Clear scans, skip town
As many of you know, we’ve been dealing with a family health crisis these last seven months. My son Luke has been battling Hodgkins lymphoma while attending high school and swimming for the LHS team, which the Sun wrote about here. After watching him endure months of chemotherapy and radiation, last Tuesday we travelled to Children’s Hospital in Boston for a day of tests and post-treatment scans to determine if we had killed the disease. We got the results that the scans were clear just hours before last Wednesday’s school committee meeting. By Thursday evening, we had packed the car, picked up two more kids—one friend for each of ours—and headed to the White Mountains for a long weekend of cross-country skiing, skating, snowboarding (the boys), and best-of-all, sitting in a steaming hot tub surrounded by mountains with snowflakes kissing our cheeks. (That is, until the boys snowboarded to the base and threw snowballs at us!) Despite driving home in last night’s blizzard, the entire trip was a much-needed escape from months of worry, heart-wrenching treatments, and stress. It occurred to me as we travelled the winding roads and I marveled at the evergreens clothed in thick white blankets, a living testament to beauty and strength: We suffer so we can appreciate the magnitude of our blessings.