Awake in October

“How long?” they asked. “Forever” I said.

That snippet of conversation is one I had hundreds of times beginning in 2019. It referred to my treatments 4 weekly infusions, 5-7 hours each, every April and October, with a drug called Rituxan to treat my incurable but treatable Granulomatosis with Polyangiitis. “How long?” they asked. “Forever” I said.

While the ritual infusions are lifesaving, there are/were benefits and costs. Sounds like something I learned in Management by Objective training…benefits and costs. The benefit is to stop my body from destroying itself with an out of control immune response. A very good thing. The cost is the absence of an immune system at all, killed off by the drug, leaving me susceptible to anything and everything. A lesser cost was that in treatment months, all I could do was sleep. We’re talking 12-14 hours a day. Since April of 2019, I have missed every April and Ocotber. Till October 2021…

It’s October, and I’m awake. My pre-infusion bloodwork had none of the usual markers for active disease. My Rheumatologists recommendation is hold off on Sleeping through October. Re-do bloodwork in a few months… wait and see. So it’s October and I’m awake!

And it’s October and I am grateful. I’ve always experienced myself as a grateful person. But the contours of my gratitude have changed over the years. I was always grateful for extraordinary things, opportunities, experiences, people. I always had a sense of being gifted so much. I find now, however, that I am grateful for gifts that are everyones…at all times…when we are open to them. I am full of gratitude for the 100’s of different greens of the trees out my window. I am grateful for still water, and ripples from jumping fish, and windswept tides. I am grateful for the color of a blue sky with and without clouds and for the opportunity to watch a thunderstorm approach from the west. I am full of gratitude as I watch the white herons perch to catch the dawn on the tallest pines and preen before setting off for a day’s hunt. I am grateful of the reflections of the moon, the colors of sunrise and sunset, and trees on Lake Ibis–never the same twice.

Though complicated to reason through, it is the fact of my disease that has brought me to be AWAKE this October. AWAKE to what is freely given to all people, in all places, when we’re ready. I continue to build my reservoir of gratitude day by day, because I know it will come in handy in those darker days that come to us all. And I’m writing this all down to remind myself (and offer to you) the cultivation of this ‘awakeness’ this awareness…the filling of our reservoirs of gratitude moment by moment.

Sending peace, love and blessing to you on your journey,

Kathleen

thecelticmonk