On Other Anniversaries or The Sound of Music...

One week, five road trips, four cities, three performances, two hospital stays, one debut and one surgery later, I am celebrating the two year anniversary of my first lung transplant. And while I love the people at the Cleveland Clinic and my insurance company (I love you Kaiser Permanente) -- they are amazing and a gift and I am so blessed to have them -- spending your transplant anniversary in the hospital being reevaluated for transplant is a little like spending your second wedding anniversary in family court preparing for divorce.



Mom said it was like The Sound of Music -- near the end when they are making preparations to leave Austria in the midst of this major competition that they eventually win, only to escape into the uncertain necessity of the alps. And though I never wanted to be cast as the reverend mother, she was onto something.... or at least Roger and Hammerstein were. We don't have to climb one mountain. We have to climb every mountain. Whether it is a mountain of dirty diapers, a mountain of debt, a mountain of sorrow, a mountain of disappointment, or an endless, monotonous trudge through the mundundity* of life, sometimes the ranges seem to go on forever. And the truth is, they do.



The purpose of life isn't to coast. It's to grow -- to climb higher. And it isn't easy. It necessitates endless change and work and hardship and trial and pain and discovery. Ask anyone with kids, bringing them up is not an easy task. But the greatest things in our lives -- the things that make life worth living -- never are. This whole transplant thing is not easy. My life is not easy. I literally would not wish it on another living soul. But in the same breath, I have been afforded the most unbelievable, unexpected and miraculous opportunities for love. From my heavenly and earthly families, from TFMT, from my wonderful friends, from my doctors, from strangers. It's not like war where there are people who want you dead. On the contrary. Everyone is knocking themselves out to keep me alive and to make my dreams come true. And while some of this is far beyond any nightmare I could ever conjure, the mountains of my life have opened vistas to truths that I could have never seen and with each door God has closed, his windows have opened, heaping love down onto me.


Thank you for your continued prayers.

Also... If you want to do something nice for me ( a little presumptuous, I know) write to my little brother. I'm having a hard time getting to the mail box, but he loves letters, pictures, food, anything that your time and budget allow. He's in Japan and could use the pick me up! Here's his info:

Elder TD
3-1-5 Yagiyama-Minami
Taihaku-ku
Sendai-Shi, Miyagi


*not in the dictionary, but it should be