Surviving Cancer: My Story, Part 4: Ignorance Is Bliss

 

(Our family, the year prior to this ordeal)

Part 4:  Ignorance Is Bliss

“Are you ready to go?” he asked me while holding the door to the garage open. We left our small children with my mother and headed downtown to St. Marks Hospital. 

 The specialist recommended by our insurance company for my husband’s break had been anxiously awaiting the MRI results from the previous day, as were we.  Up until a few months prior, we looked like the picture of the young American family; a husband and wife, starting a family with the world as our oyster and general happiness our mantra. Although average and void of perfection, our problems were manageable and far from being real.  We were on our way to having a second child, and saving to buy a house.

Looking back, I compare my respective circumstances to those of my peers at the time.  We knew people around us who were in the same boat, trying to carve out a life and find their place in the world. We also knew people who had real problems, struggling, who were going through hard times.  We could empathize when these hard times would occasionally be brought up in conversations between friends, but in general these circumstances didn’t directly affect us.

Lack of knowledge and personal connections kept us safe from the ugly things in life.

 ‘As long as it’s not happening to me, it’s not really happening’.

The phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’ would soon take on a whole new meaning in my life.

The doctor finally came into the room.  He instantly drew his attention toward me, and I to him.  What had transpired in the appointment between this man and my husband the day before was something I was determined to get to the bottom of.  He sat down on the physicians chair with one foot firmly planted on the ground and the other in sprint starting position: heel up and ready to spring at the first shot of gunfire.  He flipped open my husband’s chart.  He buried his face in the notes for a several minutes. The room felt cold, and uninviting. Why was he staring at the notes for so long? My mind was already going down a list of possible scenarios of what he could possibly say. The look on his face made it clear that he had no need to review the file. He knew what he had to say, it was figuring out how to say it which he hadn’t quite figured out yet.

His eyes finally came off the paper. “Well,” he sighed, speaking in a slow monotone manner. “The MRI came back clarifying the origin of the fracture in your hand.”  He paused before he went on, “There was a small tissue mass growing near the metacarpal fourth ray.” Again he paused, looking up to see how much we were going to press him to say, “The pressure from the mass caused the bone to gain stress, weaken, and then break.”

“So what does that mean?” My husband was anxiously waiting to hear something he could understand concerning his condition. The doctor sat further down in his chair, his heel now dropped to the floor.  “It means the break was not caused by you opening a door.” This was getting us nowhere and I could see this game going on for hours. “Are you saying that this “growth” is what caused my husband’s hand to break?” I interrupted. “Yes”, the doctor answered, realizing he had a gun now pointed at his head loaded with specific questions.

I finally blurted ‘the question’ I knew my husband wanted answers to but couldn’t bring himself to ask. “Does that mean he has cancer?” I almost felt stupid asking the question out loud.  I already knew that my husband didn’t have cancer.  My husband’s eyes became fixated on the floor. “The probable presence of cancer is extremely low, almost zero chance.  I have seen a lot of tumors in the hand which have all resulted in being benign.” I recognized the word but felt little relief. Benign was the opposite of malignant. A strong urge kept me asking the same questions in variant forms.  I’m sure it was annoying to the doctor, but I really didn’t care. We were talking about my husband, and in that moment I felt responsibility to rescue him. I couldn’t stand to see him be reduced to words on a sheet of paper tucked away in a folder marked confidential.

I pressed the doctor for the next course of action. Reassuring us that it was a standard benign tumor with need for removal, he still wanted to schedule a biopsy for the very next day. It all sounded so simple, so why the urgency of all these appointments?  I suddenly remembered that the bone in his hand resembled a dinosaurs’ half eaten lunch. “What about the bone in his hand?” I continued questioning away, “Will it just grow back and become functional again after removing the tumor?”  My husband’s hand had become useless, his ring finger almost a disconnected part from his hand altogether.  The bone that secured the finger to the wrist and connected functionality was now MIA. “No, it won’t.”  It was like pulling teeth to get this so-called professional to give us the facts, and give them to us straight. Regardless of the tumor being benign or malignant the repair of his hand would be no easy task. One outcome gave us a fully functional hand after a grafted hipbone surgery and a year of therapy. With its 99.9% probability of success, considerable talk about this course of action was had before my mind would allow me to ask about the other.

Finally I asked, “What happens if the biopsy comes back malignant?” I wasn’t prepared for the brutally honest answer I was about to hear, “Then he will lose his finger.” Spontaneously a moment of silence had commenced and continued to linger until we left the office.  The nurse set up the biopsy for the following day. The elevator doors closed and sound of our breath returned.  Blood came back into our faces restoring a normal color to our cheeks. Gazing at the metal doors I announced that the doctor was crazy. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about……that would NEVER happen.”

Now calm, my husband responded with confidence, “I am sure that is what will happen…..I am going to lose my finger.” We continued to disagree with each other as if we were talking about how the ending of a movie would turn out.  The seriousness of what we had just learned flew out the window for the rest of the night, although our discussion about it did not.

There was no way that they would just cut his finger off. 

The ridiculous notion abolished all my fears of a cancer diagnosis. Still my mind couldn’t refuse to ponder the possibilities of ‘what if’. We were living in the 21^st century. You just don’t get your body parts cut off. These thoughts replayed themselves over and over again in my mind. Even if it were cancer, there would be a way to repair the bone. Simple math, A + B = C. My brain, hard at work, had resolved the problems dancing around in my head. The skills of the right doctor could piece my husband back together again. After all, 15 years earlier I had been injured in a ski accident and my blown out knee didn’t leave me without a leg. It was repaired with materials that came from other areas of my body. My surgeon informed me that the body has spare parts, and most any break or complication could be repaired. Dan’s hand would just need reorganization of materials. If there was a will, there was a way. My denial began to set in. The remainder of the night was spent playing with our children.  I would not allow myself to be consumed by tumors and chopped fingers.

Before the biopsy we had lots of time to wait, think and talk.  From there on out we spent every appointment together as a team.  My husband seemed nervous. His cast had been off for two days and he had already begun coddling his damaged hand. The hospital gown made him resemble an old man, as he had undoubtedly lost weight in the last month. We nervously joked back and forth while we waited, only engaging in small talk as if we were on an uncomfortable first date. Soon the surgery was underway and I was left alone. The waiting seemed to go on for such a long time. I memorized the hideous pattern on the wall and the counted the stains on the ceiling. Hospitals are so gross in addition to being extremely depressing.

(Dan, shortly after his tumor biopsy)

His doctor came in and told me my husband would be awake in an hour and ready for me to take him home.  He told me very little after that, except that testing would be done in a lab and the results would not return until Friday. We would have to wait. Two days shouldn’t seem like a long time, but when your life depends on it, two days seems like eternity.  I had never seen my husband in a hospital before, or in any kind of real pain for that matter. The tables were about to be turned from the year he had just watched me go through pregnancy. For my body, pregnancy was its own form of cancer. Throwing up for a full 10 months, an 80 pound weight gain per kid, and a 10 pound tumor (the baby) of my own torn out from inside of my body left me emotionally worn and physically changed forever. Women are strong. They have babies every day with little sympathy and consideration from their husbands as to what it must really be like. My husband in particular, couldn’t fathom how hard it was for me to reclaim my body and identity, and I felt very abandoned by my partner in my time of need.

He should not have gone back to work the next day, but was desperate to be ‘normal’. He lied to his co-workers about what was really going on. I hid out at home with the kids, telling no one but select family members what we were experiencing.  

We were almost embarrassed, as if we would soon be told that we had a nasty case of cooties. No one likes the kid who had cooties.

No, we would keep it a secret for now.

Appearances are everything to those who can’t accept that they are imperfect. 

 As long as we kept those appearances up everything would be okay.