The last six months have been one high drama after another. Just as I made an offer on my first house, the market began to collapse and it took twice as long to close. During this period of waiting, my father, who was helping with the down payment was diagnosed with lymphoma and began a VERY aggressive chemotherapy. Nonetheless, he and the rest of my family were right there for me when the time came to strip out carpets and make the place habitable (it stank). It will be a project for a few years, but no one told me how freeing the feeling of sinking into the sofa and looking around and saying "it's mine!" really is.

Six weeks after the closing we had history-making floods that came within 20 feet of my basement door. I had very unexpected riverfront property (the river is a couple miles away but the levy broke). I was, however, one of the lucky ones. My basement is built like a bunker and remained as dusty and dry as it's been since 1920. Everyone to the east of me and everyone beginning half a block south had water in their homes. None of us are in the flood plain. I guess that's one way to get to know the neighbors.

Now through all this, Dad was still going through chemo and by the 17th of December had completed 4 of 6 treatments with no visible adverse effects. I mean, yes, he was a little sicker and a little weaker each time, but that's chemo. After all, the goal of chemo is to kill the cancer faster than it kills you, so getting sicker as the poisons accumulate in your body is to be expected.

That all changed on Friday, December 21. While Dad had no VISIBLE damage, what we couldn't see is that one of the chemo drugs, a steroid in the cocktail, had a side effect of thinning skin and all other bodily membranes. That Friday, just as Dad had no immunity to anything the lining to his colon turned into a seive and began pouring filth into his intestinal cavity.

Obviously, this isn't a good situation, but what made it worse was that it manifested itself in a way that mimicked constipation, something that was expected from the chemo, so no one was initially alarmed. That Friday Dad went from being a company owner at a business meeting at midday to being rushed by ambulance to the nearest large hospital by business closing time.

His blood pressure dropped so far that it wasn't keeping his heart beating. The filth in his system sent him into septic shock and general organ failure. Mind you, the man had a white cell count of 0 from the chemo. Since they couldn't find a blockage, they thought he had a superbug and everyone had to gown, glove, and mask to protect us, not him... He was in agony and they couldn't give him pain meds until they could get his blood pressure up enough to keep his heart running.

It is a weird thing to sit in a hospital and for days hear only "if he makes it through the: (a) night; (b) next twelve hours; or eventually (c) surgery... You begin noticing progress or the lack thereof by other things, such as staffing levels. In critical care, nurses have only two patients each. Within a few hours, they called in another nurse and my Dad had 1.5 nurses to himself and one or the other was almost always in the room.

You also begin to understand how to read all the machines and you begin counting the IVs and other tubes. At one point there were 13 lines plus the ventilator down his throat, the dialysis machine and the point where they'd done the angiogram when they thought his heart was failing. You begin counting how many of what kind of drug they are giving him and celebrate when they go from 4 antibiotics to 3, then 2 and panicking inside when it goes back to 3.

Another is the way they do or don't give you odds on stuff. When they finally figured out what was wrong with him (perforated colon) they told my Mom that the surgery normally had a 30-40% mortality. By the time he was headed to surgery they told her that his odds "were a lot worse" than that but that he would die for sure if they did not do the surgery. At the point of odds being "none" versus "slim to none" the whole concept of informed consent goes out the window. You just do what you have to do and you pray and cry...a lot.

It was four days into the saga when his doctor told us that although we were a long way from being "out of the woods" she was "cautiously optimistic" and told my mom to go home for a while because "if he makes it he's going to be in here a long time" and she had to take care of herself.

Hope is an amazing thing. It puts spring into our steps and lightens our hearts and it's all we hear. The night before the doctors told us the surgery went well and he'd come through it with flying colors. We never heard that they were fighting very hard for his life in the recovery from the surgery or that his blood pressure was creating the same issue again. It was a long time later that we realized how daring his doctor was to be "cautiously optimistic" and none of us even clued into what she meant by "in here a long time."

I remember that, in my wildest dreams, I thought it might be 3 weeks. Little did I know. As it turned out, the doctor was right to be optimistic. He finally left Critical Care after 17 days and the hospital after 6 weeks, almost to the hour.

When he got home, he was an old man, unable to care for his bodily functions, unable to walk without a walker (and only a few feet with one) and hardly able to eat. He was also cadaverously thin. When he first got home it took two of us just to do everything and I basically cooked, washed dishes, planned the next meal, did a little cleaning, and stayed up late listening to his monitor so that my mom could get a few hours of unbroken sleep each night.

On Friday, Dad was home 6 weeks. he's mostly walking without a walker and he's sleeping in his own bed again. Tomorrow they are taking away the hospital bed and the craft room returns to being a craft room and not a hospital room.

Last week we got great news from the most recent set of tests. The lymphoma is gone. There is a spot on his leg bone that they have to biopsy this week but it might just be a cyst and is certainly unrelated to the lymphoma.

On the weekend of March 8-9, I was back in my home for a whole weekend...only the second since the flood in early December. I adopted 2 cats, something I'd been planning since I moved in. I began working in my yard, tilling the soil up and planting 5 fruit trees.

Today I go back outside and continue the long hard work of screening soil for the beds I tilled. It's nice, crumbly loam. The cats gambol and jump and stalk invisible things in the yard, not to mention each other. They climb trees and roll around in the dust.

Everything seems new and hopeful. Today is Palm Sunday. Lent is almost over. For the first time I think I really understand Lent as preparation for Easter; darkness as preparation for light, and Winter as preparation for Spring.

Today I will go back to church.