New Territory

Kev's found himself on the other side of the patient/doctor/caregiver triangle recently. I'm not sure it's as easy as he thought it might be and I know it's not bringing the balance of power he expected.

That at least keeps me entertained so I'm less cranky about this week's 4 visits to my new doctor's office. Peggy was as good as her word and got me in to see someone within days of our last meeting.

Four appointments this week is a lot of intrusion into my space. Literally. The new doctor is a gynecologist.

After an endometrial biopsy earlier this week, I had a "surgery consultation" with the doctor today and Kevin came along to meet her.

Gynecology offices aren't made for men. They're very pink and full of very pink stuff.

Whereas I found the 3 dimensional pop-apart rendering of the stomach, intestines and rectum in Dr. Francis' office very intriguing--and was quite happy to pull the pieces out and try to fit them back together, Kevin seemed a little discomfited by a similar rendering of uterus, ovaries and vagina in Dr. Lovell's office. And he wasn't having any part of puzzle play with it.

I think he thought it was vaguely naughty to play with the thing. Which made me laugh all the more.

I pointed out that his butt was completely uncharted territory for me and I adapted quickly to the language and topigrahical discussion. I remember Dr. Francis and I doing a couple of impromptu tag-team sketches of the critical parts of Kev's ass as Dr. Francis was explaining the surgery and healing process to us.

One would think nearly 2 decades of marriage would bring Kevin a certain comfortable familiarity with the language and inner workings of female geography but not so.

I was apparently wrong about us having explored, in graphic medical detail, all of the taboo subjects (and areas) in this last year.

Autumn Herald

Being away even for as little time as a weekend, lets us see things with new eyes.

Whether it's the lack of rain or a herald of changing seasons, we were surprised by the leaves on the ground near the woods. A hint of autumn color is beginning to show in places and we noticed the deer are becoming downright chunky after a summer of plenty.

One of the does came up to feed in the cool of the morning today. She is without her fawns this morning and she sizes me up quickly. My computer and I are no threat to her time out. She enjoys raiding the feeders for breakfast as surely as I enjoy watching.

A lone leaf drifted down from the trees just in time for me to snap it with my camera. It reminds me of what I like about this time of year--the colors, smells, sounds, the slowing down of time.

Easter Baby

Our Kate is pregnant.

Our baby is having a baby. Never mind that she's on the downward slide toward 25 years old, as the youngest of the sisters, she is eternally the baby of the family.

Saturday evening brought tears I held back as both she and James cried when they told us. Parents pray their children's tears will be tears of happiness, not worry, at the news of a new baby. And we hope our answering tears will be joyful, not mingled with doubt and concern.

The pieces of life--finances, living arrangements, healthcare and job concerns--add an underlying stress to their announcement.

We will, all the same, lovingly welcome a new member to our clan sometime around Easter 2009. A spring time baby.

Having cleared the hurdle of telling parents, Kate has been making phone calls to her sisters and aunt. I sense a growing excitement among les trois tantes. They are already making plans for a girl child. I dig through a closet, find a box and carefully unwrap Katie's baptismal gown of nearly twenty-five years ago. I remember her Easter birthdays and Barbie cakes.

This family is ready for the joy of new life and the hope that comes with it.

Summer PIcnic

Picnic at the lake. My sister and brother-in-law welcomed their two exchange students and many friends to a picnic on their farm. The boys are from Denmark and Brazil and seemed to have already settled in comfortably in their new surroundings.

It was a gorgeous day filled with fishing, canoeing, the sound of laughter and the smell of food on the grill.

Kate couldn't get out to the party due to her work schedule and was adamant about meeting us for dinner back in Lafayette. So we'll be leaving the hotel soon to meet her at Spagheddies. She said "we'll see you there" which leads me to believe James will be joining us. We're not exactly sure what their relationship is these days but I'll bet we figure it out over dinner.

Frozen Recovery

Our freezer marks the progress of Kevin's recovery from the cold induced effects of Oxaliplatin.

Cherry Cordial Ice Cream. Popsicles. External Hard Drives??













For the computer uninitiated, those thin black things are external hard drives. I discovered them while looking for something to prepare for supper. Kevin apparently stashed them in the freezer last night. It's a techie trick to try to buy enough time to retrieve the files stored on an overheating hard drive.

Just weeks ago he couldn't have easily handled the frozen hard drives. Or stood the nerve pain of having the cold ice cream in his mouth.

He's making progress, healing. I'm making dinner. Something with blackened external hard drives..

Un-Chemotherapy Day #5

It's un-chemotherapy day again. The every other week reckoning of symptoms, side effects and healing.

Five un-chemotherapy days = 1o weeks of un-chemotherapy = A Much Happier Kevin

Continuing side effects of treatment are almost unnoticeable some days, a lingering nag on many days and an intrusive reality on a few days.

Healing a body from the side effects of cancer treatment is less than an exact science. There are some things filed under the "we don't really know why that happens" heading. Kevin and I continue our Mad Scientist approach to much of it--trying to decide what does and doesn't impact things for better or worse on a daily basis.

The neuropathy in his hands and feet continues to be a consistent annoyance. He's adjusting to the ongoing tingle and the frustration of dropping things but is hoping to see more improvment in this area. Some of the cold sensitivity in his mouth lingers but not enough to keep him from becoming a regular at Dairy Queen's drive through window.

He gets tired easily--a really deep tired that still surprises him--but his energy level is increasing each week.

His appetite is better--ravenous is the word he uses. Most foods taste good again; some things are still undefined. A few foods don't taste like he thinks they should taste.

This may have more to do with my cooking than his tasting, but we'll just see how it plays out over the next few months.

The College, er, MiddleAge Days

I had a realization tonight.

We have hit middle age-- one of us has the AARP card to prove it--and we live like college students. Our lifestyle has regressed.

We have downsized a 4 bedroom house into a 2 bedroom apartment.

Our bikes are parked in the lving room. They are used often enough to make it too large of an effort to wheel them clear through the apartment to their niche beside the storage shed on the patio.

The placemats are folded over the back of one of the unused chairs at the dining room table. Too much trouble to wash them if someone spills, easier to wipe the table.

The tablecloth is...I don't remember where the tablecloth is. It was here when I moved in. But sometime over the months it disappeared to the laundry room and never returned.

The dishwasher is as much storage as it is utility.

There are more Pepsi cans than milk cartons in the recycling bin.

There is an unhung picture leaning on the fireplace mantel. There has been one or another leaning there for months.

I consider dusting a task to do when company is expected. Maybe. When the queen drops in for tea or something.

If I wanted to mop the floor, I would have to dust off the mop first.

We ate pizza in front of the TV tonight. Not even homemade pizza. Unbaked pizzas we hauled home in a cooler from Arni's in Lafayette and stored in the freezer for later times. Like a care package from a mom to her campus kid.

I used to keep a perfectly ordered house where dust feared to tread and there were fresh flowers on the table (from my own well maintained gardens). I imagined it would become much easier, and still very important, to do when our children were grown and the house was no longer filled with the messiness of family life.

The truth is, fresh cut flowers make me sneeze and dust only bothers me if I bother it first. I like the picture unhung, it's easy to change the scenery of my day this way. And under the tablecloth there lurked a beautiful natural wood finish on the dining table--that doesn't have to go into the washing machine to be cleaned.

The house has been traded in for an apartment and it turns out biking is highly enjoyable when you're not worried about the child wobbling in front of or behind you.
And pizza truly is better when it's eaten in front of the TV.

Granny Knew

Kevin is feeling much better tonight.

Apparently you can survive cancer and its treatments and then go on to have perfectly normal, non-life threatening, plain old everyday sniffles, sneezes and general flu-like things.

Who knew?

Other than my granny?

It's Not A Problem Until It's A Problem.

Kevin is sick. Probably a virus. Sleep last night was interrupted by the frequent demands of a miserable body and tonight he came in from work and dropped, exhausted, on the Man Couch.

He's finally resting well; I'm not sure I'll even wake him to go to bed.

Probably a virus.

But the what ifs really struck me in the wee hours today as he made yet another tired trek from the bedroom.

I made him a salad for lunch yesterday and sliced fresh tomatoes for supper. With basil from our garden. Have I poisoned his still tired immune system with the uncooked food we avoided so carefully during the months of chemotherapy?

I wonder if I need to call Dr. Skinner. Three hundred and seventy-six days ago the idea of calling an oncologist for what appears to be a virus would have seemed ludicrous. Insane. Impossible--we didn't even know any oncologists.

Now I lay awake and weigh the evidence to decide if this is a little thing or a big thing. Big Thing includes anything related to cancer. A little thing is everything else.

I wait. He's drinking plenty, he's on his feet. There's time to see what this is, what it will be.

I wonder when do things become normal again? When is long enough for a cough to be just a cough? An ache just the natural groan of an aging body and not a sign of some new symptom or side effect?

I devoted more hours to this today than I wanted. I have, however, come to a realization.

Do not, as my grandmother would remind me, borrow trouble.

It's not a problem until it's a problem.

The Bike Trail

Our August autumn continues. The days are cool for summer. The evenings are a delight. Too cool even for the usual hordes of mosquitoes on the bike trail.

Biking is working for Kevin. Less painful than walking--it eases the painful tingle on his feet and doesn't come with the tripping hazard. He can switch hands between the sometimes painful task of grasping handlebars without interrupting his ride. Sometimes the two mile trail comes easy for several passes and other days it's an effort to make it in and out once. He enjoys the effort, the success of being able to endure the effort.

Me? I can tell how he's feeling by how many times he laps me on the trail. Always at least once, usually repeatedly. I meander along. Stop to photograph a wild flower. Wait for some deer to cross the trail ahead of me. Peer over a bridge to see what's happening in the creek.

We are, always, together yet we see the view through slightly different lens.

Kevin feels like a year disappeared from his life. He is driven to reclaim what he missed. The time, the plans, the opportunities that were pushed aside by an unwelcomed interruption.

For me it was a year that lasted forever. Everything clamored for attention in a deafening roar. The moments may have slipped away under the din; the minutes I remember. Days and nights that were sometimes counted in miserably slow minutes.

I balance against a bridge while I wait for Kevin. We're somewhere in the middle of the trail. We know where we began but we can't see the end of the trail from here. This is a good place to be.

Redemption

The house phone still doesn't ring often here. But when it does ring these days I feel less of that nervous apprehension of "what now" if I see the hospital or a doctor's office popping up on the caller ID.

The cancer center called today. They were following up on Kevin's colonoscopy from last week. Wanted to know what the doctor found and how things are generally going for Kevin.

I'm pleased. This is why we came here for his treatment. This kind of follow-up and communication. This kind of care.

This one moment--the call that says 'we just want to know how things went' and I get to respond 'really well' and then I get to tell Kevin some good news from the clinic--makes up for each of those crappy calls I answered and each time I had to hit Kevin with more painful news this last year.

This is my redemption.

Zoo

We went to the zoo this morning. Banked up some of Kevin's increasing energy by having a quiet day yesterday with the intention of spending it on one big zoo-spree this morning.

It was a good time. Cool weather which invigorated the zoo residents as well as us.

Encountered some highly entertaining children and frightened their parents by talking to them. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Cincinnati isn't like our home in Indiana where a few sentences would render us "not frightening" because the parents would likely know someone we know.

Four hours later we called it a day and came home. To further feed our inner child, we're going to have a nap now.

The Pleasure of Choosing Quiet

It was one of those once a year summer days when the temperature hovered just below 80 and the sun was brilliant through piles of fluffy white clouds. A promise of autumn days arriving in the not so distant future.

We cooked and ate our supper outside tonight. Nature provided our entertainment. The hummingbirds zoomed among the flowers and feeders, occasionally stopping to hover and chatter in our faces. Mamma doe brought the fawns up for an evening raid on the feeders and a raccoon ambled in and out at woods edge.

Kevin worked this morning and took a nap this afternoon. We walked through a garden center nearby. Went to Mass early this evening.

It was a quiet day filled with simple pleasures.

I think we appreciated days like this before cancer intruded. What we didn't appreciate was the pleasure of getting to choose. There have been quiet days this last year because cancer decided; after days in a hospital or nights of sickness I was thankful for a quiet day when Kevin could rest.

I am more thankful tonight for the pleasure of choosing to fill our day with quiet.

The Largeness of Small

We are working through the 'what works/what doesn't' aspects of Kevin's continued healing.

Some days he wakes up to fingers and feet that are cooperative and some days he wakes up and wonders just how they're connected to his body because they don't seem to want to connect with his brain.

From my side of things the dropped cups and tripped up footsteps are small things. Clean it up, move it out of the way, adapt until it passes.

Kevin reminds me, though, that these are large things to him. Reminders of the worries and doubt of both cancer and treatment. The concerns of will it pass and how much more adapting does he have to do to accomodate the mess left behind by an uninvited and unwelcomed guest.

He continues to take Glutamine daily. Missing a couple of doses in conjunction with a rise in the tingling nerve pain leads him to believe Glutamine is helping. We're working on some dietary adaptations and reaching for an activity level that challenges him without increasing the tingling and pain the following day.

I need to remember that what appears like a small thing to me can be very large to the person actually living it.

The Reluctant Passenger

The great news tonight is that today's exam shows no sign of cancer.

Dr. Francis took care of some interior scarring at the surgical site and wants to see Kevin in a year unless any issues come up beforehand.

I would have liked Kevin's exam to have been clear to the point of boring--the memories of last winter's scare due to scarring at the surgical site are vivid. But Dr. Francis seemed confident this can be handled without additional surgery. That's a HUGE improvement over what we faced last winter.

Dr. Francis is great. His own little physician/artist sketches of what the potential problem is, full color photos of the inner deal AND a confidence level that's contagious. What more can you ask for in a surgeon?

Kevin did great. He was outspoken this time about how the sedation affects him afterwards and things went amazingly better on the recovery side. I couldn't believe how good he looked and felt immediately afterwards.

As on all medical days, he got to call lunch; he was eating coney dogs from Dog N Suds within the hour.

So we're home in Ohio tonight. He has a tune-up in a year. We're counting on things being calm for this year. An entire blissful year of no invasions. This is WONDERFUL news!

Kevin had the rare experience of being the passenger for the entire trip today. He closed his eyes a lot--maybe napping, more likely avoiding my driving. (This was probably a wise decision on his part--it got a little ugly along those orange barrels and cement barriers lined up on I-275. I always imagine all it will take is clipping one and then we'll ricochet between them like a pinball for miles.)

Kev's very kind about it, but it's hard to be the passenger when your normal role is driver.

Kind of sums up the last year for him. Being the passenger more than he wanted. On a ride he didn't want to take.

I'm as happy to relinquish the driver's seat as Kevin is to claim it. Now all I have to do is explain the orange barrel wedged up under the truck...

A Colonoscope Walks Into a Bar...

We have an eclectic bunch of friends. So it stands to reason we've had an eclectic array of support through this past year.

This is a good thing. It takes many skills to get through cancer. To get through life.

One of the under-acknowledged necessities in cancer care is laughter. We were lucky enough to have friends who knew this and made it a point to laugh with us.

And once they were certain we could find humor in the bits and moments, all bets were off. My cell phone would light up with one line text messages while we were sitting anxiously in a doctor's waiting room. A friend sent a joke a day for weeks after Kevin was in the hospital last winter.

I had no idea how much I needed to laugh about something until the jokes began to arrive. When Kevin was feeling rotten through those weeks, there were some days when those emails brought the only smiles I saw on his face.

Getting through the embarrassment of talk, tests, treatment and recovery was much easier with laughter.

"Hey, doctor, while you're in there, if you see my dignity would you grab it for me?"

So here we are this morning, just over a year into this 'new normal.' We're in a hotel room in Indiana. Kevin has an appointment later today with his surgeon. It's time for the one year check-up of last August's surgery.

Which means another colonoscopy for Kevin. The good news is that he's been through this kind of stuff enough in the last year that it's kind of a 'so what' procedure for him. (The bad news is that he's been through this kind of stuff enough in the last year that it's kind of a 'so what' procedure for him.)

If you've had a colonoscopy, you know that the "prep" portion can be the roughest part of the deal. And you know why we aren't driving into town this morning, opting, instead, to arrive last night.

Kevin is sleeping soundly after a restless night of , er, "prep" work. I was awakened when my phone lit up with a text message from a friend:

"When I had a colonoscopy, my boss insisted on having a note from my doctor. He wanted to know if my head really was up there."

Cancer War, the epilogue

It's been a year. An entire year since everything in life rearranged in 182 minutes of a 'routine' colonoscopy. Kevin still wishes he had never had the colonoscopy, still imagines he could have gone on indefinitely not knowing.
I imagine an untreatead TOM (Cancer so quickly took over our lives, had a personality of its own, that Kate named her dad's tumor "TOM." It really was like an unwanted gate crasher had suddenly joined our party, ate the best food, drank the top shelf liquor and had to be forcibly evicted.) growing within, like some pulsing pile of radioactive waste. Becoming more powerful, stronger, building his empire. Kind of Jabba The Hut Star Wars-esque.
But he was discovered through the miracles of stealth butt cameras and a battle ensued. Laser sharp weapons. Biological warfare. Nuclear attacks. One ravished landscape later the enemy within has been defeated--not merely beaten into submission but erradicated, defeated, destroyed.Permanently.
So now we work on restoring the empire to prosperity and making sure the valiant Jedi warrior gets to enjoy the spoils of war.

Ordinary Things

Kevin and I celebrated the good news of his scan results with an ordinary kind of day. Nothing fancy; ate lunch streetside at a tavern (that's tourist for "bar") across the river in Kentucky, checked out the local farmer's market and wandered along the river a little before going to Mass.
That's what we were celebrating. Ordinary things.

Maybe it was the day or just the natural rhythm of healing, whatever the reason, Kevin was energetic and we were surprised to get home this evening and realize we had spent 10 hours out doing nothing and thoroughly enjoying ourselves at it.

Here's to the blessings of ordinary!

Free At Last

"Oh, this is good news!!! I am so glad to hear Kevin is cancer-free! Can you hear me singing “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, he’s free at last”? You can bet your bottom dollar I will send up a prayer of thanksgiving and for God’s continued watch over both of you! Thank you for this news! It is wonderful!" --Zelda

I was searching for a great way to share the wonderful news from Kevin's PET/CT scan when our friend Zelda sent the email I've copied above. Her response to hearing the scan results expresses our excitement and gratitude better than anything I will write.

Kevin's PET/CT shows no cancer cells!!

The image is "overall clear." There's some inflammation in his right chest that needs to be watched; he'll have another PET/CT in 3 months rather than waiting a full year.

Tonight we'll end our day with prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving. Not only for a patient and persistent God but for the prayers and support of friends--known and unknown--who have been a constant reality through the good and the bad.

In the meantime, Zelda said it perfectly, "Thank God Almighty, he's free at last!"