Chewing the Cud

We are home now. We got back on Saturday around noon. J got constant praises from all the doctors and nursing staff for his quick and strong recovery from surgery. He was up walking on day three and set records on the breathing test. They supply this breather (IC device) that you inhale as much as you can in a slow, steady way that measures the intake. When J first got brought up from the OR, his nurse asked him to inhale...as he slowly and methodically inhaled, the little yellow tab when up, up up. As it kept rising, the nurses eyes kept opening wider and wider until he reached 3500 with a controlled exhale. She excitedly said, "That is the highest I have ever seen anyone do! Most patients only do 1000!" The next shift of nurses came bounding in a few hours later and said, "We heard you are a diver and can do 3500 on the IC...can we see?" By, the time we got discharged, J had done the maximum at 5000 and was a superstar on Floor 9. J is settling back in at home. He is recovering well and back on his great pain medications. It is just nice to have him home walking around with no TPN, IVs or any other machine hooked up to him. And, just nice to be able to sleep without getting interrupted every hour!

The surgery took all morning last Monday. My girlfriends and I took over the floor in the waiting room playing scrabble and card games. We laughed, chased their little ones and breastfed the hours away while we waited in anticipation. The surgeon finally came out and I took my brother-in-law inside the side room with me. He started with, "The surgery went well, I am just worried about the cancer." He said they were able to remove all visible signs of cancer out of his body during the surgery. The tumor they removed was a little bigger than a racquetball, and it had grown out of the colon into his right pelvis area. They were able to dislodge it from his right pelvic wall and the backside of the pelvis muscle. They shaved off as much as they could from the tailbone. J lost about a liter of blood, but it was quickly replaced. The surgery went as well as it could possibly have gone, given the difficulty of the circumstances, and we are so grateful for our surgeon and his team. They did an incredible job. The concern is that, even though they were able to remove all visible cancer in J's body, there is the chance that there is microscopic cancer cells left in his body at this point. The pathology report came back while we were in the hospital, and 11 lymph nodes tested positive for cancer, along with his pelvic side wall, and an area away from the tumor it had jumped to. All of the results, both from the surgery and the report, now classifies J as a Stage IV cancer patient. This is the worst news possible we were expecting to receive. Stage IV is the worst stage to be diagnosed with. And, with the cancer being in the lymph nodes, it means it can spread anywhere in his body at a really fast pace. Also, we were told having 3 nodes come back is a lot, so J had 11 come back with cancer...which is really a lot. With this diagnosis, it is a higher chance now of the cancer being harder to beat and it coming back at a faster rate....1-2 years.

I am still trying to digest all of this, and I feel like a cow chewing on my cud. I just keep bringing it back up to try and chew, digest, extract...and then when I begin to try, I taste the sourness of it all in my mouth, and swallow it all back down for a later time. I feel like I can't get it all out of my head to even begin to process. My head feels thick, heavy, and fuzzy...weighed down with gobs of threatening information which have forced their way inside and have no outlet to come out to give me some relief. My girlfriend asked me tonight if talking it out would help get it out of my head. I told her it probably would help, but I don't want to "talk" about any of it. And we both agreed that praying counts as talking, so for now it is just sitting inside my head sucking the clarity I desperately need to make good and right, life and death decisions. I know there is more to tell in details, but can't find their way out right now.