My Husband's Tumor
This is our story: a collection of snapshots and memories of love, brain surgery, cancer and life
Aaron’s brain tumor came back.
That wasn’t supposed to happen, even if it was statistically probable.
What was supposed to happen was wrapping up his oral chemo in July, throwing a giant party, burning his hospital bracelets and deleting this blog from the Internet and this whole ordeal from our memories.
But it came back. Just as a blip on his November MRI, a “spot to watch” but not panic over, a blip so small I mentally dismissed it as a smudge on his doctor’s computer screen (they don’t have retina displays so it’s entirely likely).
It wasn’t, of course, and after his next MRI on the 21st of December, we were shuffled into a different room to meet with the oncologist and the brain surgeon and agree on a plan of action: brain surgery right after the holidays and a more aggressive form of chemotherapy whose description made both of our stomachs turn.
You know you work in advertising when you assume that “post-holiday” means sometime in January, and you know your brain surgeon is a serious dude when he literally means the day after Christmas. As in, as soon as he’s done eating dinner with his family, he’s going to bed and waking up to crack your skull open before the sun rises.
His brain tumor wasn’t supposed to come back, but it did.
But then, this whole thing wasn’t supposed to last past our second date.
A baby wasn’t supposed to be statistically possible.
Aaron wasn’t supposed to run a 5k less than a week after brain surgery (seriously, I don’t think that was medically advisable but it happened and he had a really good time).
The universe doesn’t care about what is or isn’t supposed to happen, and I realize more each day that we shouldn’t either.
As I write this, our impossible baby is sleeping upstairs. My impossible husband is regaling me with tales from his weekly soccer game. Our stupid dog is asleep on the floor. The first scents of summer are riding on the breeze through our living room.
I don’t know which combination of events led me right to this moment, I just know that there’s no amount of woulds, coulds or shoulds that can change what is.
Aaron’s brain tumor has given us a ravenous hunger for life that’s directly proportionate to the intense gratitude we have for every day on this planet.
It’s discovery kick-started us to do all of the living we could: to get married, to have another wedding reception, to have a child, to sell our house, to drive North until we hit the edge of it all, to head west into the desert and consider turning south and never coming back.
It’s made us want to stay up late and wake up early. No, go to bed early and wake up late. To go to IKEA on a Saturday afternoon. To watch Friday Night Lights until 2 am. To read him my childhood diaries out loud. To eat more. To eat healthier. To eat a Shamrock Shake even though it’s poison because it’s a poison that is only available for a limited time. To run. To meditate. To grow (and kill) a garden. To spend a full day in our pajamas. To generate ideas for new businesses to start and new movies to write and new places to go that neither of us have ever seen before.
No amount of gratitude can satisfy this hunger. Our baby’s face makes us want five more babies (or one, according to Aaron, who isn’t as Irish Catholic as I am). NOW. Aaron casually suggests I dye my hair pink? DONE. We see something we like in a store? PURCHASED.
I want to find every book or poem or song that ever meant anything to me and read it out loud to him until it’s as much a part of his being as it is mine. I want to build a time machine and watch his whole life unfold so there isn’t a minute of his existence that is unfamiliar to me.
“Why don’t you slow down a minute,” my dad said the other night, “you’ve got enough going on right now.”
No, sir. There’s no such thing as too much. And even if there were, we’d be nowhere close.
Listen up, kids: the world is full of harsh truths, and I’m here to share some of the most important ones I’ve learned in the past 15 months or so.
- Accept that someday, you will die. Probably not today, and most likely not tomorrow, but someday you will leave this mortal world. As a child, I imagined myself as nothing more than molecules floating in space, and the thought simultaneously struck me with insomnia and helped me to face my fear of death more than the time my dad drove our car off a cliff in Italy (ask me about that someday!). The sooner you wrap your head around this one fact, the better, because all of the following points kind of depend on you coming to grips with the fact that you are not invincible.
- Have health insurance. No matter what. Yes, it’s expensive. You know what is more expensive than paying for COBRA before the insurance kicks in at your new job? PAYING FOR BRAIN SURGERY. I myself had plenty of uninsured moments where I trusted that the universe wouldn’t let me get hit by a taxi or fall off a subway platform, which is stupid because I’m incredibly clumsy. I thank our lucky stars every day that Aaron has excellent insurance from his awesome employer. Before he worked at the ad agency he’s at now, he was freelancing and, you guessed it, uninsured. Meanwhile, he was growing a brain tumor. While medically it probably would have been better for his tumor to reveal itself earlier, the financial disaster of paying for all of this treatment probably would have killed him. Think of it this way: paying a few hundred a month for insurance will seem like a God damn bargain compared to a hospital bill that costs more than your house is worth. Plus, according to all of the conservative talk radio I’ve heard, Obamacare is going to make being insured really easy for you while simultaneously ruining our country. Take advantage, kids.
- Fill out a health care directive. Is it fun to run through all of the decisions that may need to be made about your healthcare if you’re reduced to a pile of unresponsive bones in a hospital bed? Of course it is! I’m lying, it sucks and you’ll probably cry as you write it unless you’re dead inside. What you’re really doing by filling this out is relieving your friends and family of the horrible burden of guessing how you’d define “quality of life.” Most people probably love you so much that they’d try to reanimate your corpse or have your brain kept alive in a jar in their living room in hopes that medical science would be able to create a new version of you in the future. Here’s where you let them know that’s not part of your plan. Bonus: if you want 2Pac’s Life Goes On to play at your funeral, this is the time to make your wishes known!
- Establish a power of attorney. Who do you want to delete embarrassing emails and throw away the Box of Secrets you keep hidden in your closet when you’re gone? Who’s going to make sure your weird cousin doesn’t get her mitts on your collection of vintage t-shirts? I’m not sure those things are addressed in a power of attorney document but if it’s important to you, I bet you can include them.
So, now that you’re sufficiently bummed out, be an adult and add these four things to your to-do list. Deal?
Neale Donald Walsh
If you’re the kind of person who has chosen the first option, you’re doing it wrong. Look again. Try harder.
