Filed under: Uncategorized
Right now is the biggest Oregon college football game of the year and I am blogging as a way to cope with all of the boredom. It’s not that I hate football; I don’t. I know the rules and can follow it and that’s all hunky-dory, but I don’t lose my shit when someone scores a touchdown or the umpires blow.
I spent some fall evenings of my childhood at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, home of the Florida Gators. My father is an alumni and we went to many a home game. I spent most of the time watching the pixelated box at one of the end zones. At the time, it was much more entertaining than what was going on down on the field. I picked up a thing or two and am no longer lost when a game is on. In fact, I even went to a Duck game, under my own free will. I bought the tickets from a coworker and took Jason to Eugene as an early birthday present. It was fun. Our seats were great and the crowd was lively and it was a great chance to people watch.
But right now there’s no one to watch but Jason, and he’s yelling at the TV.
Maybe I’ll do some online shopping until it’s half time, although I enjoy shopping more when I’m actually at the store. I like that department store smell. The only thing I smell when I shop at home is that god damned cinnamon air freshener Jason keeps spraying.
I named this blessed event Chemo Tuesday because Jason started his chemotherapy today and it happened to be Tuesday. I’m pretty clever at naming things.
When we had our initial meeting with the chemotologist (is that a word? Firefox is telling me no, but I make the rules), he said that chemotherapy was “remarkably anticlimactic.” He said that. I wrote it down for future reference. I also wrote things down like “blood count” and “single agent” (which made me happy, like the carboplatin coursing through my husband’s veins wouldn’t all of the sudden unmask himself and start attacking precious body parts, like his single, lonely ball) and a litany of side effects. It was only after I had wasted my time writing down said side effects that the doctor said Jason would likely not experience any of them.
6 and a half hours after the chemo, the only side effect he has experiences is tiredness.
In a week he should really start feeling like shit. Here is why, in layman’s terms: chemotherapy is designed to attack the rapidly growing cells in your body. This includes hair follicles (leading to hair loss) and mouth cells (leading to mouth sores). Other rapidly growing cells: white blood cells. Unlike red blood cells, white blood cells regenerate at a much faster rate to fight a host of bacteria we come into contact with every day. Most of the time we aren’t even aware that anything is wrong: we get a cut, our blood is exposed to bacteria, the white blood cells chomp it up, and we go about our day. The downside is that because the chemo attacks rapidly growing cells and white blood cells happen to fall under that umbrella, he will be at a higher risk of infection and feel more run down now that his immune system is a bit oppressed.
Sounds fun, right?
Anyway. Back to “remarkably anticlimactic.” The doctor was right. Jason sat in a chair with an IV in his arm for an hour: fifteen minutes for some super-duper anti-nausea medicine, and 45 minutes for his single-agent carboplatin. I don’t really know what I expected to happen. Everyone to break out in song? His eyeballs to turn pink? We sat and read magazines and then it was time to leave. And that was his first round of chemo.
He goes back every Tuesday for the next two weeks for blood tests to make sure his blood is cooperating and his kidneys are functioning normally. In three weeks he goes back for dose number two. And that’s pretty much it.
Filed under: random
We’ve lived in our apartment for two and a half years – three Christmases – now.
Our tree is fake because I do not want to deal with real trees. We have ornaments from our childhoods, as well as three for each year we’ve been together. We put up our tree and watch Christmas movies and it’s all very pretty.
Aside from the tree, though, there was little in the way of other decorations. So we went shopping. We had a Pier One gift card from when we got married (yes, that was over a year ago. Aren’t you impressed with my lack of impulse shopping? Truth: I kind of forgot about it) and on Saturday decided to use it. We bought a new tray for our coffee table and a Santa figure and a Snowman figure. Then went to to the Hallmark store to get our 2009 ornament and got two other snowmen figures, so now I’m happy. And Jason is happy, too. Because at Pier One there was a sale on their spray scents, so we picked up one that smelled like apples and cinnamon and he likes it so much he sprays it every time he walks by the canister. He sprays and sprays and then exclaims “CHRISTMAS!” like he’s five years old. I love his enthusiasm, but I’m pretty sure my pee is going to smell cinnamon-y now.
I am so grateful for the long weekend. It was really fantastic to spend time by myself and with Jason. We saw a movie, hung out around the house, went shopping, and did some more hanging. A lot of TV was watched. Sleeping in was done. It was fairly low key, the way a vacation should be.
Except today is Monday. Vacation is over. Not only is it over, it’s also the busiest day of the month in our department at Big Company. We were closed on Friday, so work is likely backed up to hell. It’ll be a two-coffee day for sure.
Filed under: Uncategorized
We were all in a circle, and in the middle of the circle were three buckets of water, and soap, and washcloths. The director, Andre, told us the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet as an act of servanthood. Andre explained that the Southeastern put a big emphasis on servanthood, and stressed the importance of putting others before ourselves. It was a very powerful and moving sermon. He encouraged us to look around the circle, to find someone we could serve.
One by one my peers got up from their space in the circle, took someone else’s hand, and washed their feet. It was beautiful. We prayed and worsipped while this was going on, as we expressed our servanthood in the purest of ways.
I washed the feet of a girl named Mary. I would meet her later. She was the girlfriend of the roommate of a guy I went on a date with. Such a small world. At the time, though, she was nameless, and as I washed, I thought about how vulnerable she must feel, having some stranger clean her feet.
I’m not sure how long we all sat there. After a while, I started feeling panicked. No one had approached me.
I used to suffer from extreme social anxiety. It felt debilitating. I couldn’t go to class without feeling judged, stared at, and mocked. I didn’t make friends easily because large groups of people scared me. It took me many months of therapy to come to grips with, to understand that no one was teasing me quietly and that large groups were nothing to be afraid of. I had conquered it.
Until then. I sat in the group of strangers and felt cast aside. The whole thing came and went and no one had chosen me and I was crushed.
It wasn’t intentional. No one was being malicious by not washing my feet. It could have been that there was an odd number of people, or that someone left when they heard there would be foot touching. I don’t hold it against them, but it broke me.
I never went back.
I tell you this not so you’ll feel sorry for me, but so someone might understand what it feels like to be left out. Although it was a trigger for my depression to rear its ugly head, it provided me with an opportunity to learn about the true nature of serving. Sometimes you don’t get chosen, but that shouldn’t stop you from choosing.
I know, I know. I go and tell you about cancer and how my husband has it and don’t do a follow up post or anything. I left you high and dry. Forgive me. After appointments with doctors and discussing treatment and relaying that to family and friends, it all begins to feel pretty heavy. The absolute last thing I want to do is talk about cancer and balls some more, and yet here I am.
He starts chemo on December first.
For anyone wishing to google this type of treatment, he’s getting carboplatin for a stage one seminoma in two doses.
I hate that I have to know that.
We picked a treatment plan and I’m looking forward to it. The sooner he gets the treatment, the sooner we can start putting the cancer behind us. After the rounds of chemo he starts his bi-yearly check ups, and after some years of clean scans and good blood work he gets bumped up to yearly scans. We’re in good spirits.
Kind of.
I get asked all the time how I’m doing, and I usually say “Fine. We’re fine.”
It’s so draining to pretend everything is fine. I understand that I don’t really need to pretend, but it’s easier that way. I go about my day pretty normally but when I get home I feel so exhausted. I’m scared and anxious and mildly depressed. Everything feels like it takes so much energy. I cry on a regular basis. I know that it is a phase, but it’s a pretty bullshit phase. It comes in spurts, which is helpful. At least I’m somewhat productive.
I know I have to be accountable for my feelings. Nothing makes me feel a certain way; I let myself feel angry or scared or small. It’s very very easy to slip into feeling sorry for myself and for what Jason is going through, but it’s not conducive to a healthy state of mind. So! Enough of the pity party. Tonight I am going to: do laundry, play The Sims 3, catch up on about four years of blog posts that I’ve missed, and buy my brother some Christmas/housewarming gifts. Nothing makes you feel better than buying kitchen stuff, even if the kitchen doesn’t happen to be your own.
Jason has testicular cancer.
Maybe.
I’m unfamiliar with the jargon. Does one have cancer if the cancer is gone? Logically, no. But right now we don’t know if he had it or has it. I could be optimistic and declare him eradicated, that when the doctors removed his teste they effectively removed all of the cancer. The cancer was in the form of a 4 centimeter tumor, and the tumor was complete inside of the teste. Ergo, no teste, no tumor.
But that does not mean no cancer.
When we are mere fetuses, our kidneys and ovaries/testes are one. Then we develop further and what was one is now two (three, really), so it’s possible that the cancer cells hitchhiked to the lymph nodes near the kidney and set up camp like wayward mobsters without a godfather and are now formulating their attack.
Which is silly. Because cancer cells don’t think. They just grow.
Unless there are no more.
But we don’t know.
Jason gave a pretty detailed account of the when/where details on his blog, but here’s the rundown: on Sunday at around eleven a.m. he felt what he thought were lower intestinal cramps, a sure fire sign a poop is on the way. So he pooped. But the cramps did not subside. At three in the afternoon he took a shower and noticed that instead of the cramps easing up, the pain seemed to radiate to his left testicle. After a quick feel, he called me in to verify that it was indeed swollen. It felt full, and where there was just a teste inside of a scrotum there was now… something else. We went to the hospital and checked in at 4:54 p.m.
At 8:30 he got an ultrasound done. The right teste looks like an egg yolk: homogeneous, round. A perfect specimen of health. The left one looked decidedly squished up, and below it was… something else. It was dark and scary looking and I expected the lights to flicker and thunder to roll in an ominous fashion, which is ridiculous because it doesn’t thunder in Oregon.
Instead we just went back to his room and waited.
The doctor arrived shortly thereafter and told us he scheduled Jason an appointment with a urologist the following morning, bright and early. He said that it was likely the urologist would remove the teste.
That’s exactly what happened.
We saw the urologist who looked over the ultrasound with us and said it was probably cancer. He ordered a chest x-ray and a CT scan for that day, and blood work to be taken before his surgery at 11:30 the following morning.
Everything happened so quickly.
We had another doctor’s appointment yesterday, a follow up so the doctor could tell us if the mass was malignant or benign.
Waiting for the doctor was the longest three minutes of my life, and when he told us the status of the tumor I felt crestfallen.
Cancer.
It’s one of two types, both of which have scary sounding and unpronounceable names and neither of which I can remember right now. The treatment for one is just regular scans to make sure that when they scooped out the guts of his testicle, they got everything bad. There is a possibility, though, that the cells had moved to the lymph node and are now there. The final pathology isn’t back from the lab so we find out next week.
We have an appointment with an oncologist on Tuesday.
I am twenty five years old and my thirty year old husband has an appointment with an oncologist.
Fuck.
I never thought of myself as capable in crisis situations. I am good at comforting and saying soothing things and making people laugh, but I am not the strong one. That is my brother. He is level-headed and logical and unemotional (I don’t say that to insult him; there is a reason he’s a police officer and not, say, a nurse or a circus clown) and able to take bad news. But my brother wasn’t here, and he really has nothing to do with this whole thing except for the brief moments I wish I had inherited my father’s calm demeanor and not my mother’s side of the family’s flair for the dramatic. When the doctor said cancer, I heard “death.” When the urologist told us this kind of cancer had a 97% cure rate, I thought “What about the other 3 percent?”
Helpful, right?
The great thing about adrenaline is that it kicks in when you normally wouldn’t be able to handle anything you’re about to deal with. I dispense his medicine and put on his socks and give him a sponge bath and make him laugh. I do not dwell on the negative emotions that darken the doorstep of my mind because they are unhelpful and refuse to fold the laundry. When the adrenaline runs out, I feel worn down. I cry when it is appropriate, when I feel terrified of what’s going to happen next.
But we don’t know what’s going to happen next, so the crying, while heaving sobs, is short-lived.
Since Jason’s surgery on Tuesday, we’ve eaten crappy food and watched even crappier television. We take naps in the afternoon and talk to our family. We give rundowns of the situation to everyone that calls. We do it all together, because before we were what we are now, A Couple Dealing With Cancer, we were just A Couple. We delight in each other; we are strong for each other. I am his footrest during the day and I fall asleep on his chest at night. To an outsider nothing has changed. But everything has changed. You can’t go through something like this with your partner and not come out stronger than you ever thought possible. I love him more every day, not only because he is strong and loyal and positive, but because he chose me to be by his side.
I’m honored to be there.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Writing has always been my fool-proof stress reliever. There’s something about seeing all my stresses on a piece of paper that gave me some clarity. I had the ability to more or less forget about what was bothering me as long as I wrote it down and it was trapped on the page.
The past few weeks have been stressful, due mostly to work, and I’ve been unable to write about it because I don’t know who reads this or what’s really going on. Don’t you just love when that happens?
I am still alive, not that anyone would be able to tell judging from this alone. Still employed, still married, still living in southern Oregon, still not pregnant. I’m just not blogging.
I will start again when I have something to say and can put it down in a coherent way without being vague. Until then, I have twittter and facebook and will do my darndest to stay caught up on the writings of others, even if I have nothing to contribute myself.
Filed under: relationships
My cousin tagged me in a note in facebook that had the title “i need opinions.” Being an opinionated person and always willing to speak my mind about (most) things, I obliged. Her questions covered some deep topics (racism and sexism, for example), but the question that drew me in was number one: Why does love hurt? I thought about it quite a lot, going over and over the subject in my head. Why does love hurt? We’ve been in relationships before, yes? And we feel sad when they end and the question is one we’ve all asked ourselves. Why does love hurt?
I’ve been in exactly two serious relationships in my life; one of them is with my husband. The other obviously didn’t work out so well. It was shit, to be quite frank. It wasn’t always bad, but toward the end of it there was definitely more bad than good. We were together for about a year and a half, and then broke up for nine months, and then got back together for 5 months. The getting back together part, that was a mistake. But I learned more about relationships in those five months than I had in any other previous “relationship” I was ever in.
Love doesn’t hurt.
Love does not cause your boyfriend to cheat on you: lack of faithfulness and blatant immaturity do. Love does not cause you to feel jealous of your significant other’s friends of the opposite sex: insecurity does. Love certainly does not cause you to clock your ex-boyfriend in the face: anger, frustration, and a teensy ounce of empowerment are all contributing factors. Love is considerate, understanding, and thoughtful. Love causes us to be vulnerable in times of stress and grief; love gives us the security to open ourselves up completely, to let down our guards. We trust that the person we love, and who says they love us, will not throw away our regard when it comes to making decisions or having conversations; we trust that they will consider our feelings and needs, will provide us with the security to speak our minds. When the person claiming they love us handles our heart maliciously or thoughtlessly, that is not love.
Love does not hurt. Hurt hurts. Being betrayed, lied to, that really sucks. And we think “But he said he loved me! Why is doing this?” He’s doing that because he does not love you. He does not regard your feelings as highly as his own, and so your needs got kicked to the curb. But it’s a two way street, isn’t it? Men aren’t monsters or bad people for breaking up with women any more than women are needy and clingy for voicing their opinions. Women are capable of the inducing the same bitter emotions. Men’s needs are relatively simple: eat, sleep, physical contact, wash, rinse, repeat. Women, on the other hand, tend to complain a lot more. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing–it has the ability to turn into a bad thing if abused–it’s just the nature of the beast. Women are talkers; men are doers. Problem solvers. People of action. When they are treated like a girlfriend or talked down to like a child, when their inherent manliness isn’t substantiated but, rather, diminished, who can blame them for wanting out? They aren’t loved, so they do not feel love, and because they are people of action, they do something about it.
But love, at the heart of the word, is a verb. The feeling of being in love is an emotion, one that eventually (and thankfully) wears off after a while. To love someone means seeing the bigger picture and your place in it; sometimes it means shutting up and letting the little things go. But at the heart of it, love doesn’t hurt. Not even a little bit.
