My sister drives like an old lady. It's mind-boggling.
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.
No puking here
I'm not going to spend a lot of time regaling everyone with a week-by-week snapshot of my pregnancy, mainly because the pregnancy itself has been pretty uneventful. Aside from discomfort when I try to sleep, I'd almost venture as far to say that it's been downright pleasant.
I know I'm lucky. I know I'm lucky that I did not have to deal with gut-wrenching morning sickness or swelling to the size of a small county. My mom told me that she did not have morning sickness with any of her three pregnancies, so I guess it's just something that I inherited from her. There were three days in a row around the sixth week where I would get nauseous around midday, but since then I haven't had a problem. My only first trimester problems were typical; my already large boobs seemingly doubled in size and became so sore that I had to smack Edgar in the head any time he so much as looked at them. And I spent several weeks having to pee every 10 minutes.
As far as the crazy pregnant lady cravings go, I haven't really had any. I've only found that foods whose smells I found offensive before being pregnant are even more so now that I am pregnant. And things that smelled good prior to being pregnant now smell even better. I don't ever find myself craving anything in particular, however I've found that I'm much more prone to the powers of suggestion. I smelled reheated pizza the other day at work (you know that smell, that steamy fresh crust smell) and couldn't stop thinking about it until I got home and told Edgar "Forget what we were having for dinner, we're having pizza now."
I'm grateful that I have not had a problem with craving foods that are unhealthy for me because my weight gain is something that I do have to keep my eye on. To date (22 weeks) I've only gained 5 pounds. I was overweight when this pregnancy started, so my weight gain target is much lower than any "normal" weight woman would expect. Considering that the baby has most of its growing left to do, I think I'm at a pretty good point.
My only real beef with pregnancy to this point (besides that whole no-alcohol thing) is sleeping. I'm at the point now where I can't sleep on my stomach or my back, and so I'm stuck sleeping on my sides. But I'm a back sleeper. And I wake up a lot finding myself on my back and having to switch over to my side. Or I find myself lying on my side still awake after being in bed two hours because I CANNOT GET COMFORTABLE. I've already built a fort of pillows in the center of the bed in an attempt to keep me from rolling onto my back in the middle of the night. And it makes me feel bad because I somehow still manage to do it and Edgar is over on his side of the bed clinging to the edge trying desperately not to fall off because his space has been reduced to this little sliver of mattress not being taken up by his pregnant wife and her pillow fort. And one day my kid is going to come home with a C on his math test and I'm going to have to be all I'M SORRY, it's because I accidentally slept on my back when I was pregnant with you. Bad Mommy.
And so it begins
The same day I found out that I was pregnant, I called my doctor as soon as the office opened to schedule an appointment. Rookie move, I now know. I scheduled my appointment for the Friday of the following week, meaning that based on the date of my last period I would only be about six weeks along at the time that I went. I know now that it's really unnecessary to go that early...you're basically just wasting your co-payment money. Then again, it is good if it's the beginning of the year and you have a deductible to meet because DEAR LORD are those lab tests expensive. So you can work on getting that out of the way while you're still in that euphoric state where you aren't thinking about how expensive cribs and travel systems and diapers are.
My first appointment was a nightmare. Actually, let me change that. The first few weeks of this pregnancy were a nightmare. While I didn't feel any different physically, mentally I was a mess. I had made this deal with myself when Edgar and I first started trying to get pregnant that I was going to slow down and breathe. I wasn't going to let things get to me. I was going to be calm. I wasn't going to overreact and freak out and dwell on things that I had no control over. I really truly believe that high strung people have high strung babies. This may not be true for everyone, but I've definitely seen it in myself. I know a couple that are very chill, very go-with-the-flow, and guess what? Their son, who was born last year, is the same way. He doesn't cry that much, and when he does it's not that loud, and other than that he's just happy. Content. Loves his life. Then on the other hand I have a cousin who is so high strung you could pluck her and she would snap, and she's got four kids who were absolute TERRORS as children. I think that kids feed off of the cues that we give them, and I didn't want to give my baby those cues. I wanted him/her to be as healthy and as happy as possible. I'm no biologist, but I know that when you are stressed your body creates stress hormones, and since whatever is in my body is going to my baby as well, I didn't want to create that environment for him.
But I couldn't help it. I was scared. As soon as the shock and excitement of seeing that iffy pink line wore off I started filling up with all of these irrational first-time mother fears. My immediate pressing fear was that I was going to miscarry. Since I had been trying to get pregnant, I found out very early on about my pregnancy. Earlier than most women find out, earlier than the ones who aren't trying to get pregnant get over the denial to actually take a test--earlier than that point when your body or nature or whatever is may make that decision that the pregnancy isn't going to stick. Every time I went to the bathroom I steeled myself against it. Every time I felt a slight cramp I expected the worst. I became highly protective of my belly, afraid that if I even slightly bumped into a counter that I could hurt it.
Then came the appointment. I don't think, even if you aren't full of irrational fears, that the first appointment of a pregnancy can ever be very enjoyable. Because what they fail to show you on TV whenever some perky actress is pregnant is that they do not take the first ultrasound to date your pregnancy by a trans-abdominal ultrasound. Nope. Because new babies are teeny-tiny little things and are way to small to be picked up through the layers of your abdomen. Your first ultrasound is done trans-vaginally. Which means that you're naked from the waist down with an ultrasound wand stuck up your vajayjay that the doctor is turning every which way to get a good view of what's going on in your uterus. And you know how on TV the doctor always says "Ok, this might be a little bit cold" when they squeeze the ultrasound goop onto the perky actress's taut stomach? It's a hell of a lot colder when it's up inside your hoohah. So let's recap. Naked from the waist down. Ultrasound wand. Cold goop in the hoohah. UNPLEASANT.
The news from the ultrasound was terrifying as well for someone with the jitters. My doctor "would not commit" to saying that I was pregnant. She could see something on the ultrasound; something that showed that a pregnancy had started. She could see a sac. But she couldn't see anything in it. Rationally, it was just that it could have been way to early in the pregnancy to see anything. In my mind, I immediately jumped to the worst conclusion. She scheduled me for a follow-up appointment a week later.
When I got home I told Edgar what the doctor said. He of course, and thank God, told me that we had nothing to worry about, that it was just too early. He was a champ during that week, talking me up whenever he could tell that I was brooding over what had happened at the last appointment and what would happen at the next one. I know that my own attitude must have been scaring him (he's self proclaimed as knowing "absolutely nothing" about babies) but he knew I needed support and he was there for me and can I just say that I am so lucky to be going through this with him?
Edgar took the afternoon off of work to come to my appointment the next week and to hold my hand through the whole thing. I can't describe the wave of relief that swept over me as soon as the doctor turned the monitor towards us. The difference that one week made was unbelievable. Where there had been nothing the week before, there was this little itty bitty blob with a pulsating heartbeat in the center. That was our baby.
She dated the pregnancy at 6 weeks 5 days and gave a due date of October 11th. We're kind of hoping for one day early. How cool would it be to have a birthday of 10/10/10?
The Thin Pink Line
Edgar and I found out on the morning of Wednesday, February 3rd that we were going to have a baby. And for a couple that had vigorously been trying get pregnant for the last three months, it was somewhat unexpected. I didn't think I was pregnant; a few days before I had peed on a stick on what would have been the first day of my period and it had come back negative.
At least, I thought it had come back negative. And then Edgar, after examining far more closely than I would something that had recently been doused in urine, said "Wait, is this a line? It kind of looks like a line." I grabbed the test from him and after inspecting it under a brighter light saw the faintest of all faint pink lines, a veritable mirage of a pink line that didn't even extend the entire width of the indicator window as one would expect. I immediately dismissed it as a malfunctioning test.
Because, you see, really, there is no such thing as a little bit pregnant, and this test WAS SHRUGGING ITS SHOULDERS AT ME. Am I pregnant? Eh, could be. Try again later.
THIS IS NOT WHAT PREGNANCY TESTS ARE SUPPOSED TO DO. They are designed specifically to test for a pregnancy hormone in your pee. Either you have it, and the test is positive, or you don't, and the test is negative, or you do, but in such a small amount that it cannot be sensed by the test, in which case the test is supposed to read negative. This test was saying 'maybe'. IT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU MAYBE. THERE IS NOT A 'MAYBE' READING IN THE INSTRUCTIONS. There is a regular pink line that matches the control pink line, and then there is no pink line. There is not an iffy pink line.
But after not starting my period that day, or the day after, I found my always-regular self getting all excited and confused and scared and crazy and could not wait one more day when the alarm went off for Edgar to get ready for work on February 3rd. I rubbed the crust out of my fuzzy eyes and opened up the last pregnancy test that we had and crossed my fingers. Then waited. Three whole minutes. Because I follow the directions, unlike some pregnancy test that's too totally fucking lazy to do its job. And then......
Is that a pink line? It kind of looks like a pink line.
AGAIN.
Once again, we were faced with the control pink line and a maybe-pink line. This maybe-pink line was definitely darker and thicker than the maybe-pink line before, but it wasn't what we were expecting. We called it a win anyways.
And then Edgar had to go to work and I had to go to work, and I was all WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO THIS IN THE MORNING BEFORE WORK, REYNAGA? Because walking around the office going "Holy crap, I'm pregnant" in my head and smiling like an idiot and running to the bathroom every 15 minutes to make sure that I really didn't start my period was not a good look for me. All I wanted was to be at home with Edgar celebrating our victory and naming our baby and dreaming about that baby smell--you know, that smell, when they're all warm and snuggly and you're holding them while you give them a bottle and they're making that cute little gurgling noise and you're patting their butts and watching them jerk their arms around like they're conducting an imaginary symphony and OH MY GOD I'M HAVING A BABY.
Bombshells
It's been almost one entire month since I've written a post on this blog. Life has been kind of overwhelming over the last few months and after severely trailing off in my posting habits and fretting to myself about it I decided to give it up for a little bit just to get my head back together guilt-free. So now I'm going to try to pick up where I left off.
Reasons why my head was not together:
1. My father was diagnosed with cancer.
2. I'm pregnant with my first child.
My friend Jessica just read #2 and slammed her forehead into her monitor in disbelief.
The pregnancy is not new news to me anymore. We've known since the beginning of February that I was pregnant. I'll be writing posts specifically dedicated to this pregnancy and catching up on what has happened so far, but this is the quick version. Our plans were to keep the pregnancy a quiet secret to all but close family until my first trimester was up. Just as that milestone was reached, the diagnosis came down about my father, who had been ill for quite some time. There will be more blog posts dedicated specifically to this battle and what he's gone through so far as well. In the mix of all of that, calling up friends to share the good news and writing blog posts about it in light of the bad news just didn't feel right. And all of a sudden here I am over five months into this pregnancy and the only people I've told are my parents (who I relied on to spread the news through the family) and my co-workers in light of the fact that my belly was about to pop and make the news very obvious on its own.
I have a lot of work to do.
