So, how do you tell the people you love that you have cancer? Ummm, we had no idea. I had never known anyone with cancer before. I was lucky enough in my life not to be touched by this terrible disease, until now, when it is literally sleeping in my bed.
But how do you TELL people you have cancer? We decided that it was not something we could send in a text message or through a phone call, it was something we had to tell our family in person. So off we went. Setting meetings with each of our primary family members in one weekend to deliver this terrible news.
We told the kids first. They were shocked but we definitely tempered the information so as not to scare them. We made sure to let them know we had a plan in place to attack this cancer and that everything was going to be fine.
We told the parents next. We decided that we’d take a 2-pronged approach, a 1-2 punch, if you will. Starting off the conversation by saying that we had bad news and good news. I would deliver the bad news and Andy would come in and follow that up with the good news, the plan of attack. I formulated what I wanted to say, I practiced in the shower, I had a flow of how I wanted the information to be heard, I was concise, giving facts and not trying to get too emotional as I delivered the news. I felt as prepared as I could be to ruin the day of quite a few people.
And we did.
We ruined the day (life?) of everyone we saw that weekend. It was meeting after meeting of ruined days. It was hard, but it was the right thing to do.
Interestingly enough, when we asked people why they thought we had setup the family meeting, there was a recurring top 3 reasons:
1. They thought we were getting divorced
2. They thought we were moving
3. They thought one of us had lost our job
I mean, honestly, I would have rather delivered any of the above news before I delivered the cancer diagnosis.
Once everyone in our immediate family knew, we went public with the information on Facebook. I’m a big Facebook fan, it’s how I keep in touch with a lot of my family and I don’t let the political stuff ruin my day. The amount of support you receive after a diagnosis like this is incredible. Its overwhelming and really makes you believe in the good of humanity once again. We were inundated with kindness and well wishes, facebook messages and posts under our announcement. It truly was the best to see how supportive everyone was, it made this whole nightmare just a little bit more tolerable. But we had a long way to go.
At urgent care, they gave my husband a CT scan (which, again, I was initially pissy about because of the cost) and immediately identified the problem. Appendicitis. They recommended he go straight to the ER to have his appendix looked at more closely.
Meanwhile, I had the P1 team at my house. We were having a great workshop! We got a lot accomplished and while we were breaking for lunch, my husband came home. He told me the news and that he was heading to the ER. Still peeved, but now a bit concerned that he might actually have something wrong with him, I ask him if he needed me to drive him or if he needed anything from me? He says no, that he is totally fine to drive himself and who knows what the ER will recommend or how long it will take. So I let him go and me and the P1 team went back to working on the project.
My mind was racing tho. Here I was, hosting this group, literally in my home, and my husband was heading to the hospital! What was the right move here? Do I send the P1 team away? If so, where were they to go? Do I go with my husband and sit in the ER just to wait for God only knows how long? I didn’t know what to do. So I went with status quo. I remained with the P1 group. But by 3pm, my husband had been seen in the ER and they told him that he needed surgery to have his appendix removed ASAP. His surgery was scheduled for 5:30pm. I could no longer focus on the P1 project, and my team could tell. They had asked me no less that 30 times if I wanted to go be with my husband at the hospital, each time I declined. But by 4pm, it was clear I could no longer stay at home. I apologized and sent the P1 team out the door. (Note, they were SO understanding and completely okay with leaving! It was really more my stubbornness that was keeping everyone at the house, not my P1 team.)
So onto to the hospital I go. I get there, find my husbands room, and see him just long enough for him to detect the aggravation on my face and in my body language. I was aggravated. Here I was, trying to be a female in the tech industry and waiting YEARS for this opportunity, and THIS! This had to happen now. Right. Fucking. Now. Aggravated was an understatement.
He went into surgery around 7pm, not 20 mins after I got there, and around 8pm the dr came out and talked to me. He said that he had successfully removed the appendix, but it had perforated prior to removal. I remember him saying that his appendix was the gnarliest looking appendix he may have ever seen, and thinking Whoa, really? I mean, this was an older dr who had clearly been around the block with an appendix or two, and MY husbands was the gnarliest he’d ever seen? Huh.
The surgery was laparoscopic. So all that was left of the whole ordeal was 3 itty bitty scars on my husbands belly. He came out of surgery and ended up spending the night in the hospital because they wanted to administer IV antibiotics. The next morning I went back to the hospital and was (again) peeved to learn that they wanted to keep him ANOTHER night, possibly 2!? I couldn’t imagine how much this was costing us and since I’m the one in charge of finances in the house, all I could think about was how much shuffling around of money I was going to have to do to cover this ridiculous ordeal … and now they wanted to keep him another 24 maybe 48 hours??? Aw HELL NO.
It’s so ridiculous looking back and thinking about how I was so pissed off at all of this. I was pissed at my husband (who clearly was not at fault here, but I kept thinking that if only he had eaten less McDonald’s or something, this would not have happened.) I was pissed that the nurses (who, again, not their fault, but kept coming in and telling me that they needed to keep him there because of the perforation in the appendix, which put him at a higher risk of infection.) I was pissed at the dr who operated (who, I rationalized, clearly didn’t do a good job of cleaning it all up or else they wouldn’t be so worried about infection.) I was SO pissed that we decided to go with the stupid high deductible insurance plan thru work to save money because we rarely got sick or need to see a doctor. I was trying to place blame, I NEEDED someone to blame.
There was no one to blame.
He was sent home on Sunday, March 31st. By this time I had resolved myself to paying the entire max exposure for our insurance (ughh) and was sort of, in jest, but kind of serious, planning all the other surgeries he could have now that we were already in this deep! He needed sinus surgery and to get snippy-snipped, if you know what I mean, he had a situation with his lower back that needed attention and … what else could I pile on here since we’re already paying anyway! It was a fun game.
The work week started and my husband’s driving was restricted, so he decided to work from home that week. It’s important to restate that I also work from home, so having him at the house was a complete distraction. He decided to setup shop in the basement, he had his laptop, his PlayStation, and all the streaming TV services at his disposal. And he used them all. so. much. of. The Office. Recall that I have a bit of a problem with empathy. He had surgery to remove his appendix and had 3 tiny little holes from the laparoscopy that were healing. I had birthed 3 babies via c-section. I win that pain fight. I could not stand to have him hobbling around the house hunched over, taking Norco pain meds 4-5-6 days after the surgery. Are you kidding me? I switched over to over-the-counter Advil the second I came home from the hospital WITH a newborn. Get over yourself, dude, man up. You are NOT in that much pain. In my mind, I constantly compared my c-section with his surgery. I would think to myself that mine was WAY worse in terms of what they did, the incision, the recovery, basically everything, and I had done that 3 times! I thought he was being so ridiculous.
If you’re going through hell, keep going. — Winston Churchill
It all started on a random Tuesday. It was a completely normal day. My husband, Andy, went to work that morning, dropped our 4 year old off at preschool. The big kids went to school. Nothing weird, nothing out of the ordinary. We had been bickering a bit the past week or so, as normal married couples do, he probably loaded the dishwasher wrong again and I got all pissy (I cannot be the only one who demands the dishwasher be loaded in the most space-efficient and wash-efficient way possible!?) Either way, he got home from work that Tuesday evening on March 26, 2019 and told me he didn’t feel well and went immediately upstairs to bed. I was a bit thrown off when he said this since he was completely fine when he left for work, but, whatever. He was going to be sick.
A thing you need to know about me — I am not what you would call empathetic in certain situations. I have a TON of empathy for a lot of things, but for adults who “claim” their sick, nope. None. Put on your big boy pants, throw some pills down your throat, be an adult and move on. That’s my exact thought process when I hear the phrase “I’m sick” muttered from the mouth of an adult. I’m not entirely sure why I feel this way? Maybe its because I don’t really get the luxury of laying in bed being “sick” for a few days (which sounds like a vacation to me!) I have to get things done, like care for the kids and make them food, pick them up from school, take them to practices and games, and do baths and put them to bed. All things I don’t just get to opt-out of because I’m “sick.” So, boo-hoo, you’re sick. So what, suck it up buttercup and do your part.
So you can imagine how I felt when he stayed in bed for a full 36 hours. Didn’t get up to eat, didn’t get up to check his phone, maybe got up to pee, but I never witnessed that.
I had just been given a HUGE opportunity with my company, to be included in what they were terming our #1 Priority (P1) item for the next quarter. They wanted ME to be a part of a 3 person team to help lead the effort to define, solve for and implement the strategy to address our P1 item. I had been positioning myself over the course of the past 4 years with my company to be ready for this amazing leadership opportunity once it happened … and it was finally happening! I was AMAZINGLY excited! I had FINALLY been given a seat at the table and all I needed to do was to seize the moment! Why am I telling you this? Because, as luck would have it, our little P1 3-person team had decided to do an in-person workshop (we all work remotely from our home offices, so actually seeing my colleagues in-person was a pretty rare occurance) where we could more effectively strategize on how we were going to approach the problem. We decided on 2 workshop locations, one in St. Louis (my home base) and one in San Francisco (the home base of one of the team members.) The St. Louis workshop was to be held on March 28th and the San Francisco workshop was the following week.
March 28th, a Thursday. I was having the team over to my house for the workshop. I NEEDED this to be a success. I could NOT have my “sick” husband disrupt this opportunity for me, and I told him so. Since I had not actually seen him in any form of an awake state since that Tues evening when he came home from work, I sent him a text message:
Don’t forget, tomorrow is the day I have one of my company executives and another very high level coworker coming over to work on this Account Success planning project. This is extremely important to me that everything go smoothly tomorrow. So if for some reason you are still feeling sick, I need you to put on your big boy pants, take some meds and deal with it. Ok?? Love u!
That’s what I said. That’s exactly what I sent. Looking back, I’m an asshole. But how was I to know?
Thursday morning came, and my husband finally got out of bed. He was hunched over, I knew immediately that something wasn’t quite right. But he looked at me as he was rolling out of bed and said that he had promised to help that day, regardless of being sick, so he was making good on that promise. He took our 4 year old to preschool and when he came back home, he told me that he was going to urgent care because something wasn’t right. Again, I was a bit peeved that he was making such a big deal about what I thought to be nothing, and I was also peeved because we had HDP (high-deductible plan) insurance and we would have to pay out of pocket this entire episode he was having. But, ughhh. Fine. Go to urgent care.
Stage IV Appendix Cancer, Mucinous Adenocarcinoma 