In a Haze… New Year’s 2010

“Your husband has cancer.”

Those words hit me like truck. Not a pickup truck…more like a Fedex truck. And not the FedEx Ground one, THE FREIGHT TRACTOR TRAILER.

There were other words that followed out of the doctor’s mouth after those, but who could think straight in the wake of this news? My husband is 25. We haven’t built our dream house, or traveled to Europe, or had our 2 beautiful children.

“He needs surgery right away.”

He was still coming out of sedation from his endoscopy. He was asking for me. I couldn’t go into his room. How was I going to tell the love of my life, the person who loves me more than I could ever love myself, that he has cancer?

It wasn’t going to be me. No. I would not be the one who would devastate him.

There were a lot of choices to make. Where will we have this done? What surgeon will do it? How long is the recovery? Who will pay our bills? What will we do about work? And the question that lingered that I would never utter…

Will. My. Husband. Live?

At this point, no one knew. No one had any idea how much or where in his body the cancer was or had spread. All I knew was that he needed to know; he needed to have a say in his medical care.

If my husband is one thing, it’s brave. And another: strong. And a third: practical. I knew he would want his surgery done quickly, I knew he would want answers and want to strategize, make the best decisions for himself and for us as a family.

He did. The surgery happened 2 days later. They removed the part of his right colon where the tumor was growing and reconnected the rest.

The short version: he was a champ. He was back in recovery quickly and is doing well. All we could do for a week (happy new year!) was wait for a pathology report that would give us the information we needed about the stage of the cancer and his treatment options.

Good news: stage one, no spread, no lymph nodes involved.

And there was much rejoicing (and texting and emailing and facebooking and laughing and kissing and hugging and…you get the idea).

That’s why I’ve been away from the blog so long (and I was just getting good at it, too!). But my husband is home from the hospital, he is as close to well as one who had colon cancer can be at this point. We are meeting with an oncologist soon to discuss possible chemotherapy as a precaution. Overall, we are very lucky that the experience we had has been short-lived (ish) and as uneventful as possible.

I know that I don’t write about serious things very much. But I want to say this: if you think that you or someone you love is exhibiting any kind of symptoms, SEND THEM TO A DOCTOR. Johnathan had some complaints of fatigue, so our best (uneducated) guess was anemia. A blood test got us to his diagnosis in a matter of 2 weeks. I’m not writing to scare anyone or create a panic or hysteria or paranoia, but I couldn’t be more fortunate to have been aware enough to send my husband to his doctor.

You can follow my updates on his condition on the facebook group Go JoBe, Go. Otherwise, I will be returning to my regular programming here on the blog, keeping it as light and fun as possible.

Happy (Belated) New Year!