ThE MoUnTaiNs ArE CaLliNg...AnD i MuSt gO

~everything you can imagine is real~

far away in the sunshine

are my highest aspirations.

i may not reach them, 

but i can look up and see

their beauty, believe in them,

and try to follow where they lead.

-Louisa May Alcott

I feel good...

today I woke up with

messy curls in my hair,

a smile on my face,

and feeling peace.

i love my life.

it's not a perfect life.

it's not the life i wanted, 

or planned for myself.

but...

i have 2 beautiful kids.

i have amazing friends.

i love who i choose to be.

i know what i want,

and who i am.

nothing can replace the warmth in my heart.

good morning world,

good morning life...

A ChriStMaS TreE fOr ThReE

A Christmas Tree For Three 

by Tatum Merrill

written for sprouts Cole &Ethan

____________ 

The hunt was on,

to find a tree,

one to be

the tree for three.

A 'noble' fir showed up the rest,

'we three' had found the tree,

the best.

Tradition called for mom

to trim, 

to prune, to groom, 

and make us

grin.

Our music tunes

we danced about,

the Christmas spirit

left no doubt, 

 Our tree would soon 

be glam adorn,

with lights,

and magic, 

and trinkets 

forlorn.

 Our favorite decor 

so long packed away...

A snow globe,

a reindeer, 

 a bike,

 and toy sleigh, 

Visions of Santa,

soon came to mind..

boxes, presents,

and gestures of kind.

So much magic

for a tree to unlock.

Is Christmas more 

than a toy-filled

sock?

Dreams of eight 

reindeer,

and the man 

who wears red,

quickly changed pace,

as I thought in my head.

The story oft told, 

during the holiday 

season, 

made me ponder the tree,

it's message, 

and reason.

 The star atop the tree

lit up the sky,

shone brightly 

back then,

for The Lord, 

Prince,

One High.

 It lit up a path

where the babe Jesus lay,

born in a stable, 

a manger with hay.

Gifts, treasures, and love unfold, 

were brought to the babe, 

they even brought gold.

The gift he gave back was

life to man-kind.

No greater a gift could 

any man find.

 

So why the tree 

in the dead of the night?

...to represent life,

new birth, gift, 

and light?

  Yes, my heart said,

this was the reason,

for Christmas,

gift-giving,

the tree, 

and the season.

Christmas is more than just

Santa and toys.

It's the cause

of our 

happiness,

and all 

of our

joys.

 

I stood back from the

tree,

and stood with some

poise,

 

it needed respect,

we quieted the

noise.

 How lovely our tree 

made my heart simply say,

this is a message

we should give away.

In our actions, 

our thoughts, 

and even our deeds, 

we should pay attention

to others needs.

Whenever a gleaming 

tree 

I walk by,

I'll give the true 

meaning

of Christmas

a try.

Who knew

the message of 

The Christmas 

Tree, 

would give new 

meaning

of Christmas for 

me.

Merry Christmas!

sLeEpLeSs iN SaLt LaKe

i couldn't sleep last night/this morning.

my brain won't shut off even when i am very tired.

writing parts for my 'cancer story' made me want to finally look 

at the filming we did.  we recorded most everything and planned to 

make a short documentary about it. 

my intention is to still do this once i find someone who can convert the material to a better format and help edit it.

i haven't opened that box in four years, and never watched

what we filmed once until now.

i only watched 1 and a half of 7 tapes we filmed.

it was weird to see my boys so young, and dan with hair.

painful yet validating to watch him talk to me while i held the camera.  he spoke softly and sweet to me; nothing that he is now.  

i only watched to where my cancer stories are currently. although not surprised that my memory is identical to what was filmed, i am amazed at my ability to recall details of almost any event in my life.  

my memory is a gift and a curse.

i love knowing who i am and the details of my life,  but with the sweet memories also come the painful, sad ones that i would prefer to forget.

i'm not ready to post the details saved for future parts in the story, but the films made me miss my husband.

he is not him anymore.

he is someone else.

i have accepted this.
i have learned to be happy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

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.

Surviving Cancer: My Story, Part 3: Cancer is an ugly word and nobody likes saying it

Part 3:  Cancer is an ugly word and nobody likes saying it 

My husband came through the door with a well constructed cast on his right hand, and wrist. “30 days!”, is all he said. 30 days to having a fully functional husband again. “That was a really quick doctor’s visit" I said somewhat puzzled.  "What did he say about how you broke it?” I asked inquisitively.  He had only seen the doctor for about 2 minutes total. “He came in and asked me how I broke it, glanced at the X-ray briefly and then ordered a cast for 30 days. He didn't even looking directly at me, or my hand, and then left me with the nurse to wrap it up, he seemed in a hurry", he explained, as if it were normal procedure.

"That seems odd", I thought.  I was forced to dismiss the nagging questions I had.  I wasn't a doctor, and if they weren’t concerned, why should I be?  Yet I was experiencing the same uneasiness in the pit stomach as I had before–a force that had led me most of my life– telling me that I should not dismiss the nature of this break.  

This time I did not listen.

I wanted to relish in our new baby, and new beginning for our family, instead of being borderline mommy figure nagging my husband to get to the bottom of something so minor.  A broken bone?  So what.  Everyone gets a broken bone in their lifetime.

There were warning signs that we didn’t recognize. The following 30 days consisted of a lot of complaints from Dan. His hand was sore and he was tired a lot.  I remember rolling my eyes when he would attribute needing to nap almost every other day to his broken hand, while I was living on new mommy fumes, never getting the rest I needed at night, let alone a nap every day. But I went along with it anyway, sometimes joining in on the nap, or just taking down time with our boys. His coloring had changed quite a bit which my subconscious dismissed to the lack of sun we were seeing because it was wintertime.  His skin had taken on a subtle greenish hue, recognizable in the family pictures we had taken later that month.

We continued on with every day life for the next 30 days.  Our baby would be getting blessed at church, and our extended families would be in town.  We were happy to be spending time together, and life went on like normal. The time came and went quickly. On his way to the 30 day appointment Dan was relieved to have the annoyance removed from his hand. The cast was finally coming off. That morning I had kissed him good-bye and went about the daily tasks of laundry, and planning out the day. Several hours later he returned. Immediately an alarm went off in my head when I saw his face as he walked in from the garage. Concern, disappointment, anxiety, and fear consumed him as he entered the room, and hastily walked passed me down the narrow hall to the bathroom. “What’s wrong,” I asked, immediately following him.

He hadn’t stopped walking until he reached the bathroom, and silently locked himself inside. I heard sobs. At the base of the door his shadow confirmed he was sitting on the floor.  My heart sank, and my knees buckled.  I found myself sitting next to the door that was now between us.  I was confused. Ten minutes of silence passed before I knew he had stopped crying. He knew I was there but hadn’t said anything. I finally got up the courage to ask him to open the door. “No!”,  he said. “Please……let me in. Tell me what’s wrong. What happened,” I replied as softly as I could trying to convince him to open the door. “You don’t understand.”

I finally convinced him to open the door. He sat there with his head in his hands sitting as he crouched on his knees. I moved inside the door and positioned myself right next to him. I had no idea what was going on. Something had happened and it was obviously serious.“Did something happened at the doctor’s office?” He only replied with the word yes.“Well what was it? I can’t know how to help you if you don’t tell me.” I tried to reassure him that whatever it was couldn’t be that bad. “There is something wrong with me”, he finally blurted, “and there’s something wrong with my hand.” He finally looked me in the eyes. Thoughts were exchanged between us, but no words were spoken. My mind raced over what he could be talking about. Maybe the bone healed wrong and he would need surgery, I thought.

“I don’t know what it is”, he tried to explain, “All I know is it’s bad.” I had never seen him react like this before. I was used to seeing a lot of emotion from him, but never as scared as he seemed to be then. He seemed broken, and genuinely scared.  Even though I was trying to counter-balance his fear and uncertainties by staying positive, I attribute my lack of real worry to being somewhat naïve.

He told me the details of the visit. Upon arriving at the doctor’s office they took off the cast and did a routine follow-up x-ray. The nurse left him in the waiting room for the doctor to come in and give the thumbs up confirming that the bone had completely healed.  He sat in the patient room for a considerable amount of time before anyone came back.  It wasn’t the doctor. The nurse had come in to get some supplies from the drawers. “So how did the X Ray look?” He said breaking the silence…..in an almost joking manner with a grin on his face. “Am I all better?” She averted her eyes from his direction and answered, “Well it looks like it hurt pretty bad….the doctor will be in soon to talk to you about it.”  She seemed eager to leave the room without anymore discussion.

My husband, now nervous, was anxious for the doctor to return. With the new x-ray in hand the doctor opened the door with the news that an MRI was needed, and possibly some further testing on his hand and the break. There was some discussion, and then my husband questioned ‘why’.  He recounted how the doctor seemed more nervous than even he was,  as he used medical textbook explanations. Dan finally told the doctor he didn’t understand what he was trying to say.  Sighing, the doctor finally stood up, and switched on the light to the x-ray box where he plunked the image from his hand against its light.  He pointed at the spot of interest–the bone that was once broken.

“Ok, you see this?” he began, pointing at the image, “this is where your broken bone was.” Dan was staring at what looked like the remnants of a bone that had been chomped off in the middle by a dinosaur. The bone was almost gone, dissolved, with only fragments left on either side. “Ok", he replied, sounding as if he were trying to follow where this story was going. “Something has happened to this bone in the last 30 days.  It’s gone".  Dan sat stunned. There was very little he could think of to say.  Being a professional at avoiding problems he wanted to pretend like he hadn’t heard what was being said, and that it wasn’t real. “What do you mean the bone is gone?” he asked. The doctor was evasive at best, not giving any information away. Dan was not an ideal communicator, and had no other choice to follow the doctor’s orders to make an appointment for the following day. He got in his car, and came straight home.

“What if it’s cancer?" came out of his mouth, still staring at the bathroom floor. “What??? It’s NOT cancer!” I instantly replied. Barely in my 30’s I’d only personally known older people to get cancer, or serious diseases, and just a few cases at that. Surely my young husband in his prime of health didn’t have cancer. “You don’t get cancer that way, not from a broken hand.” The foreboding feelings I had dismissed only 30 days prior crept back into my mind, and gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Why didn’t I listen? I planned to go with him the next day to the doctor visit knowing it was the only way to get real answers concerning this situation.  There was no use borrowing problems at this point. We would soon find out what was really going on.

He seemed to let what I was saying calm him. The doctor didn’t say the words cancer, tumor, or disease. But my husband still knew by the look on his face, the urgency of these tests and appointments. Whatever was going on with his hand was very serious.