For those of you that have read my son's blog, you'll note the similarity in how it starts. In the same fashion that I wanted to give my son a voice so others could know him, I asked my wife if I could write about her (our?) journey as we're just getting started. Between the two of us, I'm more the writer.
What Ifs
It was as textbook and as simple as you can imagine: "I just felt something inside."
Dial up the anxiety to 11 and just keep it there for almost 3 months. It's at about a Stage 3. I feel like I went through the stages of grief at least twice in the intervening time. It took that long, I think, because my wife is so young. At the age of 31, she's considered as being part of a low-risk demographic for this cancer. Individuals her age just don't typically get it and studies rarely see patients at that age. It felt like nothing was prioritized until the second biopsy came back with positive results. The first didn't grab enough tissue for a conclusive result. Imagine the anxiety of waiting for cancer results and the frustration of being told the results were inconclusive. Fun fact: biopsies sound simple, but they carry a several-day recovery period. When you've got 5 kids, you get a few hours. This all crescendoed one day when she rushed into my home office. She was still on the phone with the lab results and she mouthed "I have cancer". Fun fact - you absolutely can just leave a meeting for no announced reason whatsoever. It was definitely one of those "where were you on this day" type of moments where my gut dropped while my heart was injected with nitrous.
Suddenly, there was this thing growing, spreading, and trying to kill my wife from the inside. The initial week was an onslaught of "what if". Each "what if" is something you have to mentally and emotionally fight. It's exhausting. As terrifying as that sounds, it really is in that moment where you see a person's constitution come out. For my wife, she tapped into every bit of her motherhood to manage her emotions and gain a handle. It has been uncanny to see. I'm typically emotionally constipated as it is and this did not let me down until I had some time to myself in the car where I had a moment to break down. In the Islamic tradition, anything like this is viewed as a test. As with our son's diagnosis and prognosis, I was reminded of the humanity that Islam affords in allowing room for raw emotions, but at the same time governing them with purpose. This combination of human emotions and purpose gives rise to hope and resilience. I think hope might be the most defining quality of those of the Muslim faith, but you only ever really see it in times of trial. As hard as this might be to understand, there is something purifying about purposeful hardship, and that has brought us some calm.
Balancing
I have always been aware and grateful for how much my wife does, but I acutely felt the responsibility of it all when I had to pick up a lot of the work with her recovering from various procedures. It's a little nuts how the work not only piles up, but never actually seems to end. It's 10PM on any given day and you find yourself in the midst of chores you'd expect to be doing 4 hours prior. It's as maddening as it is defeating. However, that's the call. You strap in and grind through it. Rinse and repeat.
Today is her first day of chemotherapy (which takes several hours), and my first day in the waiting room. Needless to say that we logistically would not be able to manage this without our families and our community, but more on that in my next post.
The emotional toll this has taken is severe enough that I started this blog (and it's not even self hosted), if that tells you anything. It feels like we've been getting doused with information every time we have an appointment, and it's been a marathon of tests, scans, and appointments over the last three weeks. Our kids have taken things in stride. We held off on telling our oldest two about what exactly was going on, but their curiosity really drove us to tell them. They've been great so far and understand the need to rise to the occasion in their own small ways without fully grasping the severity of the situation.
I say "so far" because we literally just got started today on what is going to be an intense marathon for the whole family. Sitting here I have no idea how she'll react to the treatment, am hoping that the treatment is perfectly effective, and know that I'll need to step up in major ways in the coming months ahead, including ways that I haven't yet been introduced to. So this isn't your typical narrative from the actual patient, but from the view of the one that watches it happen to the one they love the most.
