Thank you, Lord

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
~ Frederick Buechner

I had a wonderful night.  I was awake for much of it, because of the random bouts of high heart rate.  I topped out at 172 last night.  But it didn't bother me much.  Without the sudden drop back down to 40 or 50 beats per minute, I did not suffer any chest pain or dizziness.  The only thing I felt was a sense of a my heart racing - as if I had jumped out of bed and run a lap around the unit.  This is due to my thyroid hormone levels being out of whack.

The good news for the day: I feel great.  I haven't been dizzy for 24 hours.  That is the longest I have gone without that dizzy, floaty, world-closing-in sensation since 1994.  The pacemaker is preventing the sudden drops in heartrate that have plagued me since then.  It is also preventing any rate below 45 beats per minute.  Even better, when my heartrate goes over 150, the pacemaker "captures" my heartbeat generator (the sinus node in the heart) and takes over, slowly bringing me back down to 80 beats per minute (a normal adult heartrate).  This will prevent any more life-threatening tachycardia like the one I experienced in 2002.  I couldn't be more pleased with the pacemaker decision!  Imagine a life without ever fainting...or even more amazing, without lightheadedness!

The bad news: I had one more lab test drawn to check on the status of my cancer.  It should have been entirely negative.  The test was for thyroglobulin (my "tumor marker").  It should be negative because my cancer is - in theory - suppressed by the replacement hormone I take every day (Synthroid).  Instead, the test came back at 1.8.  Which means there is cancer.  Shocker.  I need to see my oncologist, but he is on vacation until we get back from South Carolina.  So I won't know anything more until then.

One thing is healed.  And another throws it's tentacles deeper into the hidden mysteries of my body.  Yet, life itself is grace.  Each day a gift.  Today the gift is that I have a couple of weeks before I have to face cancer. And I can swim in the ocean this year because I am not going to faint!

A song kept going through my head yesterday during my pacemaker procedure - a simple chorus my mother sang to me when I was a small child, cementing the words with the notes deep in my heart and brain.  Those little song-verses are what come to me when I am at the bottom, where words fail me and I forget everything expect breathing in and out.

Thank you, Lord,

for saving my soul.

Thank you, Lord,

for making me whole.

Thank you, Lord,

for giving to me

Thy great salvation,

so rich and free.

~ Thank You, Lord by Seth & Bessie Sykes, 1929