Timing is everything

We received some good news this week on the cancer front: Through my first three chemo treatments, my body is responding extremely well.

We also received a tidbit of rather sobering information, and that got me to thinking about how everything tends to work out as it should.

I asked a member of my medical team how long I've had cancer, based on what she now sees in the CT scans and reports. She said that it's probably been there for two years, give or take.

When I shared this with my brother, his first question was this: Why would this not have been caught during the battery of medical exams I was subjected to during the adoption process? It's a great question.

The first answer is this: Standard blood tests and other physicals won't necessarily detect cancer. It doesn't work that way.

But digging deeper, I thought about our adoption timeline. We brought Niranjana home in September 2007. We got her referral in October 2006. By that point, all the medical exams were behind us and we'd been approved to adopt from India. So even if one of those exams had been able to detect cancer, it probably wasn't there yet.

And think about this: If my cancer had been detected during those exams, we would not have been able to adopt, and this beautiful little girl would not have become our daughter.

I can say this with complete confidence: I would rather fight this cancer now with Niranjana as my daughter than have detected it early but been denied the opportunity to be her father.

Call it divine intervention or fate, but I firmly believe there are plans for our lives. I do not believe we just float around on this planet aimlessly. This is another stark example of that.