cancer

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Fuck Cancer

I’ll never forget the moment when my husband called from the Emergency Room to tell me that his CT results were back and “they found a mass”. 

They found a mass. 

Those words still barely register seven months later. Seven months, one colonoscopy, eight rounds of chemo, and three scans later. I know it’s not MY body that was overwhelmed by the cancer, but once cancer comes into your life, it will never not be a part of you. Over the course of the last seven months, I’ve come to realize that despite it not being my own personal diagnosis, my body feels the weight of this burden every day. All of my senses are heightened to react or respond to the memory of when cancer came knocking on our door. 

The night of that phone call, I got into the car to drive to the hospital and immediately turned off the music. I did not want any song to be ruined by the memory of the scariest moment of my life. I did not want to risk the possibility that one day five years from now, I’d be brought to my knees in the middle of the grocery store if “that song” came on over the PA system. 

I will never be able to look at another red jello packet without thinking of our time in the hospital. The beeping of a blood pressure machine at the doctor’s office still rattles me. I’m constantly scanning my husband’s body for jaundice in the eyes or whether he’s warm to the touch. 

In the shower this morning, I felt a lump in my armpit. Upon further examination, I am pretty sure it’s an ingrown hair. But I can’t stop thinking about it. Every mole, every red spot, every headache feels like….maybe. 

The reality is that cancer will never not be a part of my mind and body. He finishes his last round of chemo on Monday, but it doesn’t feel like a thing that we can ever check off of the list of things to worry about. This awful disease has made a home in our collective psyches and though we are walking through the process of finding therapists to start the mental part of the healing journey, I know we are in for a long road. As they say….the body keeps the score, and the score from this one is high.

PS – Get your colonoscopy!

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She bought him a catfish body pillow. Seriously.

Trigger warning: cancer, illness, hospice mention, food mention, weight mention

When you lose a parent as a young kid, you have a lot of questions. “Did daddy like ___?” “Would he like this band or that band or this food or this ____?” I often wonder now if it was hard for my mom to constantly get these questions from me that I only asked because I was insatiably curious and I knew remarkably little about who my dad was personally. A lot of what I remember about my dad (and about my childhood in general) comes in images and in imagined scenarios of how I believe things would have gone. I don’t have many truly genuine memories of my father, but the ones I do have I treasure and actively make sure I never forget. One thing I know for sure about my dad was that he was stick thin. I remember him crossing his bony legs in the morning in his bathrobe as he read the newspaper and drank his coffee. My mom told me that his legs were so bony that he had to sleep with a pillow between them; my aunt even bought him a catfish body pillow (my dad loved to fish, so it was a perfect gift) to put between his legs. It looked like a catfish. Seriously.

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