You know what is really hard to do when you have joint pain? Type a blog post. The good news is that this round I did not experience horrific jaw pain. The bad news is that instead of 1 day of joint pain that was managed with 5mg of oxy, I had 3+ days that required 10 and 15 mg of oxy to manage. Still, I will take that over the jaw pain.

I also found out that my white blood cells were super low (like 0.08 when normal white blood cell counts are around 4.50-11). This unfortunately meant that I was advised to skip Easter services. Normally, Jarrod and I try to go to the full Tridium — Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, and Easter Day (though we skipped Easter Day last year because I wasn’t fully recovered from first chemo). It hurt pretty deep to have to skip something I’d been looking forward to and constantly rechecking with each schedule change to make sure I’d still feel up to attending.

Thankfully our parish came through for us. One of our friends tested out skyping us with his phone set up between two hymn books in the choir loft on Friday, then repeated it on Sunday morning. It was lovely. I cried because it meant so much to me. Then, our friend and pastor, Amanda, came over on Easter after service to bring us Communion. The blood made my poor tongue burn (chemo kills digestive cells, including taste buds, so essentially my tongue is really raw a lot of the time as baby taste buds try to regrow) but it was so fulfilling to have Eucharist on one of the holidays I consider most important.

It hasn’t been an easy round by far, and there’s much more to write soon about kindness and gratitude, plus the perspective gained from being treated on a leukemia ward, but that’ll come another day. For now, I’m improving greatly and I’m not in pain, but I’m still dealing with a lot of chemo fatigue so I get tired and exhausted pretty easily. Walking 2 full laps of our condo building hallway left me shaking and leaning on the wall the other evening, even with multiple pauses to catch my breath.

Also, on a crabby note, having allergies on top of chemo side effects just feels rude, like the universe rubbing salt in my wound. Thankfully those are getting a bit under control. Being exhausted and fatigued, but unable to sleep for coughing (or, my husband’s favorite — me being so exhausted I literally sleep while hacking away like some old school consumption patient), is just not cool of the universe.

However, we’re in Easter. My husband made me a delicious Easter dinner complete with a from-scratch Swiss cake roll. He made me a display of rabbits to call back to a childhood tradition my sister and I shared. I got to see lots of photos of my nephew at my childhood ballpark. And, I got to take part in the Easter worship because the people of my parish are kind and considerate, and went out of their way to include us when it would have been so easy for them to simply say they were busy and unable to help.

I think, even more than stuffed bunnies on a Pope JP-II-blessed Jubilee cloth, that’s the real spirit of Easter.