Edgar and I went to see Inception this weekend.
Well done, movie, well done.
It's time
Wow, there I go again, totally not updating my blog regularly as I should be. Not cool, Amanda, not cool.
Life over the past month has just been relatively relaxing and I've been trying not to test the system or muddy the waters or whatever...I like this peace and I would like for it to stay that way for as long as possible before my world explodes into things like labor and a pooping baby and the mangling of nipples in October. NIPPLES. I said it.
The clouds sort of feel like they've been lifted since I no longer have the threat of "My dad is dying from cancer" hanging over my head. It's been replaced with other worries about him, but those worries regarding his recovery seem much smaller now that, you know, he doesn't have a huge fucking tumor growing on his liver anymore. He has been readmitted to the hospital due to some fluid build-up and a persistent lack of appetite that's resulted in him losing a whole lot of weight and a whole lot of muscle mass, but his surgeon has him on a plan for physical rehabilitation (in-patient if his insurance company approves it, at home if not). Recovery from a surgery like the one he had takes months, many months, and now it's just a waiting game to see when he'll turn that corner. But I (and I'm pretty sure he feels the same way) would much rather wait for that corner instead of the drop off the edge of a cliff that we were waiting and fearing before.
Add to that the fact that the June Fucking Gloom is FINALLY gone and life doesn't seem so dark and disturbing.
Plus, Edgar and I made our baby registries this weekend at Target and Babies R Us, and who doesn't love a good registry? There's something about the power of that scanner gun and finding all of the stuff that you need and going "Oooooooooooh, look at this!" and "Awwwwwww, oh my god we have to get him this!" that just makes you melt inside. That melting feeling is good when you need to take the edge off the fact that you just spent over $350 in one shot on baby clothes (but you saved over $120 with the sale that was going on, so that makes it ok, right? Right? RIGHT?). I'm going to look at it this way....the child needs clothes. It's money that had to be spent. And this way we can register for the other essential stuff that we need and don't have to tell people, "Ok, now I need 6 month clothes, buy 6 months clothes. NO! No more 3 month clothes, I don't need 3 month clothes!"
Now the only trick is just getting people to buy off of the registries. I REALLY hate when you make a registry and people don't buy off of it or give you a gift card. The point of the registry is to say "This is what I need/want." It's not to say "Please don't buy me these things and instead buy me what you think I need/want, even though I know better. And also, please definitely don't include a gift receipt so that I have to look like an ungrateful asshole when I ask for it or else suffer in silence because I'm too embarrassed to do so." When we got married, Edgar and I took the time to make two different gift registries. Most people stuck to them; they either bought off the registry or sent us gift cards or money. But some random aunt of Edgar's went out and bought us this ludicrous centerpiece flower/candle combo thing WHICH WE WILL NEVER USE and didn't even give us a receipt to go along with it. I appreciate the gesture of giving a gift, and I don't mean to sound selfish, but COME ON. Come freakin' on. These registries are made for a reason. My mother-in-law doesn't understand my persistence on this point; when I was talking to her the other day regarding my baby shower, I made the point to tell her when she sends out the invitations to include the little inserts that say where I'm registered, and that if her friends ask her for suggestions on what to buy that she tells them to buy off of the registry. And she's all "Well, but....well, if they want to buy something else they should!" and I'm all "No. No. RE-GIS-TRY. Registry. We made them for a point, we are giving a clear guide of what we need. People do not need to waste their money buying something that we don't need or want, because they won't even have the courtesy to give us a receipt. REGISTRY."
I still don't think she gets it. And maybe it makes me sound selfish. But if I'm going to a wedding or going to a baby shower, I would NEVER buy something that the bride/groom or mommy-to-be/daddy-to-be didn't register for. I would buy them a gift off the registry, or get them a gift card to one of the stores that they registered at, or just give them a check or cash. I would NEVER be like "Well, I think I know better than you what you want and/or need so I'm going to ignore the very nice and helpful list that you spent the time creating and get you something totally off-base."
I think it's partially a generational thing as well, because I think that's how most of the people in my age group feel. No offense to anyone in the world intended, but I think that it's mainly the older generation that just doesn't get it or refuses to get it. IF YOU THINK YOU'RE YOUNG ENOUGH TO HAVE A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT, YOU'RE YOUNG ENOUGH TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO BUY OFF A REGISTRY.
Whew, that rant came out of nowhere.
Moving on. Moving riiiiiight along. Back to what I was talking about before. Oh yes, relaxation.
Right now is the calm before the storm at my job.....the summer months are slow leading up to when August 1st hits and all hell breaks loose, so I'm really trying to enjoy the pace that I'm at right now before everything goes crazy again. Couple that with the fact that I'm officially in my third trimester (HOLY GOD, I'M HAVING A BABY) and that my body is about to turn on me and I'm treasuring these moments while I still have them.
I'm perpetually tired all the time, so I'm taking that as a sign that nature is preparing me for the fact that after October I will not be getting a good night's sleep for, oh, say, EIGHTEEN YEARS. My belly has also officially protruded enough that it is becoming difficult for me to move in some of the ways I used to. And I miss my old center of gravity. I don't think I have a new one yet, so I'm just kind of wobbling and wavering out here. Plus, the only way I'm comfortable when I sleep is on my back. I've talked about it before--I WANT TO SLEEP ON MY BACK. But I'm not allowed to sleep on my back and so I sleep on my side, or, more accurately, I fail to sleep on my side, and it's all a huge mess.
A few weeks ago somebody asked me how my pregnancy has been up to this point, and I was like "You know, I'll dare say pleasant." The universe has struck me down, because the last couple of weeks have brought on the unpleasantness, at least relatively to what I was experiencing before. It's nothing catastrophic....I'm not the co-worker of Edgar's that has been experiencing morning sickness so severe that she can't even smell food without throwing up, I'm not the family friend who is only three months along yet is already leaking from her breasts. Compared to them, I'm totally ok. I'm just getting uncomfortable. And I'm slightly anemic now, which means that I've had to start taking additional iron supplements. And for those of you that have ever taken iron supplements before....I miss pooping like a normal person. Really. It's totally uncool.
So here I am, two trimesters under my belt, one more to go, baby clothes debt piling up around my ankles, starting to freak out just a teensy bit about what I've gotten myself into. In a good way. I would make tomorrow October 11th if I could. Because even though I think it's absolutely ridiculous that the universe is going to let me take a baby home and raise it I TOTALLY CAN'T WAIT.
Envy
How much do I love Dior's Cruise 2011 collection? Oh, If only I had money. *sigh*
And a size 2 frame. *big sigh*
On the other side
I' m back from Indiana. My dad came out of surgery like a champ and is doing excellent by all accounts. I'm not going to go into huge details of the minutiae of his recovery (my sister has a bare-bones chronicle here), except to say that he kicked serious amounts of cancer-ass and I couldn't be prouder of him. It was a highly emotional and physically exhausting week, and I haven't even mentioned the part about where my plane landed in the middle of a FREAKIN' TORNADO. Back home again in Indiana, indeed.
Cancer
It's time to talk about the cancer. This is going to be difficult to write because the fact of the matter is that it makes me so angry every time I think about it that I have to take a step back in order to calm down.
My dad has been feeling sick ever since around Thanksgiving last year. It started with digestive problems. He started to become unable to eat very much without getting severe stomach pains or having to subsequently spend an hour in the bathroom afterwords. This continued for several months without getting better; trips to the doctor did nothing to shed light on the problem. He started losing weight. Lots of weight, very fast, because he could hardly eat anything.
In January, doctors discovered bleeding in his abdomen. The bleeding was caused by what looked like lesions in the lining of his stomach. They pegged that as the problem and put him on medications that were essentially supposed to coat his stomach to help repair the lining.
It did not help. He continued to have problems and continued to lose weight.
In early April, while having extensive blood work done, a doctor noticed that he had an extremely low red count, white count, platelet count....his blood wasn't good. She told him that he had leukemia.
My dad had to make a very harrowing phone call to me to tell me, a phone call that he was scared to make in the first place because we hadn't spoken in months. I had gotten very angry at my dad in February when shortly after I told him that I was pregnant, and emphatically stated that he and my mom were not to tell anyone until I was out of my first trimester, he posted the news of my pregnancy on his Facebook page. I'm 25 and I had to be mad about something that another person had posted on his Facebook page. Junior high much? I was angry. I think I had every right to be angry. But when your father is choking back tears and telling you that he has cancer, things like that go out the window. Things like that are forgiven. If you can't do that you pretty much suck at life and I don't think I would want to be friends with you.
This diagnosis was given early in that week in April. His biopsy was scheduled for that Friday, and he was told that he was going to be starting chemotherapy on Monday. Sounds like they're all pretty sure about that leukemia, right? WRONG. His biopsy results came back negative. No leukemia.
WHAT KIND OF WHACKO NUT JOB BALL LICKER DOCTOR TELLS SOMEONE THAT THEY HAVE CANCER WHEN THEY DO NOT ALREADY HAVE DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT PERSON HAS CANCER?
So now it's not leukemia, but he's still really fucking sick. That's when the doctor notices that, oh, gee, his vitamin B12 level is dangerously low and he has almost no iron in his blood. Let's start you on this round of aggressive daily injections of B12 and iron and see how your blood work looks in a month. That could be the cause of the extreme fatigue and you should start to feel better after your levels go up in a couple of weeks.
Except he didn't feel better. He felt the same. Then worse. And then the blood tests came back and all of his blood count numbers were even lower than before. And the whole time I'm thinking "Shouldn't the fact that someone has such low iron in his blood, which means he's anemic, be pretty evident to anyone who went to med school that looks at his test results? Has it really taken them 6 whole months to come to the conclusion that, oh, look, you need more iron and then this agony can end?" Of course not. Because it can never be that simple.
Someone finally had the brilliant idea to scan his abdomen after his spleen became so enlarged that when he lays down he can see it poking out of his side. That's when they found it. A tumor on his liver about the size of the palm of your hand.
They had to do another scan, called a PET scan, after locating the tumor to make sure it didn't spread to, or had spread from, another location in his body. Primary liver cancer is very rare in someone like my father; it is seen mostly in people that are either HIV positive or who have had hepatitis or cirrhosis. Usually in people like him the cancer has spread from somewhere else. In what seems like the only amount of good news that has come out of any of this, if you could ever consider anything cancer related to be good news if it's not the headline CURE FOR CANCER DISCOVERED, the cancer in his liver was the only cancer found.
Surgery is the only treatment option for liver cancer. His oncologist told him that chemotherapy and radiation treatments had been shown to have very little effect in dealing with this kind of tumor. He was told by the oncologist that he would have a meeting with the surgeon the following Friday, at which time they would schedule a surgery to remove the tumor and the entire left lobe of his liver.
EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT THE SURGEON DOES NOT HAVE OFFICE HOURS ON FRIDAYS, BECAUSE GUESS WHAT? SHE'S IN SURGERY. She only meets patients for consults and scheduling two days a week, not Fridays, and nobody bothered to tell my dad that until a day before what he thought would be his appointment. So then he had to wait until later the next week when she would be able to see him. For anyone keeping track, that would make it two weeks between "You have a tumor growing inside of you" to "Hi, I'm your surgeon"+handshake.
So there he is, two weeks later, meeting with the surgeon, and she tells him she doesn't think surgery would be in his best interest at that time. His spleen is huge and swollen, and apparently the spleen and liver kind of work together in there, and the pressure in his spleen is so high that he could stroke out during surgery. Plus his liver physiology of veins and arteries is "not normal", making any surgical procedure on it more difficult. She recommended a 6-8 week course of chemo and radiation to shrink the tumor prior to operating on it, which would also give time for them to address the swelling in his spleen.
But wait, didn't I just say that the oncologist said that chemo and radiation would not work for him? Yes, that is correct. But, according to the surgeon, she specializes in the liver and has seen this type of cancer a lot, and she knows that it can be effective. The oncologist deals with all types of cancers, so liver isn't her specialty and she just has to go with what she's read.
The surgeon told him she would need a few days to consult with her colleagues to see if they would do the same thing and would get back to him. Meanwhile, go get your chemo and radiation scheduled. So now we move to the next week, the next week being last week, where my dad is schedule to start chemo the following Monday (this past Monday, the 7th) and is waiting to hear about when he'll go in to have little radioactive seeds implanted in his tumor. At which point the surgeon emails him and tells him, hey, you know what, I looked at your films again and I don't think it's in your best interest to wait anymore. Let's do the surgery.
For anyone still keeping track, it's been a month and a half between when he was told that he had a tumor on his liver and now. A month and a half where ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING has been done about it. NOTHING has happened to treat him, only to yank him around, to lift his hopes and drop them down. To be faced with "Yes, we're going to cut this cancer out of you and it will be gone" to "Nope, now you have to wait 6-8 weeks" to "Ok, now we're going to operate, even though I thought it was too risky to do in the first place." AND THAT FUCKING TUMOR IS STILL IN HIS BODY. Growing. Possibly spreading.
He's tried to keep a brave front through all of this, boasting that he'll be alive to see my child graduate from high school, but a man can only take so much. Two weeks ago he had to begin taking anti-anxiety medication, anti-depressants, and a sleep aid. BECAUSE HE HAS A FUCKING TUMOR GROWING IN HIS BODY AND THESE MEDICAL 'PROFESSIONALS' CAN'T GET THEIR SHIT TOGETHER.
I want to punch every doctor that has seen him in the face. And the balls, if they have balls. And to tell them THAT THEY'RE ALL A BUNCH OF FUCKING DOUCHEBAGS AND ARE A DISGRACE TO THEIR COLLEAGUES. And I mean it. Seriously. So it's November, it's December, it's January, and you have a patient with severe abdominal pain and you can't figure it out. Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, would you not order a scan of the patient's abdomen? If this had been done then, seven months ago, they could have seen the tumor then. And taken it out. SEVEN MONTHS AGO. When it was smaller. When his spleen wasn't so swollen that he's at a risk for stroking out on the table. Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, would you tell a man and his family that he has leukemia when you don't know for a fact that he has leukemia? WHY, in the name of all that is good and holy, WOULD YOU TELL A MAN THAT HE HAS A TUMOR ON HIS LIVER AND THEN NOT DO ONE FUCKING THING ABOUT IT FOR SIX WEEKS BESIDES SHOVING HIM OFF ON THE NEXT PERSON, OR THE LAST PERSON, OR HOW ABOUT THIS PERSON?
And it's not like he has some shit health insurance. He's got good insurance. These should be good goddamn doctors.
He finally met again with the surgeon today for pre-op appointment. His surgery has been scheduled for next Thursday, June 17th. It's scheduled to last for 5 hours. And it doesn't look good. While no surgery where someone is being put under general anesthesia and being cut open can ever be considered low-risk, his is considered ever more dangerous due to his enlarged spleen and the fact that the tumor is located merely a millimeter away from a major vein. There's a high probability for bleeding. The surgeon thinks that she can get the tumor out though, and since this is his only treatment option there's really no other choice, unless you consider dying a painful and wasting death from liver cancer to be another option. There's a high probability for bleeding, but there will be a transplant surgeon involved as well in case the necessity comes up that he needs repair done to his veins due to trauma during the surgery.
The fact is, this surgery is dangerous. And a whole hell of a lot could go wrong.
And I'm scared.
I'm flying to Indiana this weekend to spend a few days with my dad and my family prior to the surgery. Assuming all goes well I'll be coming back home the following Saturday, a couple of days after the surgery. I have to do this without my husband by my side; it's pretty much impossible for him to take time off of work right now. In the last month his counterpart in the office quit, doubling his workload, and another person got fired, leaving the new guy that was coming in to replace the guy that quit to now be allocated to do the job of the one that was fired, meaning the whole operation falls apart without Edgar. It also will mark our longest separation, since, oh, when we started dating, and it's going to be hard to do this without him holding my hand.
