LET'S MAKE A DEAL

PHOTO CAPTION: October 2010- The hubs, me and our twin granddaughters, Isamae & Kasia.

December 3, 2010

Okay, so I just may be the worst blogger ever to take up space on the invisible internet airwaves, which I completely don’t understand how they work, by the way. I’m still trying to figure out the radio and TV, and yes, I couldn’t record a show off of TV if you paid me. Let’s see, I haven’t blogged since April. Yep, I’m the worst.

However, just because I haven’t blogged in a coon’s age doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. I have and not particular on a subject I ever saw me blogging about—cancer. Melanoma to be exact. Well, actually atypical cellular blue nevus that had metastasized into a rare form of melanoma. Never heard of it? Me either. But now I’m an expert.

For those of you who did not keep up with the Clevelands on Caringbridge.org, let me quickly review. In March, my husband, Gary, had his yearly physical. Once again he asked the doc to take a look at the knot that had risen on his ankle. He’d had this knot for about seven years, but the last two years, it had started to grow into a small planet. To make a long story short, after three months of biopsies, etc., we were finally sent to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN to have them try and figure out what was going on. Turns out it was Stage three melanoma. And, the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes in his groin. I’m going to skip a whole lot, the bottom line is that Gary just finished his last radiation treatment a couple of weeks ago and all appears to be well. We’ll go back to Mayo in January for another PET scan just to check up on things. We’ll probably be making this trip to Mayo every three months for a while.

I had been working on my third book when all of this started. But, as soon as we began what Gary called his “medical mystery tour”, all writing on the book stopped. I couldn’t get my brain to work in that direction, so I became the family chronicler of the tour. We received lovely, touching messages from friends and family all over the country—even some from out of the country. I can’t tell you how those thoughts and prayers from others sustained us during those first awful months. Plus, we have an awesome family of God’s people that we worship with every week, who took care of us in all the important ways. I’ve truly been made aware of how holy a ‘ministry of presence’ can be.

Going through something like this has taught us many lessons and revealed more to us about our faithful God and ourselves than anything else could. I’ll be blogging about some of those enlightenments as I go along. I’ll try my best to blog a little more regularly, if you promise to stop by and visit a little more regularly. Deal?

I’ll go for now, but not before I tell you where I am right now—one of my favorite places in the world. Door County. Sister Bay to be precise. Gary and I have been here all week to celebrate the end of radiation and the beginning of what comes next for us. And…I’ve finished writing my third book while here. More about that later as well.

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll keep in touch…. I promise.

deb