Feb 7

Waiting. This word has come to mean much more to me lately than it has ever meant in my whole life. Just about everything I am involved in in the last month and a half has involved waiting. I wait for results, I wait for meals, I wait for my doctor to come, I wait for the nurse to come, I just plain wait. I wait in my room all day long for the next day to come, I wait for the next hour to come, I sometimes wait for the next minute to come. I wait for Deb to come back, I wait for the dietician to call, I wait for the sun to go down. I wait. Waiting has in some ways been a curse to me, nothing seems to happen quickly, and I dearly want it too. I want to be done with this disease, and I want to move on and live my life now! Sometimes in life, however, we don't get what we want and we just have to make the best of what comes along. That's what I'm dealing with right now, making the best of my current situation, and waiting. I am learning to be patient in all this, more patient than I have ever been. It's much different than anything else I've done in my life. Usually when problems come along we can actively do things to take care of them. I like to be proactive when I am faced with problems, I want to take action. In this case, however, there is not much I can do except follow the doctor's instructions. I not only cannot be proactive or take action, for the most part I must be inactive and stay in my hospital room and I am very limited to what I can actually do. Even when I was allowed to go home, I was very limited in the things I could actually do, as my blood counts weren't all the way back to normal for a lot of that time. And so I wait, and realize that I am not the only person in the world who has had to go thru this or any situation like it. I think of all the people who have had leukemia, gone thru all the waiting, and have survived. I think of people who have been prisoners of war for years, and have survived. I know for a fact (and many of you may know of some) that there are many, many instances of things that people have gone thru that are much worse than mine, and have survived. And so I wait, knowing that I can do what I must do, but also knowing that I have help. I know that because I have given my life to God, that although I may have to go thru something unpleasant, God will be there for me. God, the One Who created this world, Who keeps it going, is there to help me, Ernie Brady and I feel like I'm the luckiest guy in the whole world.
IN HIS HANDS,
Ernie