No More Tacro!

Tomorrow will be my 17-month anniversary since the transplant.  Time flies when you’re having fun!  Last week at my follow up appointment, Dr. Shah finally took me off Tacro, the immunosuppressant I have been on since the transplant.  She has been weaning me down for several months, but it has been a slow process… checking labs, watching my numbers go up and down, etc.  I have been on a weekly dose for a while now…always on Tuesdays.  So today is my first day not to take it.  Wow!  Monumental day!

As I look back over this cancer journey, at some point it seemed to turn more into a transplant journey.  While the purpose of the transplant was to deal with the cancer (which it did), all the focus was on the transplant.  I haven’t even been to a leukemia oncologist since the winter of 2012.  I go to a stem cell transplant doctor...and always will. 

That’s not a problem.  I love her to pieces!  She, by the grace of God and the miracle of modern medicine, saved my life.  My journey has just been different than others’ with different cancers.  I guess everyone’s journey is unique. 

I follow the Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplant Survivors Club on Facebook and am humbled by the number of people who have had so many struggles along the way and by the number of little children preparing to walk the same walk.  I am so thankful for the relatively small side effects I endured compared to what was on the list!  

As I eagerly await our fourth grandchild (and enjoy the first three), get to know and train this new puppy of ours (Dixie), and grab onto every precious moment with my sweet husband, I continue to be amazed by God’s grace and count each day as a blessing.  I’m still not sure what God has next for me.  My doctors and fellow transplantees keep telling me to not be in a hurry…that it takes time for the “new normal” to become normal…and that when it’s time, I’ll know.  Until then, I'm glad God knows.

Psalm 139 1-18, 23-24  “O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.  You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.  You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.  Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.  You hem me in--behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.  Where can I go from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?  If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.  If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.  If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.  For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.  My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.  When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.  All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.  How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!  How vast is the sum of them!  Were I to count them they would outnumber the grains of sand.  When I awake, I am still with you….  Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”