The Prognosis

The prognosis came in January.  Eighteen months at the outside.  Less if certain things happened.  We have just entered October.  Every time I write the day’s date I get a jab in my gut.  I’m just that much closer.  Moving from9-27-12 to 10-3-12 may seem so insignificant, but it eats up a significant amount of my eighteen months.  

When we had a swimming pool we always asked when we closed it around Labor Day, “What will transpire between now and when we open this next summer?”  Actually the next summer seemed to come around quickly and no trauma in-between.  Just one-day-at-a-time ticked off the calendar and suddenly we were again scrubbing the tiles and pouring in the chlorine.

When we were children, those days until Christmas or the end of school or grandma’s visit or our birthday don’t tick off quickly enough.  Somehow that changed.  It seems like just yesterday we were in January and now we are in October.  I haven’t thought of what month the eighteenth month would be.  But I intentionally have done that to keep each single precious day in sight.  I’m trying to keep a degree of normalcy.

I’ve had friends who have outlived their prognosis.  Janet was told she would live seven weeks.  At the announcement she said, “Praise the Lord!”  She credits God with her healing and is grateful for the aggressive chemotherapy program her doctors designed.  This morning she held my hand and squeezed it so hard my ring finger screamed in pain.  When I told her she apologized, but I said, “It is a testimony of how strong and well you have become.”  She smiled knowing she has come a long way by God’s grace.

Another friend Bob was sent home from the hospital enrolled in hospice and expected to slip away soon.  Yea! He has far outlived his prognosis.  He graduated, in an “alive” sense, from hospice two times and cared for his wife through her life-ending cancer.  Now more than five years from his threatening diagnosis he lives a busy fruitful life.

 

Maybe I too will go beyond my projected end.

I have more than enough friends who are currently wondering how true their prognosis will be.  Have they figured in what month their predicted end date falls? How close will that be to their birthday, their daughter’s wedding, the birth of a grandchild or their favorite season?  While others are crossing off dates in anticipation, my diagnosed friends and I are painfully aware of how time flies.

A very few know my condition.  I want it that way. It means that some of my actions, decisions or isolation may not be understood.  My prognosis is not physical.  But it is life-as-I’ve-known-it altering.  It robs every day of its ordinary life.  Every day is a pendulum that swings closer to the end.