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I'm leaving out so much as I try to catch up to the present. And not only that, this account is only my experience of the thing and so I can't by any means give the full picture. While everything I have so far described was going on, there was much going on elsewhere which I did not witness or even much hear about until later. In particular, during this time the number of Team members was rapidly growing.My sister runs her own business and in the course of conducting that business she works with a great many talented and resourceful people. Many of those people have also become her personal friends. As time went on and a treatment plan began to take shape, the disparate people from the various sides of my sister's life began to reach out and find each other like self-connecting nodes in a, dare I say it, metastasizing network.
The treatment plan prepared by the Stanford doctors required my sister to spend one week in the hospital undergoing combination radiation and chemo treatments, then two weeks at home in San Francisco, but traveling to Palo Alto Monday through Friday for continuing radiation, down and back, 45 minutes each way on I-208. Those three weeks they called a “cycle”. The plan required at least two of those cycles to be executed one right after the other.
My sister is a fiercely independent woman and thought she could make these daily drives to Palo Alto herself. Members of the team who had experience with this sort of treatment regimen were, to say the least, dubious.
My sister's good friend and associate, SR, grabbed the scheduling department reins. With the help of other friends and associates, notably JF and EO, a list of some 75 people was pulled together who might be able to help with driving duties, hospital visits, and so forth. Before we knew it, SR had drawn up a calendar setting forth either driving or visiting assignments for all sorts of people from the various sides of my sister's life.
I cannot emphasize the importance of being good to people on a daily basis as you go through life. Of course, you can't always be good to all people all the time. Life is too complicated for that. But you ought to try, daily, to do your best in this regard -- not only for the fundamental rightness of being good to others, but also because someday you might need 75 people or so who are willing to pitch in and help you through a crisis like the one my sister had found herself in.
Me, personally, I don't think I could pull together a list of 75 people who would be willing to pitch-in this way for me, but then I'm kind of a stuck-up, smart-mouthed jerk. Nevertheless, I do have a small number of great friends. For their sake, I should probably try to spread my net of grace a little wider.
Oh. Wait. I guess that makes me Ebenezer Scrooge and this whole train wreck of my sister's cancer the Ghost of Christmases Yet To Come.
Excuse me a moment... I gotta go buy somebody a goose...
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