Expectations...

The house is ready for Amanda’s return. The girls and I are ready and excited for her return. More than any of us though, she’s ready to get out of that hospital, get home, be Mommy again (to as great a  degree as she can right now),   and sleep in her own bed, snuggled up tight with the kids and me! This respite from hospital life that we’ve all been looking forward to so much looks as though it’s going to be postponed for a time though. I don’t know if that means a day, a week, or if she’ll need to go right into the next phase of the treatment, making it perhaps months.

I’m glad that since Amanda wanted to surprise the girls, by just being there after school or something, I hadn’t told them it’d be Tuesday or it’d be Wednesday. High expectations can lead to big disappointments, so in this case no expectations meant no disappointment for them. Yet. This morning Amanda told me that the Doctors are concerned about how the blasts in her blood are beginning to look. We’re trying not to have strong expectations either way. Desires, yes. Hopes, yes. Aches, concerns, worries, yes, yes, yes. But Cancer has a funny way of taking your plans and morphing them into something else entirely. So while we believe in the power of positive thought, prayer, grace, and that life is ultimately good, maybe we’d be wise to shelf plans and expectations for a while.

She’ll get the next biopsy tomorrow. Its results should fruit some concrete answers, and surely some more speculation and a whole new set of possibilities and what-if’s.

I wrote all of that last night and was too tired to finish, but an ending to this one occurred to me in the form of an analogy this morning.

Sophie and I were out on the front stoop and she noticed these big bugs on their backs. I explained that like a turtle on its back, they can't flip themselves over, without help. I realized that I feel rather like a June bug stuck on its back. External forces have rendered us helpless to do anything about our situation but flail our legs, not expecting, but full of hope for a good outcome.