Hope giggles.

Once again it's time for the What I Learned This Week blog carnival over at Musings of a Housewife. Feel free to hop on over there and join in!

It's been a few weeks since I've done a What I Learned post. I've been a bit of a blog slacker lately. But I'm back with a post now and I've got some sharing to do. While this is not something I learned this week, it is something that I keep learning more about whether I want to or not. My dad has stage 3 Lymphoma. On the upside, the type he has is pretty treatable. On the downside, this type likes to come back repeatedly. He just started his first round of chemo (Monday) and he'll have two more days of it in this round. The thought of all the chemo and radiation treatments he'll have to go through is pretty scary. Why does the treatment seem to make a person feel worse than the cancer? It just seems crazy to have to pump a body full of poison in order to make it better.

There's a heaviness in my family right now. Not a lot is being said about it. We've gone through cancer before with my niece and it was horrible. We're trying to make light of it by joking about hair loss. You see, my dad has big, bushy eyebrows. He could use them for a comb-over they're so big. When my niece was little, she used to draw pictures of him that looked something like this:

Yes, the big line is his eyebrow. Must have been before the plucking of the unibrow. We're all taking bets as to whether he'll lose the eyebrows or not, and if he does, how long they'll hold out. His doctor gives them 3 weeks. I'm thinking they might hold on longer than that. The guessing game gives us something on the lighter side of cancer to look at. Something to focus on other than the painful thoughts that come with a cancer diagnosis.

Prayer is a big deal at times like this. We are fortunate to have good friends who are sending up prayers along with us in our time of need. God is the Great Healer and He'll never leave us. Through Him we have Hope. Hope is what keeps us fighting when others have given up. It's what reminds us that this pain is not all there is. I bought a wonderful book many years back written by Erma Bombeck called I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise - Children Surviving Cancer. In it, a group of kids who had cancer were asked to describe 'hope' as if it were an animal. Here are a few of the responses:

"Hope is about two and an half feet tall."

"He is covered with fur and it's fluffy."

"Hope giggles."

"When it talks, you're the only one who can hear it."

"Hope raises its voice sometimes. It has to talk louder than fear."

"Occasionally, Hope is shy and likes to hide."

"If you don't take good care of it...it can die."

"It will come to you only when you need it."

"Hope has offsprings like any other animal. They're called 'Hopelets.' You don't keep them. You share them with other people who need one."

Kids just have a way of explaining things, don't they? So I'll be holding on to hope and watching for good things to come. Afterall, who am I to place a limit on God?