The News

I'm throwing this out as a general disclaimer - these posts will likely be raw and unfiltered. Writing has always been cathartic for me, so this is a way to get out the ugly shit in my head. I don't promise it will be pretty, in fact, quite the opposite.

Now that we have that out of the way...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Yesterday evening we learned the devastating news that my husband's cancer has returned. Four months after his last chemo treatment and our life was finally starting to make sense again. We had plans for a Christmas out of the hospital this year... we were moving to a new house in a new city... I had just shed the anxiety of him leaving for business trips because it reminded me of the lonely nights while he was in the hospital.

The first time you learn someone you love has cancer is crippling. I remember sobbing uncontrollably in his hospital room, 9 months pregnant and literally feeling like my world was crumbling.

The SECOND time you learn someone you love has cancer is heart breaking. You KNOW what it looks like, sounds like, smells like, feels like. You know all the ugly behind the scenes shit you're getting into this time, so there's no blind optimism. No fooling yourself into thinking, "It won't be that bad." You know you're in for months of nauseatingly sterile hospital stays, middle of the night emergency room runs, watching the person you love literally wither away before your very eyes. Sunken in eyes, rapid weight loss, loss of energy, lost joy, SO MUCH PAIN. The needles, the drugs, the nausea, the bone pain, the chest pain. Trying to muster up the strength to be a cheerleader when you are just so fucking tired yourself.

Whenever he tells me he feels sick, he has a headache, he's itchy... my brain goes right to - "The cancer is back." And now it is. I feel like our whole lives we'll be on hyper alert to every twinge, pain, or ache. There is no respite now.

"It'll be ok." "At least they caught it early." "He's young." My 34 year old husband has cancer. Not ONCE, but TWICE. I wish people would stop trying to see the bright side of ugly shit. I am optimistic he's going to beat this too, but there's no "at least..." in this scenario for us right now. It sucks. It's just really really crappy and there's no "at least" about it. Not yet, anyway.

I've spent the last 24 hours wavering between being a problem solving superhero and wanting to curl up into the fetal position and not move for the next 6 months until this is resolved. One minute I think, "I can do this... I can keep my shit together long enough to get us through this rough patch." and the next I wonder how I'm going to drag my ass off the couch without crumbling into a heap on the floor. The teetering between the two extremes is exhausting.

Right now, we wait. He gets up and goes to work. I take care of the kids. We wait for a phone call, a surgery, an appointment, a plan. We wait and carry on like normal, knowing what lies ahead is going to be ugly and inevitable. I REFUSE to believe my sweet boys were meant to grow up without their Daddy. REFUSE. They both just adore him way too much for him to be ripped off this earth before they can even live long enough to have memories of their time with him. But DAMMIT is it unfair what he has to go through now. I am just grateful they're both too young to absorb or remember the kind of havoc this wreaks on a family.