Punching Doctors in the Face

It’s been a while between posts. Its not that I haven’t had a lot on my mind. It’s just that at least some of what’s on my mind is the kind of raw and ugly junk that’s not that easy to write about. None the less, I’m going to make an attempt to “go there” now. I had an ugly emotional day recently that stayed under the surface. Nobody got to see it. But I knew it was there – that I was close to some kind of snap - and it was pretty scary.

Back Story

This is going to require a little back story dear readers and I am going to do all I can to keep it concise. Not just concise, but maybe a little fuzzy in the details to protect the innocent. I’ve been married twice. The first falls under one of those young and stupid categories and is a story for another day. I’ve been married to my wife of today for near 25 years now. When I met her I was literally reconstructing my life (another story for yet another day). I was attracted to her in all the usual ways, but the most overwhelmingly new attraction was her brave and confident way of handling herself. She was a single mom at the time, and she was also starting over at a new career. I learned she also survived a heart defect as a child that nearly no one had survived before. The heart defect led to, among other things, a bout with scoliosis in her teens when treatment was a tough haul. In spite of this, she was an extremely active and popular person growing up. She was also somebody I would have NEVER have even met as a young person. A cheerleader, a rodeo cowgirl, a daddy’s little princess – all the complete opposite of the near delinquent circles I ran in. She went to nursing school and became a registered nurse. She married one of those extremely macho bull riders who didn’t treat her or their baby girl so well. She divorced him and set about making a new life. When I met her, she was attempting to gain experience in sales in order to take her earning potential beyond what she thought she could as a nurse.

I’m going to have to greatly fast-forward though some things here in order to get the back story wrapped up. We met. I recognized she was the complete opposite of anyone I had ever been involved with before. She was a combination of no-nonsense, get done what has to get done determination, and grab all the joy each day has to offer. It was infectious. I was thirty and lost as a goose – borderline manic depressed. But she inspired in me a confidence I didn’t have. After a whirlwind courtship we were married. I knew going in she wanted another baby but she even gave me the confidence to believe I could be a father. The sales job she had wasn’t working out so she jumped back into nursing without grumbling. Just a little more than a year after we were married, we had a son. We embarked on a beautiful life as a little family.

We had been married fifteen years when the first blip in my wife’s health occurred. She was hospitalized with dangerous heart arrhythmias. Not long after we were to learn that a heart valve was failing and she would require open-heart surgery to repair it. All of the insecurities I had in myself before we were married were rushing to my head now and leaving me in a dizzy panic. I had to realize that it was easy for me to play the part of husband and father because she made it easy. Now I was having grave doubts about if I was the kind of husband who could see a wife through such a thing, or worse lose her and be raising these kids by myself. Somehow, we made it though. Not only through that surgery, but another open heart surgery when that valve failed again just a couple years later. It was a very tough time. Besides the challenges to my wife’s health, we were now nearly broke. But we got through it all, and got through it with really a lot of love and joy. Each time I was amazed by what I could really endure. We saw our daughter/stepdaughter graduate college and marry and our son graduate high school with honors and enroll in a prestigious program at University of Texas. We had turned our finances around in no small part because my wife and finally turned that sales experience into that career in medical sales she had wanted.

Then my wife gets diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. I have to say that there was an overwhelming but somewhat unspoken feeling of “What the hell? Can we catch a break here?” But we resolved to get through this as well. If I thought the years during the heart surgeries were tough, they were nothing compared to this battle. I guess we had to be grateful we were in a better financial situation and we had jobs that gave us the freedom to fight this. Our kids were for the most part, grown and on their way in life. But in this battle I saw my wife go to as close to dead as I can imagine and battle her way back in a year’s time. She got down to near skeleton weight, and once coded in the hospital and had to be revived. I lived day to day, mustering the courage to do what I had to do for her, and keeping my fears and frustrations buried deep inside so she wouldn’t see it. Yet again, we somehow got through it. We’re now almost two years cancer free now. But we are both changed. And that is where my story for today begins.

Scope of Things

My wife had a scheduled colonoscopy this past week. Not because of anything symptomatic but rather her age and cancer history. They also scoped her esophagus, because she has battled some heartburn but mostly due to her age and history. The prep for the procedure is no fun. I had to do it a few years back and it made me about as sick as I’ve ever been. The procedure itself was early on Monday morning. We got up early and she wasn’t feeling too badly. She was nervous. Not about the procedure but about the possibility of them finding something. This is one of the changes in her. She is fearful now and understandably so. But it is so different from the girl that inspired me to start a family some decades ago. I am the one who has to be positive and confident now, and that is not my nature. She was very emotional and repeating how much she loved me. I reciprocated those feelings as best I could. But having to appear confident for her sake, when in reality I also was quite scared was actually making me angry. That’s when I realized what has been bubbling inside me for all these years now. I have been getting pissed off. I pushed that feeling way way down for her sake. Soon they took her back for the procedure and I went to the waiting room.

I have been trying to finish a book that my wife wanted me to read written by a guy with terminal pancreatic cancer. Since we almost never agree on books (or movies or music) she never asks me to read anything. Her asking me to read it meant it was a big deal to her so I agreed. But as literature goes, this story is far from extraordinary. Not that I wasn’t often moved to tears by the guys situation. But he was coming off as if his diagnosis had given him some great revelations to pass on to the rest of us and those revelations seemed to me to just be pretty much home-spun, cliché ridden, maxims on living life one day at a time. And now… now that I was trying to read it in this waiting room… and trying to keep down the feeling of being pissed off at my wife … and the shame for feeling pissed off… now I was REAAALLLY getting pissed off at the nerve of this guy who only had six months to live and felt like that had appointed him life coach for the rest of us…

Now, 45 minutes have past and they have come to get me to bring me to the little room my wife is recovering in. She’s just a little loopy from the drugs. There’s a nurse who pops in and out of the room checking on her. My wife tells me the nurse is too chirpy and this must mean something is wrong. I am forced to muster calm strength on the outside when inside I’d almost like to choke her. I held her hand and told her to not let her thoughts and emotions get away from her. Then, on one of the little nurse visits, she mentioned that the doc did some biopsies during the procedure. Uh oh. Biopsies to us meant the doc saw something that looked suspicious. I saw my wife on the verge of completely losing it and quickly began to assure her that it didn’t mean anything yet. I reminded her she had already had lots of stuff biopsied that turned out to be nothing and there’s no reason to think this was any different. That’s what I was telling her. Its important to note here, that neither one of us would dare say “if it is cancer, we’ll get through it”. The last battle was so frightening that I don’t think either of us could say that with any honesty. Rather, I tried to bring to a conscious position of only dwelling on the known, not the unknown. I was calm, steady, loving and quite ready to start punching doctors in the face. In a while the doc came in and said he saw nothing on either end that looked concerning. He took microscopic cells to biopsy just because of her history. He’ll never know how close he came to getting punched. We calmed down.

We stopped for a lovely breakfast at one of our favorite restaurants back in our courtship days. Discussed what we were going to do for the day, the week, and for the summer. Cancer never came up. We moved on. We actually haven’t received the results of that biopsy yet. I assume it will be all normal. I assume because thinking otherwise is not healthy. But I am aware now that I am stifling a very selfish anger at my wife. I am just as concerned about my reaction to potential bad news as the news itself. To be continued? What else is there?