Breathe Shallow

Give me a problem. Or not even a problem, just a project.  I’ll do some research and find out more about it…general and in-depth knowledge, options, strategies, expert opinions…I will try to connect with others who have experience with this problem or project, if applicable.  Then, I’ll make a plan.  Depending on the level of complexity, this might be a checklist, a flow chart concept-- if this/then that, or a multi-phase plan.  Then, I’ll strap on my running shoes, so to speak, and get to work.  Consistent hacking away is key.  That’s how you eat an elephant, right?  (Not that we’d want to eat an elephant, of course!  Noble creatures.  Man, I miss the elephants…wouldn’t it be great to go to the zoo?! Wouldn’t it be great to go anywhere?!)

This being my personality, I’ve had a life journey learning to function within big problems that I can do next to nothing about. 

Like, this one.  Nearly 12 years ago, my youngest child, Elijah, was born.  He was an angel baby, and turned his little head to the sound of my voice when the nurse took him across the room to weigh him shortly after his birth.  I mean, how precious is that?  Not just precious, but healthy, alert, and strong.  Before we checked out of the hospital, I did ask the nurse to check his breathing one more time.  I was concerned maybe he still had a little liquid in his lungs, as I noticed a slight little something, off, in his breathing sometimes.  His daddy said he was a newborn, and just figuring out to breathe, but I wasn’t satisfied with that concept.  But the nurse listened to his lungs and said they were perfect.

As it turned out, she was right, his lungs were perfect. But his little intermittent breathing problem got significantly worse.  In six weeks’ time, it could be heard outside the heavy door of his hospital room.  His health and strength would be needed, every iota of it, as well as his indomitable infant spirit.  Because we found out when he was six weeks old that his odd breathing issue, that made him breathe with a remarkably loud stridor (but only sometimes) was due to the fact he had a large tumor, the size of a man’s fist, in his neck and chest.  His trachea was squished like a nearly-flat straw, and it took all that amazing baby strength he had to push air through it.

But, here’s the deal.  It didn’t primarily take strength for him to breathe.  When the tumor was at its largest, before his first three surgeries (scope to help determine airway problem, biopsy to diagnose what type of cancer he had, and central line placement in his chest) so that he could start the correct chemo protocol to shrink the tumor, which did (thank God) shrink the tumor, he didn’t breathe with that terrible loud stridor most of the time.  Often, if you didn’t know better or put a stethoscope to his chest, you wouldn’t think there was a thing wrong with him.  He had this position he would take.  He would stretch his neck up and off to the left side (the tumor was on the right) and find the sweet spot, and when he breathed gently, not forcing too much air through at once, he could breathe well.  But in other positions, or when he was super happy and excited, he would breathe harder and deeper and the audible (and heartbreaking) strain would be heard.  Loudly.  Like through a heavy hospital door loudly.  Then, we were glad he was strong and healthy, with no congestion or any kind of blockage to put any additional strain on his breathing.

In the days before we heard the word “neuroblastoma cancer”, when the pediatrician (reasonably) had us biding our time with a lower level explanation, I used to put my hand on him, as he lay in his little bedside bassinet, and just pray that he’d keep breathing,  just keep breathing, through the night. 

Sometimes, strain begets more strain.  Struggle harder, and the problem is worse.  Elijah would show me this again, three or so years later.  He’d had his cancer journeys, two of them, the second culminating when he was two and half years old with a resection surgery of an “unresectable” tumor.  Six or so months later, not caught up on immunizations due to chemo and a subsequently weakened immune system, he got pertussis, also known as whooping cough.  I had learned when a good friend’s daughter had this several years prior why it is called “whooping”.  The cough is severe, the most severe cough I’ve ever heard.  All the air is coughed out of the lungs, and the afflicted cougher will then often then try to take a huge breath, which will create a “whoop” sound as the airway is strained to try to pull in as much air as possible.  This strain in turn leads to another huge cough, and a cycle of coughing fit is suffered.  But everyone with whooping cough doesn’t “whoop”.  Elijah was not a whooper.  (I love that sentence!)  No, he’d cough his little lungs empty, and just..not..breathe.  He would hold his breath, for long enough for all of us (three older sibs, mom and dad) to say, “Breathe, Elijah, breathe!!!”  Then, after he’d held his breath for a long moment, he would gently take in a long, slow breath.  No whoop. No strain. No coughing cycle. 

This kid had learned something about how to breathe under pressure.  But, oh, has it been a hard lesson in grace for me.  There are times when you cannot control the constraints you are under. You can’t work hard enough or smart enough to fix the problem.  If you put too much pressure on the situation, if you expect too much, it will only degrade.  How can you live within it?  Remember my MO for problems?  Well, it helped me be an adequate cancer mom.  I did my research; I understood all I could about his type of cancer and the details of his treatment.  I kept track of all his appointments, joyfully checked off each chemo round, made sure the protocol was followed per the schedule, and checked every label on every chemo bag to make sure he was getting what he was supposed to.  I schooled the older kids on sanitizing and hand washing and not breathing in baby brother’s face if they had a snotty nose.  I eventually found a network of neuroblastoma parents that directed me to the world class (one of a kind) surgeon who WAS able to remove the tumor from my toddler’s neck, even though it was wrapped around his carotid artery and as the docs at home liked to put it “there’s a lot of valuable real estate in there”.  (A phrase which always annoyed me; there wasn’t an expensive condo in my baby son’s neck, there was a large malignant tumor.  Just say it.)

I could do all that, and I did, and it helped.  But despite all my organization, research, and discipline, this was a problem I couldn’t solve.  The outcome was completely out of my hands.  I had to live for months, for a few years, in this place of strain.  If I thought about it too hard, I might feel I couldn’t breathe.  At times, especially in the many days waiting for the phone calls to tell me if the MRI showed the poison was working or not, I felt this sick quiet panic—cancer parents call it scanxiety.  I was under the grip of a menace so much bigger than me.  It was impersonal.  It didn’t care.  Cancer would do what cancer would do.  It might respond well to the chemo cocktail (which at the same time might be trashing my son’s organs, taking his hearing, and making him susceptible to dying from a garden variety virus) which it did the first time.  Or again, later, it might just sit there and do nothing despite being hit with the “red killer” chemo and all the rest of the frontline treatment.  I lived with the sick quiet panic.  I functioned through it.

I had this image.  You see, then and since people have said “oh, you’re so amazing, you lived with that with such faith and what a great story of deliverance” etc., etc.  But that’s not where I lived, and I’m not amazing.  I have my child, and since his cancer time he has been the picture of health.  I am the lucky one.  We got the blessing.  I walked along the precipice, along the jagged cliff side, carrying my boy.  Sometimes, all it would have taken was a good breeze to push us over, him to death and me to that drowning no-longer-quiet panic.  I saw the view, I got the vertigo, but I didn’t fall, and neither did he.  We are the lucky ones.  But of this I am proud: I learned to walk along the cliff side and breathe, breathe shallow.  Breathe gently, and walk with grace.  I learned not to hold too tightly to him and his older brothers and sister.  I learned to hold those I love with grace; to love with an open hand. 

We are always being told to breathe deeply.  You’ve probably never been told to breathe shallow.  But I believe there is a time for it.  Right now, we are all caught in an uncontrollable situation that is changing and limiting our lives in myriad ways.  Millions have lost their jobs, thousands have, and many thousands more, will lose their lives.  Loved ones are dying alone in crowded hospital wards.  We see the limit of our power as “the most powerful nation on earth” that cannot supply its healthcare workers with basic low-tech PPE.  Some feel helpless, angry at a foolish and futile government that should have done a better job.  And then, underneath all the noise of policy debate and what’s going on in Italy and Spain and China, we need to get groceries.  And it’s dangerous, if not (we hope) to us, then to our dear friends and family who are in the high risk group.  I’m sure it’s a terrible time for all who struggle in ordinary situations with anxiety, PTSD, and the like.  And I want to tell you something.

Breathe shallow, but just keep breathing.  To breathe deeply is to try to, Thoreau-like, “suck all the marrow out of life”.  Maybe we’re just not up for that right now.  You don’t have to understand it all, you don’t have to do a great job getting along with your family 24/7, and you don’t have to function at your top 90 percent.  If you’re knocked down, just get up, one more time.  If you feel that quiet, sick in the stomach panic, just take a gentle breath.  It’s okay to not do great and have all wonderful times to impress everyone on FB with.  It’s okay not to expect too much of yourself.  Breathe shallow if you need to, but just keep on breathing. 

I read through Job in the past few months.  I know I’ve heard the phrase “the patience of Job” but I have to be honest, I did not read him as a terribly patient man.  He was a righteous man, we have that from the ultimate narrator of the story, God himself.  I have no quarrels with “righteous,” but patient??  Job railed against his friends (can’t blame him there) and against God.   He complained, criticized, and questioned.  God.  And God let him, and still called him righteous, and made him the hero of the story.  I think we can put too much on ourselves, have high self expectations, and despair when in trying to suck that marrow out of life we are left with merely a gross taste and emptiness.  It seems to me Job got to be the righteous hero merely because he didn’t curse God or pretend He wasn’t there.  He was mad at God, and he had a problem with God’s behavior towards him, Job.  And at the end of story, he got God’s seal of approval anyway.  I don’t think anyone could say Job handled his tragedies extremely well.  Don’t we have higher standards as modern Christians?  What Job did was breathe shallow.  And the message I get is, that’s okay. 

I’m reminding myself of these lessons lately.  Our family has been working toward adopting a Chinese boy for a year.  His adoption must be completed by late May, per Chinese law, or he cannot be adopted at all.  Our final approvals were being finalized, and then came a worldwide pandemic, the like of which hasn’t happened for more than one hundred years.  I texted my 20^th mile friend (the one that has been there on the 20^th mile of the marathon, literally and figuratively) that sometimes despite all one’s best efforts, you are screwed.  It blows up in your face.  I feel that sick, quiet panic.  She told me it was okay.  It was okay I felt that way.  I felt her love and grace.  I took a shallow breath.