I WAS FEELING VERY overwhelmed and to be honest, I didn’t know how to fight the feeling. I sat there with my thoughts and it came to me pretty quickly, I had two choices. Fight or flight. I know what you’re thinking and you’re right, there is no choice. The only choice is to fight. I started thinking about a lot of things at this point that I never really considered. Of course, I thought about our family and the effects this immediate future was going to have on us. We had three kids at home to take care of and try to explain what was happening to their mom.
I called my sister Robyn and again, she immediately went into nurse mode. She was pretty frank when she explained to me what we were in for. Again, I don’t think I really digested it completely. I got it enough to understand what we needed to do, but I still felt like this was something we could dig in against and win. You’ve seen those movies where two guys get into trouble in a bar and end up back to back with everyone circled around them wanting to kick their ass, but somehow in the end they make it out of the bar safely? I know it’s a crazy analogy but that’s kind of how I felt.
The next surgery wasn’t for a few weeks so we all tried to settle into our normal routines. I obviously went to work everyday and got myself back into going to the gym to work out or play basketball. Physically I got myself back into my routine but mentally, I was all kind of confused. I felt the need to discuss a lot of things, but Gina didn’t really want to talk about things too much. She wasn’t as communicative as I would have liked and that put me at a mental crossroads. I had so much I wanted to talk about, but how do you force a woman to talk about something like this when she’s the one who is under fire? I didn’t know it then but this would become a recurring theme for us; I needed to talk and she could not be communicative.
Even though she didn’t want to talk about it much, she did feel the need to tell the kids right away what was going on. That kind of confused me. I mean, she didn’t want to talk to me about it, but she wanted to tell the kids? I understood that she is their mother and was going to be laid up, there’s no getting around that, but it bothered me that she was totally green light on communicating with the kids but yellow lighted on my road.
In any event we told Jackson first, within a day or so, and he took it okay. Better than I thought he would. He wasn’t unaffected by the news but he wasn’t devastated into instant death preparation either. He took a bit of time to process it and once he did, he had a hard time getting comfortable with it. He didn’t go reeling into this uncontrollable kid, so I let her deal with him. After all, they were always closer to each other, so I kind of backed off and let the natural mother/son relationship take over. You kind of have to play the odds sometimes and forcing myself into that situation would have probably done more damage than good. It’s not that I didn’t love him and didn’t want to be there to help him, but I felt the best way for him to swallow this was to do it with his mother’s help.
Aside from that, I didn’t notice any changes around the house but admittedly, I wasn’t really paying as close of attention as I probably should have been. In retrospect, I think that for the first time, I went into a bit of a self-defense mechanism and mentally checked out for a while. The surgery wasn’t for a while and I was part scared / part exhausted from this cancer cloud hanging over our heads. It’s almost comical now that I look back at it. I guess they say ignorance is bliss because had I known then what I was in for, I probably would have felt immensely overwhelmed. More than I actually did.
I still wasn’t researching much yet. Sadly Gina’s situation had become more and more common so we were just following procedure. I was talking to Robyn a lot, but that was about it. I felt caught up in a fight where I didn’t necessarily feel outmanned or underinformed, I just felt like time was against us. Obviously as anyone who has or is going through this kind of fight knows, from the minute you find out you’re in it, you know that time got a head start on you. It’s kind of like trying to win a marathon when the race started while you were still parking the car.
When it came to the actual removing of her breast, I never really considered the impending physical change or deformity Gina was facing. Not from my standpoint anyway. Sure I had questions, but for me that wasn’t much of a big deal. I know this might make me sound shallow, but physicality is a huge part of being a couple. As a man who adores his wife and was still physically attracted to her, this is something that you have to think about. This might come across as superficial, but I’m not a huge ‘chest guy’ so it didn’t really faze me from a sexual or physical perspective.
However, what did scare the shit out of me was that for the first time, mortality started to really enter my thoughts. I didn’t share that with anyone but it really did. I talked with Gina about the checklist of things to do, but I kept my fears to myself. I dealt with them a little bit in conversations with my family, mainly Robyn, and those conversations seemed to simultaneously help and discourage me. It was like the more I learned about this damn disease the more I learned what an uphill battle it was.
I know now that Robyn always knew more than she let on. She was great at educating me and comforting me each step of the way but, like I said before, she’s watched this disease beat up on women and families first hand for years.
I kept going to work as if nothing was happening at home. I was open about it to people at work, and to be honest that was more therapeutic for me than keeping it private. It would have driven me crazy to keep it all in. Like I said, Gina wasn’t all that communicative about things so I needed some sort of release. As much as I love my family, sometimes you just need someone who is completely on the outside. I didn’t go into details with everyone but I didn’t keep everything hidden either. If they asked, I told them the big picture and kept people abreast of our situation. It’s funny because I never worried about the pity factor. I was so consumed with everything it never even crossed my mind. It wasn’t as if I was telling the kid who carried my groceries to the car, but I’m talking about people I work with and spend the majority of my time with. I felt blessed to have the friends I did.
I still wasn’t paying attention to any differences with the kids. I felt like I was still just Dad at home. I mean, I was trying to keep life as close to normal as possible. Gina was still feeling pretty normal and had the house under control. At this point and admittedly maybe mistakenly, I figured the household was her reign and supporting it was mine.