Because Fulton Sheen was Wise Beyond His Time

 “The first direct, human limitation of infant life in the history of Christianity took place in the village of Bethlehem through an infant-controller whose name was Herod. The prevention of infant life was simultaneously an attack upon Divinity in the person of God made man, Jesus Christ our Lord. No one strikes at birth who does not simultaneously strike at God, for birth is earth’s reflection of the Son’s eternal generation.”    Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Three to Get Married)

Status Update: 4 years In

 Went back to Mayo last week for a 6 month (well, 7 month because of COVID) follow up.   We're four years into this cancer gig... starting to think it's just going to be a part of my life from here on out.  Rob went with me, and we made it a little mid-week getaway, which was nice.  He did ALL the driving, and luckily the roads were good, even in mid-January.  We did a little shopping, went out to dinner (restaurants are open in Minnesota!  They aren't in Michigan - so we took advantage).  Had an ultrasound, some blood work, and then met with Dr. Stan the Man.  

Results: Status quo.  Which means good.  The one nodule they can visualize with ultrasound stayed essentially the same size and is poorly vascularized, which means that radioiodine in June of 2019 effectively stunted the growth - which is AWESOME.  Tumor marker went from 1.9 to 2.2, but that's not much of a change.  Basically, the stuff is there but behaving itself, and that is GOOD NEWS.  I asked the doctor about the COVID vaccine.  I know this is an mRNA vaccine that hijacks a cell's own "factory" to create the COVID spike protein for an immune response.  What happens if the vaccine enters a cancer cell?  There's no research on the effects of this vaccine on cancer patients, so I've held off, even though I could get it through the hospital.  Was just hoping for a little more research and data to be determined before taking it, but Dr. Stan said "either the cancer cell will make the spike protein or it won't.  There are no other things that it can do with the mRNA".... such as make the cancer go super active, which is what I was afraid of.  So, I guess there's no good reason NOT to get the vaccine at this point, although I'm still a tad nervous about how new it all is.  There is no research on long term effects for a vaccine that took 10 months to create.  But... it should be good.  This is all besides the point.

Dr. Stan also asked if I wanted a referral to an ENT to see about a procedure to "bulk up" my paralyzed vocal cord.  "Well, " says I.  "My single working vocal cord is super loud.  I can yell at my kids just fine.  I can swallow most things most of the time.  The only thing I can't do very well anymore is jog."

"Do you want to jog?" asks he?

I thought about it for a hot second.  "I'm almost 50 years old.  No.  I don't want to jog anymore.  I can walk and ski and snowshoe and hike.  That is fine.  I don't need to jog anymore."

So that's that.  He said if I ever did want to take up jogging again, to let him know and we'd do the procedure, but at the moment, I feel like I'm very functional and we should just leave well enough alone.  

So good report, good little mid-winter getaway with my husband, and all is well in cancer land!

From The Mouths of Babes

 If we thought 2020 was bad... 2021 is starting to one-up it, and it's only been around for a week and a half.  Tensions in the country are running uber-high, the pandemic proceeds as it will - even with a vaccine - and many businesses are struggling.  Quite frankly, our country is a mess at the moment.  An utter mess.  Thankfully, though, school began again for the kids this past week, which means that I get to be back working face-to-face with kids, which is how I prefer it.  

I asked one of the kids I see for therapy how his Christmas break was.  He was full of tales of Legos and new watches, and being out on the frozen lake.  It made me smile.  The darkness hadn't encroached on his little world, and that made me happy.  We were walking along the school hallway, he in his walker, coming up to maybe my upper thigh - me towering above him, bending down to try and here his quiet voice muffled behind his mask.  And then he stopped, looked up at me, and said in his high-pitched way...

"Did you see the Star of Bethlehem right before Christmas?  It hasn't showed up in like 800 years.  But it came this year!  I know it was cloudy so we couldn't see it so well, but it was still there.  And it was God telling us that Jesus is still here with us, that He'll never leave us!"

It was so out of the blue, so unexpected, and so what I needed to hear, that I had to turn my head so he wouldn't see that I had started to cry.    And then he went back to talk of Legos and school, and other mundane things, completely unaware of how he had just pierced my heart.

God talks through these little ones.  He really does.  And He hasn't left us alone, even in 2021....

Thought of the Day: Archbishop Fulton Sheen

 “The gravest danger to American democracy is not from the outside; it is from the inside – the hearts of citizens in whom the light of faith has gone out. Keep God as the origin of authority and you keep the ethical character of authority; reject Him and the authority becomes power subject to no law except its own.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen

From Tucker Carlson. EXACTLY WHAT I THINK.

Amid the bombardment of images of what took place at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, too little time has been spent thinking about why it happened. Anyone who is trying to understand the significance of what’s going on right now ought to watch video of the last moments of Ashli Babbit, the woman who was shot and killed in the chaos.

Footage, which can easily be found online, shows Babbit standing in a hallway right off the House floor with an American flag tied around her neck. The scene around her is chaotic. People are bumping into each other, yelling, trying to get through the door into the chamber. Suddenly, with no warning, there is gunfire. You hear a shot and Babbit falls. People in the hallway scream. The camera closes in on her face. Babbit looks stunned. She’s staring straight ahead. You can see that she knows she’s about to die, which she did.

So what can we learn from this? It’s not enough to call it a tragedy. Imagine for a second learning that was your daughter. The last time you spoke to her, she was heading to Washington for a political rally. Now, she’s dead. You’ll never talk to her again. That’s what we’re watching, and we may be watching a lot more of it in the coming days.

Political violence begets political violence. That is an iron law. We have to be against that, no matter who commits the violence or under what pretext, no matter how many self-interested demagogues assure us the violence is justified or necessary. We have a duty to oppose all of this, not simply because political violence kills other people’s children, but because in the end it doesn’t work.

No good person will live a happier life because that woman was killed in the hallway of the Capitol today. So our only option, as a practical matter, is to fix what is causing this in the first place.

You may have nothing in common with the people on the other side of the country (increasingly, you probably don’t), but you’re stuck with them. The idea that groups of Americans will somehow break off into separate peaceful nations of like-minded citizens, is a fantasy. The two hemispheres of this country are inseparably intertwined, like conjoined twins. Neither can leave without killing the other. As horrifying as this moment is, we have no option but to make it better, to gut it out. 

The second thing to consider, and it’s related to the first, is why Ashli Babbit went to the rally in the first place. She bore no resemblance to the angry children we have seen wrecking our cities in recent months — pasty, entitled nihilists dressed in black, setting fires and spray painting slogans on statues. She looked pretty much like everyone else.

So why was she there? We ought to think about that. If you want to fix it, you have to think about that.

The only reason this country is rich and successful is because for hundreds of years, we have enjoyed a stable political system. The only reason that system is stable is because it’s a democracy, responsive to voters. 

Democracy is a pressure relief valve.   As long as people sincerely believe they can change things by voting, they stay calm. They don’t burst into the House chamber. They talk and they organize and they vote. But the opposite is also true if people begin to believe that their democracy is fraudulent, that voting is a charade, that the system is rigged and it’s run in secret by a small group of powerful, dishonest people who are acting in their own interests. Then, God knows what could happen.

Actually, we do know what could happen, because it’s happening right now. It’s happened in countless other countries over countless centuries. And the cycle is always the same because human nature never changes.

“Listen to us!” scream the population.

“Shut up and do what you’re told,” say their leaders.

In the face of dissent, the first instinct of illegitimate leadership is to crack down on the population, but crackdowns never make it better. They always make the country more volatile and more dangerous. The people in charge rarely understand that. They don’t want to, they don’t care to learn or listen because all of this conversation is a referendum on them and their leadership. So they clamp down harder.

This is the Romanov program, and it ends badly every single time. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try it again. Of course they will, because it’s their nature. It’s how we got here in the first place.

Millions of Americans sincerely believe the last election was fake. You can dismiss them as crazy. You can call them conspiracy theorists. You can kick them off Twitter. But that won’t change their minds. Rather than trying to change their minds, to convince them and reassure them that the system is real, that democracy works — which you would do if you cared about the country or the people who live here — our new leaders will try to silence them.

What happened Wednesday will be used by the people taking power to justify stripping you of the rights you were born with as an American:   Your right to speak without being censored, your right to assemble, to not be spied upon, to make a living, and to defend your family.

These are the most basic and ancient freedoms that we have there. They’re why we live here in the first place. They’re why we’re proud to be Americans. They’re what make us different, and they’re all now in peril.

When thousands of your countrymen storm the Capitol building, you don’t have to like it. We don’t. You can be horrified by the violence, and we are.

But if you don’t bother to pause and learn a single thing from your citizens storming your Capitol building, then you’re a fool, you lack wisdom and self-awareness, and you have no place running a country. We got to this sad, chaotic day for a reason.