Anger

I have a problem with my temper. I've already admitted I'm a completely lousy person, so I might as well come clean on all fronts. Sometimes I get really really angry about things that don't matter. I keep myself up half the night stewing over the finer points of what I would really like to say to that person who made me mad or plotting ways of revenge that can be enacted without me looking like I was out for revenge. The one saving grace is that I am a terrible plotter. My revenge usually amounts to a "yeah, well.... i don't like you either" type of comeback, so I'm rarely tempted to actually enact my lame revenge.

Today I was really angry. The GI doctors went in to take the stent out of Emmett's stomach. They found that the stent was about 75% in the stomach, but the remaining 25% was still in the esophagus. The wall of the esophagus had started to encroach around the top of the stent, so they couldn't remove it without serious damage to the esophagus. The good news is that the stent won't migrate to the intestines, which was the main worry. The bad news is that there is more pain than before, just as much nausea as before, and now they're telling us he won't be able to eat solids at all. Today it feels like every time we come to the hospital that Emmett takes a step backwards.

Needless to say, we were deflated after the procedure and angry. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of procedures and tests. Each one turning up bad news or going wrong. The volume of information has been overwhelming, and our first GI doctor was somewhat less than endearing. Another doctor though would have made the same decisions with the same risks, we just seem to always fall into that "very small risk of ... category" every time. We wanted to be mad at that doctor, though, and we tried. Our friends have been drawing straws for who gets to kick him first, but really there is no blame here. It's just another setback, another jar of water on the altar.

How do you process that kind of anger in a godly way? Or even can you? I feel like an olympic wrestler with the amount of self-control I've had to exert just to refrain from ripping someone's head off. It sort of helped that we had meditated on Ephesians 4 two days ago in church. Part of the sermon last week was verses 26-27:

"In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

A lot of good words were said about those verses, but I think they bounced right off my thick skull. I still don't get it. Today's anger was not righteous anger, it was selfish anger over the consequences of a fallen world. But processing and letting go of something so utterly disappointing without letting the devil run wild with my emotions has been the biggest challenge of today. Ultimately it reveals yet another layer of unbelief in my own heart, that God is not somehow in control of things if they don't go the way I want them to. You would have thought I should be past that hang up by now given that Emmett has cancer and all, but it's strange how the little setbacks derail me more effectively than the big picture.

In a fit of self-pity it occurred to me that today might be a good day to ask the why us question, but that is such a lame question that I wasn't even slightly tempted to dwell there. I just rolled my eyes at myself. It struck me, though, that it would be interesting to ask how will God redeem the 7 inches of very small metal chicken wire hanging out in Emmett's stomach. I bet there's a funny answer to that question.

So we're moving on and focusing on what lies ahead. Wednesday Emmett gets a port placed so that he will be ready to start chemotherapy next week. Then he just needs to recover from all the procedures because they won't give him chemotherapy if he can't walk into the clinic. That is going to be a huge hurtle for Emmett, so we'd appreciate specific prayers for him to be able to hold down food, regain strength, and stop losing weight. We're going to get a second opinion because the doctor encouraged us to, but from what we understand most therapies available are just variations of the one we would get here, and this combination is the most widely used and accepted. The research to tell which variation of the therapy is best for certain patients is only in its infancy, so no one can determine what particular variation would be best for us.

We have one more small procedure and then we're ready to jump in and fight. Right now that means getting food into Emmett one smoothie at a time. So here's to another sip. Cheers!