Jan 6, 2012 - A Date of Infamy

January 6th, 2012 - a date that will truly live in infamy for the Millers. Today has been one of those not-rare-enough, horrendous days when your entire life comes to a halt as everything crashes down around you and you're left with nothing but your faith to to provide enough strength to take another step. Twenty six years ago this month, my mother was taken by cancer after a long and ugly battle.  Two years ago, Andrea was diagnosed with chronic leukemia (CML).  And today, my son Daniel was diagnosed with acute leukemia (ALL) as well.  It's hard to breathe let alone think.

The small light in today's news was that the leukemia is in fact A.L.L. type which has a much higher success rate than the type that was originally suspected (A.M.L.). Still, it's acute leukemia and will require full-blown chemo-therapy to my precious little boy. I feel like I might have some inkling of what Abraham felt when he heard the words of Genesis 22:2: "Then He said, Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you." I've heard God ask me a number of times recently if I could have trusted Him through such a command. I will probably never know for certain (I hope) how I would respond to a command to take my son's life by my own hand. But the idea of trusting God entirely and completely with my son's life is nevertheless at hand.

For the uninitiated, A.L.L. is "Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia". Of the acute forms of leukemia it is the the most treatable. Typically, there is a 90-95% success rate, but the path to the cure is nothing short of horrible. Leukemia is a disease of the blood, specifically the bone marrow. In this case, white blood cells are affected, and abnormal cells begin reproducing uncontrolled in such a way that they completely overtake the marrow and "crowd out" the healthy cells of all three types (red, white, and platelets). The "cure" (chemotherapy) is actually to poison ALL fast-growing cells within the body in an attempt to rid the body of all the bad cells. Unfortunately, it kills the good ones as well as the bad ones, along with other types of good fast growing cells in the body - such as hair follicles and the lining of the entire G.I. tract. During the "therapy", the immune system is pretty much completely destroyed. While red cells and platelets can be replaced via transfusions, white cells cannot. This leaves the patient extremely susceptible to infections during the treatment. The worst possible type of infection, the doctor tells us, would be fungal because they are the most resistant to treatment anyway.

Unfortunately, Andrea and I have both had concerns about our house in recent months and have been planning to rip up the carpets and possibly sub-flooring to deal with potential mold concerns anyway. We're really not sure how we're going to deal with this right now - but putting everyone up in a hotel for the next several months doesn't seem very practical (much less affordable). Please pray for wisdom along these lines for us.

Treatment begins tomorrow (Sat 1/7/2012). In the morning he will have surgery to install a "port" which will make the myriad of injections over the coming months less painful (or likely to destroy his veins). While he's under, they will also perform a spinal tap to inject chemotherapy drugs into his spinal sheath and draw out a sample of fluid for further analysis. This port will lie just under the skin of his chest and provide an injection access point to put chemicals directly into a major vein beneath his collar bone.

In the afternoon, they'll use this new port for the first round of chemotherapy injections beginning an intensive 28 day "1st month". The goal is to have him completely cancer free by the end of that first month. But it will be another 3 years or so to complete the full round of treatments. The details of everything after the first month will depend on more tests that we are expecting results from sometime next week.

As I said at the start, it's been a horrible day for all of us. Daniel took it hard himself, partly because he has a friend who has been undergoing chemotherapy himself for brain cancer, and Daniel has seen the effects first hand. Obviously, it's a little different situation, but chemotherapy is chemotherapy, and it sucks no matter how you cut it. His mother and I are still in shock. We have barely even begun to talk about what this means or how we will deal with it. But clearly, life has come to a stop for now and "normal" has been turned on its head for quite awhile at best. I can't even bear to think about less-than-best cases right now. We'll take it one step at a time. We'll trust in our wonderful Heavenly Father Whom we know is in complete control. And we will cling to Rom 8:28 for dear life.

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers. We will lean on them heavily in the coming months.

- Tim -