Proper Perspective returns:

My friends were having a party tomorrow night. He had invited us over for his wife's birthday which is today...50 wonderful years old, but kinda stressing about it...ya know, turning the big "5-0". I saw her last week and she said at first she didn't want ANYONE to know she was turning 50...then decided that it wasn't embarrassing, but something that she's accomplished and achieved, and is lucky to be doing...but still, hadn't fully stopped stressing about it...we laughed about it.

He just called to cancel the party. Their daughter was admitted to the hospital on Monday with an "unknown illness". Various symptoms, lots of tests, but yesterday they found an enlarged lymph node behind her breast plate. They can not operate immediately, as her white blood cell count is so far off that it will risk an equally dangerous infection. Instead, today they will try and get the white cell count back to more reasonable...or reasonable enough to have open-heart surgery at 23 years old (it's considered open heart because it is on the inside of the breast bone) and instead, on her mom's 50th birthday, will undergo a biopsy of her bone marrow....to see if it may have gone that far. . If the white cells remain a problem, they will still go in pretty soon (next few days?) and deal with an infection after, if need be.

I'm kind of speechless, and kind of sick, and kind of terrified...and morbidly relieved that it isn't my child...any of them...and I even feel a little guilty about that too, but I know they would understand. After all, they are parents of 4 children themselves. This kind of thing sure puts all the "stresses of life" into perspective again...

Turning the big "5-0"...not such a big deal now, really, is it....I guess I know what I am going to do for her for her birthday today. A prayer for her daughter is all that's on her wish list now.