The Dark Discovery

This blog is for all the families that are living and struggling with cancer.  It chronicles my own experience as the wife of someone with cancer, as the mother of three children who are too young to have to experience any of this but who must gradually and all of us collectively come to terms with what we are dealing with...

Cancer.

When you hear it from a doctor's mouth, you know what sheer horror feels like. 

Cancer.

When you announce to your loved ones you have it you know what utter despair feels like.

You hold your family close, you don't want to say goodbye.  Everyone feels helpless and grief-stricken.

"Cancer..." we told our eldest, our teenage son.  He was speechless.

"Cancer..." we told our middle child who is our 'tween'.  She cried.

"A sick kidney" was all we told our youngest, who is eight years old.  She wouldn't understand what cancer means anyway. 

Even for us adults cancer is hard to understand.

How long had the tumor on his kidney been there?  Professional guesses, but we'll never know for sure.

Where did it come from?  I lost my mother to lung cancer eight years ago, we knew her disease was due to decades of smoking.  But with kidney cancer, we'll never know.

In further conversations with the doctor and with specialists, you learn about this world called cancer.  There are islands and continents with all different climates for each depending upon which one you stand.

With my mother's lung cancer, which from diagnosis to death was a period of eleven months, I became familiar with the terraine upon the continent of her disease.

Then last spring when the doctor told my husband he has kidney cancer--I felt my world crumble as I crashed back onto that desolate continental wasteland named cancer.

However, this time around it was a little different.  My mother's had been inoperable.  My husband's was operable.  This was an island with a vegetation of hope.

Two weeks after hearing the dreaded diagnosis, my husband was under the knife to have the entire diseased kidney removed. 

The surgery took longer than expected.  I knew that this was not a good sign.

Turned out his tumor was bigger than thought by about a centimeter.  I was not exactly sure of the implications of a larger than expected tumor, but I remained hopeful--they believed they got it all and to the eyeball the surrounding areas looked good. 

Within a few days we had received the best news we could have possibley gotten.  The pathology report was clean!  We really felt like we had conquered this disease and we shared the good news with everyone.

My husband had a tough time recovering.  He had this condition called Illius where his digestive system was not working properly.  This man who always loved food now had no appetite.  He stayed in the hospital for almost two weeks before he could finally eat enough and digest well enough to come home.  He had lost a remarkable 20 lbs.

Recovery took many weeks.  But by mid-summer we were pretty much back to our regular lives.  Eerily, it actually seemed like it had all just been a bad dream and that none of it had ever really happened.  I considered ourselves very blessed and felt completely confident as I looked to the future.

But with cancer it's not that easy.

My husband had his first catscan post-op a couple of weeks ago and last week we got the results.  Not what we had been anticipating.

The doctor first started with the fact that my husband's uric acid was too high.  With just one remaining kidney, this was especially concerning.  He could control it through drugs or diet, my husband chose diet.  He has to lose twenty pounds...

Well, as worrisome as that is it is not the most serious issue.

The catscan had shown two "abnormalities".  There was a shadowy image the doctor hoped and believed was the bowel.  While one might be surprised that a urologist couldn't tell about something that seemingly simple, fact is that during my husband's long surgery all the organs in the way of getting to the kidney had to be scooped up and placed aside (this is what caused the onset of the Illius digestive problem afterwards).  The organs were put back, but with the space of a missing kidney things setttled a little differently.  So the shadowy image could very well be the bowel...

The second abnormality and I think the scariest is an enlarged lymphnode near (although not right next to) the area of the kidney.  This could, the doctor explained, be due to the area is still healing.  After all, my husband's large scar is still very red and swollen-looking.  Or this could be tumorous.

The catscan is to be repeated after Christmas.

We have not told our children anything about these latest developments other than his uric acid being high and his need to lose twenty pounds.  I did, though, ask my son to let Dad wear his cross (which was originally mine and has protected me since I was a child).

This blog will follow the journey of our family life with cancer.  I invite anyone who is in a similar situation to feel free to comment.  Perhaps this can serve like a support group.  I hope my next posting is good news.