Update

I want to provide a small update on where things stand. While I am not excusing my husbands behavior in any way, he did come to me and offer a bit of an explanation into what has been going on. Over the course of the past 168 hours, or 7 days, he’s basically been in bed for 120 of those hours. This was agonizing for everyone, including him. I think a lot of the time I don’t show the sweet and kind side of my husband. His cool, calm and collected side which is rational and balances out my crazy. I use this blog to help myself understand my own thoughts and emotions and in turn, they are often displayed in a way that is raw, full of intensity, harsh and abrupt.

And one-sided.

While I am very comfortable displaying my struggle flag, waving it around for all to see — helping me feel less alone and providing comfort and support while I struggle, my husband is very private about his struggle. He wants noone to know, and does not want sympathy or comfort from others. He even gets upset with me, sometimes, when I tell others about his struggle. He claims that it causes unnecessary worry and he would just rather say nothing. He would prefer to suffer in silence with only me knowing the (somewhat) full extent of what he is going through. I’m sure what he’s shared with me and what I have witnessed is not even half of what his true struggle actually is.

While waving my struggle flag around helps me tremendously because it allows me to organize my thoughts in a cohesive manner and I find it unbelievably cathartic to write it all down, as I feel it, as it’s happening. I’m not always right.

Yesterday (Saturday) was the first day that my husband was able to get out of bed since getting the chemo box removed. It took him a bit to get going, but he mustered up enough energy to join us at a volleyball tournament and even participate in a Christmas walk along one of the cutest and most festive streets in our city! It certainly wasn’t easy for him and he had to take frequent break’s, but he managed because he knew how much he had missed, and how much it was affecting me. So he sucked it up and powered through.

When we got home that evening, he looked exhausted. Not only has he lost, what is likely, another 5lbs from this week of being in bed, not really eating, and sleeping all day, but his eyes are sort of sunken in now, and its very easy to tell when he needs to rest. It kills me to see his body withering away knowing that its only going to get worse and it will never be “back to normal.” But I am hopeful that after chemo is over, he’ll be able to regain some strength and start to take better care of himself on a consistent basis. Right now its all about survival.

Once we got monster to bed, we started talking about next weekend. He’s been planning a trip with his 2 best friends for a few months. Why I never put 2 and 2 together that it was THIS month, in DECEMBER, during one of the ONLY weekends he’ll be feeling well, is beyond me. (face-palm) Regardless, he’s been planning this trip for months and its next weekend. They are all driving to Cincinnati together to watch a football game. The three stooges! lol Srsly tho, one of them is in kidney failure and has to bring ALL of his dialysis equipment with them to do dialysis every night for 12 hours, my husband is in stage 4 cancer and currently going through chemotherapy, and the other one … well, lol He’s the lucky one of the bunch I suppose, he’s just fine. But here they all are, bound and determined to watch this football game. So, Andy is supposed to get chemo again on that Monday after the football game and, in passing, he tells me, oh — I’m just switching my chemo to Tues instead of Mon that week. And I sort of start to flip out. I tell him that switching to Tues would completely throw off the entire schedule for the remaining treatments. Not just that, but we purchased tickets for the Polar Express, which is a BIG deal to me and if he switches to Tues then he basically has NO chance of coming with us to this event and that literally breaks my heart … and I go on and on.

This conversation begins a bigger conversation about what had transpired that week. I tell him about the internal struggle I was having and that I had been thinking about letting go of that burden of concern. When he challenged me to think about what would happen, like what the result would be from letting that go, how that would actually physically manifest itself — I told him. I was completely honest. Through tear filled eyes, I shared with him that I was terrified, because if I gave it all to him, he may never ask for my help. He may never tell me I was needed or wanted for the support I could offer. And that was what I thought would happen if I gave it away. It is the most terrifying outcome that could possibly happen for me out of this situation.

He looked at me, he walked over to me, he put his arms around me and he said “I can’t do this without you.” He told me that he did want my help and my support, that of course he wanted me there with him at all his doctors appts and during hospital stays, he appreciated all the time I was spending with him at every step along the way. He admitted he did not have the capacity to remember all the information or stats or even understand half of what they doctors were talking about and he relied on me for that too. He said the day he told me he didn’t owe me any information was a rough day for him. He was feeling awful and he was embarrassed and in pain from his constant diarrhea situation and was just completely over it. He took his frustration out on me and he didn’t mean to do that.

The conversation continued for a bit and he even said that he’d been thinking of just calling the oncologist and cancelling chemo for December, like I had wanted all along. He admitted that he didn’t want to deal with it either and clearly this was only going to get harder from here on out. He hadn’t made a decision yet, but he wanted me to know that he was considering it.

And that is good enough for me!