Resurrections

As has been the case for the last several years, my husband Warren was hired to play timpani for Easter church services at a Clintonville area Methodist church, Maple Grove. I went along as I try to go along to all of his performances.

I was raised Lutheran, although I veered away from the Lutheran church and formal religious observances early on in college. After some sampling here and there, including converting to and practicing Judaism for a number of years, I drifted back towards a belief system somewhere between Unitarianism and non-defined Christianity. I now consider myself spiritual, not religious, which I acknowledge is waffling of the first degree. All the same, eighteen years of Lutheran liturgy are engrained deeply and I can follow the Methodist liturgy with ease and am still able to quote the Apostles Creed from memory.

The minister at Maple Grove, Bill Croy, is a bright, funny, and thoughtful man of the cloth. I seem none the worse for wear for my annual exposure to his sermons. This year was no exception and the fact that I am now writing about it tells me it was more meaningful than usual.

His theme this year was "The Rest of the Story," and related to the abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark, where the women who discovered the empty tomb left troubled and afraid. Reverend Croy was interested in, as his title indicated, "the rest of the story." What changed their minds from troubled to joyous? What sparked them and the others into affirming the miracle of the empty tomb?

Croy spoke about resurrections-not just this one, but the small, everyday resurrections that mark people's lives. Any occasion where "new life [is] apparent in the midst of dead reality" is reason enough to celebrate, from the biblical resurrection to the rebirth of hope in the midst of despair.

The sermon has continued to linger in my mind and tug at my thoughts, even though this is now Tuesday afternoon, my 2008 tax picture is not good, and we are in the middle of a double concert week that will take a lot of time and energy from us both.

The pull for me is the topic of resurrections. So when Bill Croy started talking this past Sunday, something more than my ears pricked up.

In 2005, I underwent not one but two stem cell transplants in 90 days as part of my treatment for myeloma (bone marrow cancer). This unusual procedure was to study the possible benefits of tandem transplants. (Researchers have since concluded there are no benefits and so tandem transplants are no longer performed.)

Stem cell transplants are medical wonders, from start to finish. The basic procedure requires destroying the patient's bone marrow with one dose of really strong chemo, and then infusing the stem cells (harvested a few weeks earlier from the patient) intravenously 24 hours later. If all goes well, the stem cells act like seeds in a garden and grow into new bone marrow some ten to fourteen days after the infusion.

When undergoing a transplant, you watch yourself die on paper. It is a startling experience, and one I lived through twice that summer. Every morning, someone would come into my hospital room and post my latest blood work on a wall chart. The white blood count started downward, slowly at first, then faster. At day six or seven after each of my transplants, my white blood count was at zero. My old bone marrow was dead and the stem cells infused into me had not yet matured. Nor did we know yet if they would.

On paper, I was dead. Off paper, if the transplant did not take, I could be kept alive only with blood transfusions until an emergency marrow donor, if one existed, could be found. For those several days between zero and the upward nudge, I found my thoughts all over the place, always coming back to "what if?"

I was fortunate. Each time, my white blood count slowly rose, as marked daily on my wall charts. Stem cells turned into bone marrow and I came back from the dead.

It was my own personal, one-woman resurrection. And having experienced it twice, I am changed forever.

Cancer is something I live with permanently. I am not glad I got cancer; I would rather have passed this opportunity up. But given that it is now a permanent part of me, like my blue eyes, I squeeze it for every positive drop I can. I am grateful not for the disease but for what it has revealed to me: the incredible joys of life, the gifts of family and community, and, during one long and uncertain summer, the miracle of a resurrection.