Polishing

{Written by my Mom, Cathy}

This week Nicole is starting to feel the effects of chemo. Her ANC is now at zero, which means she is confined to her room. 

She stopped eating and after four days of not eating they decided that it was time to put in a feeding tube.  Since they put in the feeding she has thrown it up several times. When she vomits, the feeding tube comes up. As a result, they need to put it back in almost every day sometimes more then once. 

She has lost a lot of energy and mostly wants to lay in her bed and watch movies.  She needed blood and two platelet transfusion this week. These transfusions help increase her energy levels. We call her our little vampire:)

We also had to make the decision to shave her hair off because it was beginning to fall out.  Her hair was covering her bed and pillow. She would hand me her binky and say "fix it" because her hair would get stuck to it. Throw up would get stuck in her hair. Each time we washed her hair, her hair would fall out by the handful.  After we shaved her head she would rub her head and look at James with an expression of "what happened."

So many thoughts go through your head while you sit in that little room.  My thoughts mostly turn to our Savior and all that He did for us.  Each one of us will or are facing our own personal mountain to climb.  Elder Eyring gave a talk in 2012, during Nicole's first journey with cancer, titled "Mountain to Climb".  I have read and re-read that talk over the past two years.  In a section he talks about his mother who suffered from cancer. 

"My mother fought cancer for nearly 10 years. Treatments and surgeries and finally confinement to her bed were some of her trials.

I remember my father saying as he watched her take her last breath, “A little girl has gone home to rest.”

One of the speakers at her funeral was President Spencer W. Kimball. Among the tributes he paid, I remember one that went something like this: “Some of you may have thought that Mildred suffered so long and so much because of something she had done wrong that required the trials.” He then said, “No, it was that God just wanted her to be polished a little more.” I remember at the time thinking, “If a woman that good needed that much polishing, what is ahead for me?”"

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2012/04/mountains-to-climb?lang=eng

I guess our family still needs a little more polishing:)