I am visiting my sister this weekend. The drive to Vermont was glorious. High clouds raced in the sky as I drove, sometimes hiding the sun, turning the sky a stormy gray against the blazing fall foliage. When the light burst through the clouds, it was if the trees were lit from within—the red maples, the yellow hickories and ash, and the deep, dark greens of the pines. Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world.” A little bit of saving happened today. I found my sister curled up in the window seat when I arrived—bald, tiny, exhausted, nauseous, depleted, yet not defeated. She takes 11 pills a day, and when I looked them up online, 5 of them noted nausea, diarrhea, and headaches as side effects. Check, check, check. She will be on these pills for up to a year. They are necessary for the bone marrow transplant to succeed. It’s so hard to see her suffer. I want to DO something to help her on this long, painful ascent to health. Although what is called for most now is patience, there IS something I can do, on a subtle, energetic level. At this stage of the post-transplant journey, many transplant patients get something called Graft Versus Host Disease, a complication from the high doses of chemotherapy and radiation given prior to the transplant. The chemo kills cancer cells but it also destroyed my sisters bone marrow cells. After transplant, my stem cells (the graft cells) made their way into my sisters (the host) bone marrow and have begun to produce blood cells again. Graft Versus Host Disease happens when the graft cells recognize the host body as foreign and attacks it. Some patients never experience this, some are mildly affected, and for some it is a dangerous situation. As well as attacking the host’s cells, the donor cells will also attack any remaining cancer cells, making Graft versus Host Disease both a peril and a possibility for cure. As my cells engraft in my sister, I am going to pay careful attention to how I treat other people over the next months. I am going to ask myself every day, as I interact with the people in my life, am I on the attack when really I should be more loving, more accepting, more embracing? Is this a time to be a lover or a warrior? Buddhists talk about the Vajra sword—the sword of wise discernment—that helps us know when to surrender and when to stand firm, when to merge and when to prevail. In most cases, loving surrender is the wise choice. But every now and then—like when a graft blood cell comes across a host cancer cell—its good to take out the sword and slay the dragon. May I make these wise distinctions in my life, and may my grafted cells do so in my sister’s body.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 03:26:29 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015