Holding On for a Better Year

About three months ago, my wife Carole was diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s the kind of unpleasant surprise you naturally assume happens only to other people … until suddenly that’s no longer the case.

The weeks since have been a steady stream of lengthy visits to the clinic, side effects at home, bills in the mail, days of no energy and others when we could run an errand or visit friends, and a run (thankfully only the one) to the emergency room.

The first time you hear the word “cancer,” it is beyond belief. It floats in the air like a dandelion seed: weightless … yet menacing. There’s a brief period when you think about some of the worst possible outcomes, but you don’t spend more than a minute or two trying to imagine how you’d manage. At least I didn’t. That goes away permanently.

One surprise is how swiftly you adjust. What seemed impossibly difficult and frightening somehow manages to transform into the new normal: This is what we do now. A pair of painful biopsies and an MRI established that there was a tumor in Carole’s left breast, and an apparently infected node under her arm. The oncologist recommended chemotherapy first to try to shrink them -- a series of eight rounds, one every two weeks -- and then surgery to remove the tumors.

Fortunately, I work free-lance and flexible part-time jobs, so that part was less disruptive than it would have been if I had a full-time job. Once it was established that each of Carole’s rounds of chemo would take place on a Monday, my schedule was easy to shift so I could drive her in a rental car, stay with her, and take her home each time.

So as not to have to repeat the latest developments over and over by phone and email, Carole launched her own blog that people could check to find out how things are going.

We began to recognize some of the faces of the other patients relaxing and even snoring in the reclining chairs at the clinic while (I presume) a series of anti-nausea and anti-cancer drugs seeped into their systems through IVs. There were not only older folks like us, but young women receiving treatment, which was sobering to see.

The other surprise, after the word began to get out on social media, was how many of my family members and friends surfaced after the news about Carole got about to share that they had been through this. Cousins, high school friends, an occasional professional colleague all mentioned their experience -- or sometimes a family member of theirs not related to me -- and offered commiseration and advice.

It’s everywhere, I thought. I couldn’t avoid the notion that environmental factors must play a role in all this. The world we have made, for our comfort and efficiency, is making us pay for the convenience with our health and sometimes our lives.

Are we killing ourselves with modernity?