A Death Sentence or an Opportunity?

The strategy session with doctors at the Huntsman Cancer Institute took on another dimension when the diagnosis of having AL amyloidosis came with another bit of news: a life expectancy.

My cancer specialist had very carefully taken me through the strategy.  We’ll attack the AL amyloidosis implementing a weekly session of chemotherapy for a three-month period, before we will see if my body is ready for stem cell transplants.  I didn’t come into the process with a very clear view of what that meant. Stem cell transplants usually come with a one month stay in the hospital and come with a mortality rate of 10-15 percent.  It is an option to highly consider, he said.

A doctor has to be careful not to raise expectations unnecessarily.  Mine did the best he could.  He pointed out there are options, but the reality is the life expectancy of the average AL amyloidosis patient is 18 months.

Seemed like little he said meant much after that.

My initial reaction was to remember my late friend, Gordon Daley, who was given a one-year timeframe when he became a patient at Huntsman, suffering the effects of Agent Orange.  He lived for 10 years before his body simply gave out.

The second is to realize what that general news really means.  It is an opportunity to seize the day, to put higher value on each day and to get one’s life in order. I see it as an opportunity to live, more than a preparation to die.  I don’t want to be victimized by news, I want to be liberated for however long the time left is.

From experience, I have seen the difference attitude can make in the value of life and the process.  It brought to mind the dignity I thought my mother always lived with and others I have greatly admired.

One of those people is the late LDS leader, Neal A. Maxwell, who died of cancer urging us all the while to endure to the end well.

He put it this way: “At the center of our agency is our freedom to form a healthy attitude towards whatever circumstance we are placed in!  Those, for instance, who stretch themselves in service---though laced with limiting diseases---are often the healthiest among us.  The Spirit can drive the flesh beyond where the body first agrees to go.” (Deposition, pp. 30-31.)

So I chose to seize the day, to seize the moment, to see value in what lies ahead.

Given an eternal perspective, how we live matters a lot more to God and others than how we die, or when we are called home.