Unknown Land

The past 20 months have been pretty uneventful health wise. There have been no trips to the ER, no hospital stays, and once we figured out that my high fevers were caused by a reaction to the CT contrast, we have just been sailing along. The medical team in Fayetteville had become special friends to us. We had become comfortable with life on the smooth path. And then I began to cough.

Four weeks ago that familiar dry cough began to reappear. Instinctively, I knew that my medicine had started to fail. For the next three weeks I would lay in bed at night and pray that this was not happening again. I would lie there and talk to God telling Him that having to do this a third time could be more than I was prepared for and that if it was His will, to just not let it be so.

The CT scan conducted just a week ago confirmed that there is a new area of concern in my right lung. The time has come to get back in the fight. It is time to move from the land we have become comfortable with. Unlike the last two times where the treatment path was clearly laid out in front of us this, this time we are staring down a path to the unknown. There are no drugs with solid test results for me to change to. Trying to decide on a treatment based on the results of one or two patients is a scary position to be in, but that is what we will have to do.

The Sunday morning we were packing to for our last trip Fayetteville, the words God spoke to Abram popped into my head. God told Abram to pack all of his belongings and move to a "land that I will show you." Those words have been stuck in my head as we have been evaluating the different drug trials that are available. We have been seeking God's direction to find the best plan for me, and while we have narrowed down the choices to two or three drugs, there still does not appear to be a clear path. We are heading into unknown lands, but the one thing we do know is that God will show us the land that we are to go to, and He will be waiting for us when we arrive.