Take no thought for the morrow

Today it's easy to "take no thought for the morrow". There's nothing to worry about tomorrow, except whether we'll have a good turnout for choir practice.

It's a little harder not to take thought for the marrow, as in the marrow of my bones. The chemotherapy has done its destructive work on my bone marrow, so my white blood cell and neutrophil counts are low. Hopefully the chemotherapy did worse damage to my tumor cells. And hopefully my counts will bounce back up quickly. They will do more lab work on Monday, and if my counts are still low they will postpone my chemotherapy treatment until my counts go back up, which is both inconvenient and scary. But as they explained to me before, this kind of situation puts me "between a rock and a rock", where I die either from infection or from interrupted cancer treatment; the latter taking a little longer. (This is where I remind myself that I'll go when I'm supposed to go, and if it's not from infection or cancer it might be by Mack truck or freak lightning strike.)

I'm hoping for good results with Monday's labwork. Monday is not "the morrow", but it's the day after the morrow. (Maybe that's why it's still on my mind.) Monday is a day for collecting other important information, too. It's MRI day again. That nervous picture day for my brain; the breathless ritual that repeats every eight weeks. If all goes well, it will mark six months since my last recurrence, and if I can go six more months without a recurrence it will be a good milestone, and I will have earned the ability to coast along on maintenance chemotherapy that isn't as damaging to bone marrow. If Monday's MRI has different news, then the battle takes a new direction. It's hard to ignore.

So I'm not thinking about "the morrow" (although I am vacuuming the living room, since choir practice will be held here); just the marrow and the day after the morrow. They motivate me to pray for whatever I need to face the days ahead.