Post 48, In which I am Jacob (sort of)

Paul Gaugan - Vision after the Sermon

It seems like some bible stories get a lot of play both in and out of a religious setting (Noah, I'm looking at you!), some seem to never, ever come up in or out of churches, and some are just sort of "also rans" in the world of bible stories.  I think the one about Jacob wrestling with God (or an angel, I think it depends on the translation) is one of these "also rans," but it's one I've been thinking of a lot lately.

For those of you who didn't grow up with Arch books and Taylor's Bible Stories (which, let's face it, is probably all of you except my brothers and I) and are not fascinated by Puritan naming traditions or fangirling on the Mayflower passenger Wrestling Brewster (which, let's also face it, isn't going to be a lot of you), although I trust some of you still know about Jacob wrestling, let me give a very brief summary:

Jacob stole his twin brother's birthright, ran off to another land, worked for the right to marry one girl but was tricked into marrying her sister, worked some more and married the girl he wanted to marry, had a ton of kids through both sisters and their maids, stole some more stuff from his father-in-law and ran out in the middle of the night to return home to his presumably still really ticked off twin brother. 

On the night before he was to cross the stream into his brother's land, he sent his family across and spent the night alone.  Some strange man came up and fought with him but neither of them could overcome the other and, at dawn, the stranger tapped his hip and put his leg out of joint.  Finally they agreed to stop, Jacob demanded a blessing, the stranger revealed himself to be God (or sent by God) and blessed Jacob, but his hip never did get better.

I can see why this one is in the "also ran" pile, it's kind of a weird one and hard to make out exactly what the heck it's supposed to mean.  Good thing I blog about cancer and not biblical studies, because I'd totally throw up my hands and shrug over this one.

But, as I've mentioned before, even though my cancer is in a number of bones, it's really only my hips that have been painful and fragile enough to require me to remember not to do certain things. Radiation for me is not curative but just palliative (to kill enough cancer to stop the pain), and the radiation therapy I've gotten at stage iv has only been to my left hip.  And while I was feeling better for a while after that, in the last week or so, I'm feeling pain again not in the left hip but, this time, in the right.

So, lately I've been thinking of Jacob and God putting out his finger to give him life-long pain in his hip and wondering what it all could mean.

With cancer, probably at any stage, there's a lot of wrestling with God (or the universe or fate or whatever for those who don't believe in God).  I wish I had some idea what it all meant.  Why am I the one who puts my family through this? And why them? What have I done that I'm the one wondering if I'll live long enough to see how things turn out?  Why would anyone pick my sweet husband to be widowed and these kids to have to deal with this, my daughter to be motherless?  It's, to put it frankly, a pretty crappy thing.

I wish I could be like Jacob and just demand a blessing and limp over the river at dawn to a spiffy new life in a new-old land (at least until the whole Dinah so his sons murdered everyone in town, followed by the whole famine and Joseph sold to Egypt thing, which is another popular one, which I know because even my public middle school did a production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" back in the day, so you know that story's made it to big-time).  And maybe I will end up with a great outcome, because, afterall, who knows?  It could still work out great.

But the new hip pain worries me, because, while I don't know the cause right now, new pain is not a good sign and could often indicate that the treatments I'm on are not doing a terrific job of keeping the cancer from continuing to grow.

Unlike Jacob, of course, I do have medical imaging and the combined forces of research and oncology on my side.  I had a bone scan and a CT scan last week, results to be discussed this coming week, so I'll have a few more pieces of the "what does this all mean" puzzle soon (at least in the physical sense. I don't know what kind of image it would take to clear up the spiritual questions but whatever it would take would probably net a pretty penny on Ebay).  Also, where this is all going to go in the end isn't something scans can tell me right now, although they should do a good job of helping decide whether we'll stay the course or go to something harder.

Modern medicine could have totally fixed Jacob's hip, or replaced it, or whatever.  But the story would still be really strange because a medical diagnosis wouldn't have answered the bigger questions like why God picked a fight with him and damaged his hip in the first place and what it was supposed to mean (it also wouldn't have kept him from being kind of a jerk and stealing from all kinds of everyone and being a really dysfunctionally bad father even after all the blessings he got, but that's going to have to be someone else's blog topic, not mine)

For those of you who've followed this whole indulgent post and have managed to keep your questions about brain mets to yourselves, thank you (and, for the record, brain mets are unlikely right now, not enough symptoms).  For those of you desperately looking for the exits, here's the TL;DR version:

My other hip hurts and I don't know why but I had some scans.  Also, I'm having trouble figuring out what it all means in the physical and universal senses.

More news later this week.