There’s Hope For Life

May 1998

Plans can be made, consultations are done & hope beyond hope is exhausted yet sickness climbs on and over you like a bulldozer with ripper hooks upending anything it touches, Not for the fainthearted or better said, anyone.

I despise sickness, the hurt, the tearing apart and worse yet, the breaking of one’s drive. If we fight as if it’s for our lives, oh wait, IT IS FOR OUR VERY LIFE, we dramatically increase our survival chances including long term survival. Maybe surgery is our plan or maybe not, but we must have hope. My hope is in my Lord and Savior Jesus, my faith is in Him. I’m obviously not anti-medical help nor am I willing to blindly go under the knife.

Ok, now that I’ve ranted a little I can now share how Renee and I try to take one step at a time. In the last blog I shared when we arrived back home from testing and the answering machine held the message “we matched as if living related”! This is not only amazing but we believe it’s a gift from God,

So the next step of many we were to drive back up to Portlands OHSU hospital for Renee to meet the transplant team and some testing for us both. This was a long tough day but we made it through and as we returned to out little warm home after hours of driving in snowy weather, once again the answering machine was blinking. Alas, once again a message from the hospital but very different , “Mr & Mrs Rasmussen, sorry to say this but your blood types do not match.”