A cancer diagnosis changes your life in the blink of an eye and it changes it forever. Panic, confusion, depression, sadness, the emotional turmoil it brings is seemingly endless. It doesn't just change your life, it takes over and becomes your life. Everything that you do suddenly revolves around "The Cancer". Doctor's offices and hospitals become your home away from home. Tests, scans, radiation treatments, infusions that take a whole day, traveling to appointments, start to take all of your time and so having a day off to kick back and relax becomes something that you used to do. Side effects from treatment are often much worse than the effects of the cancer, so those days when you go in for treatment turn into days and weeks of recovering from the very thing that is supposed to make you feel better. Odds can be pretty low that these treatments will even work and so you start to feel like a lab rat, waiting on the next experiment to take place.
Good news is met with a brief moment of joy, followed by cautious optimism because you are terrified to get your hopes up too much. Bad news is like being diagnosed all over again. Eventually, you just get to the point where it is all too much and you have to decide when enough is enough and to give your best shot at living in the time you have remaining. Watching someone you love go through this process is nearly as debilitating as the cancer because you are powerless to help. So, you struggle and grasp at every available thing you can think of to do. That is because you want to feel like you are doing something positive but it is nearly impossible to hold back those feelings of helplessness and terror that you feel almost constantly. Believe me, I know about these things.
Early one morning, back in 2005, Dave shook me to wakefulness about 4 a.m. in excruciating pain. His back was killing him and he had tried to urinate but was unable to and he was really starting to become agitated. I pulled on some clothes and helped him dress and called his mother to drive us to the emergency room. Ordinarily, we would have gone alone but something just made me call her to come with us that morning.
By the time we got him to the emergency room, less than 20 minutes away, he was writhing in pain and being very vocal about how long everything was taking. Normally a very calm and quiet guy, he was making it clear that he didn't appreciate having to fill out paperwork and answer questions when he was in so much distress. Eventually we got Dave into a cubicle for examination and the ER doctor agreed that his symptoms indicated a probable kidney stone obstructing his passing urine. There had been blood in the tiny bit of urine Dave had been able to pass but that didn't seem to send up any extra red flags for anyone at the ER. But none of them had seen it.
Dave was sent up for an x-ray and about 30 minutes later a technician came down and said that something unusual had shown up on the x-ray and that he wanted a urologist to take a look. Luckily, I was informed, one of their best doctors was in the hospital assisting a surgery and he had agreed to take a look at Dave's films. The possibility of cancer was not mentioned nor did it cross my mind for even a split second.
Waiting in that cool emergency room, it seemed like it was taking forever but after another 30 or so minutes passed, the same technician came back down and said that the urologist had taken a look and had ordered a CTscan. He went on to say that as soon as they had the results from that scan, someone would be down to talk to us about what was wrong with Dave. And so we waited some more.
I can still remember exactly where I was standing when the urologist came striding into the ER waiting area. Very purposeful, efficient and all business. He was a head taller than me, almost as tall as Dave. He was wearing scrubs and a white lab coat over the top of them and he still had paper booties over his shoes because he had come from the OR directly to look at Dave's X-ray and the CT scan. Dave's mother was standing along side of me and I remember a nurse walking behind the doctor. While he was starting to speak to us, I remember that I was still very cold. I remember all those details so vividly I can close my eyes and play it like a movie in my head.
The thing I remember most is the doctor introducing himself and then, very bluntly stated the following. Dave had a 7cm tumor in his right kidney, that there was no chance it was anything other than renal cell carcinoma, that the kidney needed to come out as soon as they could schedule the surgery and that he was admitting Dave to the hospital immediately. There was a brief moment of disbelief and a little confusion until I realized that he had said the word "carcinoma". He didn't say cancer, he said the other "c-word" and it threw me for a moment. Then the world came back into focus and I realized that my husband had just been diagnosed with cancer. And that was the moment our life changed forever.
To be continued....
The thing I remember most is the doctor introducing himself and then, very bluntly stated the following. Dave had a 7cm tumor in his right kidney, that there was no chance it was anything other than renal cell carcinoma, that the kidney needed to come out as soon as they could schedule the surgery and that he was admitting Dave to the hospital immediately. There was a brief moment of disbelief and a little confusion until I realized that he had said the word "carcinoma". He didn't say cancer, he said the other "c-word" and it threw me for a moment. Then the world came back into focus and I realized that my husband had just been diagnosed with cancer. And that was the moment our life changed forever.
To be continued....
