thought I could. I am stronger than I think. I am ready for whatever comes next.
It could have been a Thanksgiving lost.
Instead it was a Thanksgiving surprised by strength, wisdom, love, grace and acceptance.
It was a Thanksgiving measured by family gathered in the most meaningful way, by an uncommon gratitude for home, by an easy surrender to someone else making the cranberry sauce.
