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| Happier Times. |
We were terrified, if I may be allowed the largest understatement of my professional writing career. Petrified. But also, weirdly, galvanized. There was a sense—more from me than from Cathy—that this was a temporary state of being. An inconvenience to be conquered, and then monitored closely thereafter. We were getting older. Trade-offs being, now we have health problems. But even though the numbers of recurrence were scary, 48% chance of the cancer returning, we were committed to powering through this. The cancer, after all, showed up at the worst time. Super inconvenient. We were just getting our shit together, after, what? Fifteen years of marriage? But we had time to fix it.
Now we have seventy-two hours.
We made it through nine months of chemotherapy, three months more than expected, because a couple of serious health concerns cropped up—a blood clot in her leg, and worse, a moderate case of pneumonia. But even after THAT, Cathy went through the surgery with flying colors! Not only was the hysterectomy free of complications, but the tumors were gone! There was nothing to remove! I mean, can you believe it? How about that? It almost made up for the nine months of hell we went through to get there. We would have to get check ups every three months, but hey, no problem. A small price to pay for getting our lives back. Three months.
Now we have three days.
When we heard that Cathy’s cancer had returned, and not just come back, but come roaring back, at her three-month check up, we both felt that it was somehow a mistake. We were supposed to be done with this. But it was Cathy who came around first. She thought it might happen, considering what the cancer was and where it was. But everything up until then had gone so well, you know, all things considered. The realizations settled on us like sacks of lead: more aggressive this time; can’t use the medicines she was on before; the new regimen would be much harsher, with more side effects; surgery is no longer an option…
We both checked out. Mentally, physically, emotionally. We couldn’t watch the news anymore. We did just the bare minimum of social and personal maintenance. The world chose those months to throw additional attacks at us. Our nest egg, such as it was, was already scrambled, and life took the rest of it. 2019 was a tire fire. The last three months of it were particularly brutal.
I wish we had spent that time together better. It wasn’t all bleak. We tried to make the best of it. Some days were bright and shiny and allowed us to push those dark thoughts and morbid outcomes away. But there was only so much we could do. The only thing that kept me going was to keep chanting, “at the end of this, we get another CT scan, and hopefully this stuff is working.” Well, it wasn’t. Not really. Every millimeter shrunk was two millimeters gained. The mass was merely shifting around. Not doing much else, except making me and Cathy miserable.
Three days.
At the start of this third round of chemo, the oncologist told Cathy that if this didn’t work, and if he couldn’t find her a clinical trial, then she was looking at maybe 12 months. A year. She waited a few days to share that information with me, knowing how it would affect me. She was right, as usual. I did not take it well. Cathy told me when she’d come to a kind of acceptance about it. And after a really shitty weekend, I came to my own place of acceptance—I just wasn’t going to give up, yet. And so that was our new plan: until we had some sort of indicator that things weren’t working, we weren’t going to have those uncomfortable conversations about what happens after one of us is gone. There was no point in having them; that would be giving up. Until it was clear we had no other options, we were going to proceed as if this new round of chemical horribleness was going to do the trick. A lot can happen in a year.
Now it’s three days.
We don’t know what went wrong. Her bowel got twisted, and it caused a blockage, and that’s what her pain has been about this last week. We thought it was more of the Gastro-Intestinal side effects that she’s been dealing with this whole time. No one even dreamed this was the case. After all, she’s been able to go to the bathroom. Ergo, no obstruction. This all happened in about—want to say it with me?—three days. Her oncologist is baffled. His last set of tests showed the cancer markers going down. The chemo was working.
The long and the short of it is this: they can’t do a bowel resection. It’s too near the cancer. If the cancer grows or migrates and presses on the surgery site, it can open the bowel up and cause sepsis. It’s too dangerous to even attempt. What they do instead in these instances is they use catheters (one of them in Cathy’s nose, which looks very uncomfortable) to siphon out the build up on either side of the bowel and hope that by relieving the pressure, it’ll unkink the obstruction, like when you turn the water hose off and it goes back to normal.
If that happens, it’ll buy us some time. After all, there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen again. We were already managing this possibility with diet and colon health. That’s part of the mystery, too. How? What? Why? We may never know.
It’s all up to Cathy’s intestines right now. If they don’t unkink, then we have to start talking about palliative care. That’s a really innocuous-sounding word that means “make you as comfortable as possible so you can die without screaming in pain.” It’s a word I wish I didn’t know; that I never thought I’d have to say out loud. Not in reference to Cathy. Not like this.
All of my hope, all of my love, all of my wisdom and courage…all of it has become hyper focused on what happens next. I will be spending as much time with Cathy as I can. Trying to keep her calm, keep her relaxed, keep her laughing (not too hard). Keep her smiling if I can. Keeping me smiling as much as possible. She’s got to know there’s more in store for us. I don’t know how much more. I just know I’m not ready to let our lives together go. It’s been a weird, crazy, tumultuous and impossible twenty years together.
It all hinges on the next three days.
