Good Grief! Almost 3 months since the last post. Plenty of stuff has gone on, I just haven't taken the time to write about it... Why? I said in the beginning that this was for my own therapy, so does this mean I am all better and don't need to write any more? Ha.... you'll see...
So why did I come back now?
I have to work this out and this is always the best place to do it.
We got great news yesterday. Triann's scans all came back clear. We have seen this every time we have gone down to Houston. A whole day of MRI's, CT scans, blood work and X-rays. Followed by a meeting with Dr Habra to tell us what they saw. Always clear. The surgery site, where they removed the tumor is clear, the other adrenal gland is clear, her lungs are clear, her guts are clear, her lymph nodes are clear. It is all clear.
The reward for this? More chemo. and here is my issue. It's not the "real" chemo, you know the kind where your hair falls out and you wear a wig or a head wrap and everyone you see knows you have cancer. What a stupid thing to say right? Is it?
I have watched my wife melt down for almost a year now. Getting her butt kicked by this poison that is helping her (maybe). She feels nauseous 24 hours a day. She can't eat much due to the nausea, that and the medication itself keeps her in a constant state of exhaustion and fatigue. Her mind is hit and miss at best, forgetting big things that we have done together all the way down to repeating the same conversation over and over, with no clue that she is doing it. Between the surgery that removed one adrenal gland (with tumor) and the chemo that is killing off the other she is now taking 3 or 4 different hormone pills to try and keep her body in some sort of hormonal balance. I don't have to tell you what unbalanced hormones are like right? She spends days in and out of bed, so dizzy that she doesn't feel comfortable driving and can barely walk, which leads to massive headaches. But when she is up and around, visiting friends, going to church, running errands or taking the kids to events she looks normal. NORMAL. So she looks normal, but asks for help, and says silly things, and makes silly mistakes and to the rest of the world it looks like she is a ditz or just lazy or incapable of doing things on her own. They don't know that her entire life is currently jacked up because of this random combination of rouge cells that decided to blow up her adrenal gland and now she has to eat 15 doses of rat poison daily. All because her hair didn't fall out. I am tempted to sneak into her bedroom and shave her head just to give her a break from the looks and the comments that she tells me about, I can't even imagine the one that she doesn't. Or the arguments she has to have with herself to justify the way she feels now, vs the person that she was not even a year ago.
It KILLS me. Triann is not herself. I know it, she knows it, her close friends and family know it, but the rest of the world doesn't know what is going on, they don't know the kind of person that she really is. Triann would never ask anyone for help, she would be the one helping, but now she has to beg to help get Emily to appointments when she can't stand up. She has to beg to have someone come over to the house for a few hours so she can get a nap in the middle of the day, or just curl up in her bed so she doesn't hurl. She had to beg for financial help because her husband can't make enough money to support the major medical needs of 3 members of the family. Would she have to do that if she didn't have hair?
Please don't write back and tell me I am out of line. I know I am being an A-hole here. I get it. I know that both of us are gaining invaluable wisdom out of this entire process, and God willing this part of it may be over in 6 months. I also feel that every SECOND I have with her is a gift directly from God in whatever shape she is in. But she is my wife and my best friend and it just rips me apart to see her going through all this.
The Dr told us that if we come back in 6 months and everything is still clear we can talk about stopping the chemo. That is a miracle. It would mean that they truly removed all the cancer from her body and they are not concerned about it returning any time soon. When she stops the pills, the effects and the chemo will hang out in her body for around a year. I imagine she will start improving through that year but it will still be another year before she is back to what could be normal. But that will mean that she beat it. By Gods Will, she will have survived this.
Did God need the Chemo? Was his miracle having Daniel jump on her and detect this undetectable cancer before it had a chance to wreck it's havoc? Or was all of that so we could experience this and grow from it and learn from it.
I know this is where I am supposed to tie in a great lesson that inspires people and makes them want to write my mother and tell them what a great son she has raised, or how great it is to see God in our lives through our faith. That is still there, I know what He has done for us, but I don't have it right now. I am mad at some of Triann's friends, and people in the store, and people at the park and all the folks that look at her and see a "normal" person and have no idea just how strong she is to be standing there at all, or what she has fought through to even be moving. To know that she does not get all the sympathy or empathy that she deserves drives me crazy.
I have done what I needed to do. I have written out all of my feelings about this and fought the urge to correct them as they came. I have let some raw emotions hit the screen and I will now walk away and let it be. There will be a time to come back and talk about how this fits, and where I see Gods hand in all of this. I hope it is soon.
e
