AMIDST ALL OF THE craziness going on, the bed felt so empty. It had an eerie, creepy feeling to it. You know how it feels when you’re traveling and you have to sleep in a hotel or a guest bed at someone’s house? That’s kind of how it felt. I think the main reason was because it had been years since I had slept alone. Sure, there were more than a million mornings where she had gotten up to start her day and I was still sleeping, but crawling out of bed alone is nowhere near the same as crawling into bed alone.
For some reason, that bed just felt ginormous. It felt like it swallowed me up. It was a feeling I never got used to, and that same unsettling sense came back after she had passed. But that’s for later.
Lying alone in that bed was another one of those moments when I really realized how much I loved her. It kept running through my mind how much I was looking forward to her coming home the next day for a lot of reasons, and lying in bed alone put the exclamation mark on it. Just having her home would be so much better for the kids, for myself, and just for the normalization of it all. Even with her gone for just one night, I realized the truth of the saying that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s no longer there.
I know I sound like a selfish jerk here, and I was. That’s kind of the point of this whole book, and that’s okay. As much as it is someone else who is going through the actual disease, it affects you too.
Here I was thinking she was going to come home and rescue us all, but she was really in pain. Since Gina was a housewife, she never really had anywhere she had to be on a regular basis. I don’t intend for that to sound demeaning or anything because I don’t mean it in that way. What I mean is she didn’t have a job that required her to be there everyday, at meetings, client functions, etc. She wasn’t tied down by the same kind of requirements I was with my job. She could be wherever she needed or wanted to be.
However, now that she had to start treatment, that was going to change. We didn’t yet know what her treatments would be, but I did know that whatever those treatments would consist of she was going to have to deal with the after-effects of it as well, so our home life was about to change in a big way. The only thing was I didn’t know how. After all, how could I? We had never been through this before. We heard stories from the doctor and my sister but they always ended with the words ‘…every situation is different.’ Ever since we had gotten married, I had gone about my work life, she took care of the kids and the house, and it all worked seamlessly. Now for the first time, I was going to have to learn how to balance it all and to a degree, take over all of them. I was going to have to juggle her treatments, her reactions, work, the kids, the house, and everything else that went on in our lives.
I don’t know if I did it right. In fact, I know that I didn’t at first, but I like to think I was in a continuous evolution of progress. It was kind of like being a kid learning how to hit a baseball for the first time. The first few swings are horrible. I mean you miss everything, but you keep taking whacks at it and eventually you get better and better until you get to the point where you’re making contact and getting some hits. Same goes for balancing your time and thriving both at work and at raising kids and running a home.
We were only a day and a half out of surgery and still waiting on the results, but I was operating with tempered optimism at this point because of the encouraging words that the doctor had said to me. I kept juggling all the possibilities I could imagine in my mind. If the news was good, if it was bad, if she was going to have heavy treatments, whatever I could dream up; I game planned it in my head.
When I picked her up at the hospital that morning it was pretty reminiscent of when she came home after her maternities. She was ready when I got there and I pretty much just wheeled her out and loaded her into the car. Granted, she looked more tired and beat up. To be honest she looked exhausted, but she was almost as anxious to get out of the hospital as I was to have her home. Just having her in the house was going to do so much for my state of mind. There was this calming effect that she had on me.
We talked on the ride home. Well, I talked. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but communication was a problem we had throughout this whole ordeal. It was always the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I would acknowledge something, she wouldn’t want to, so I would back off. It frustrated the hell out of me and after it was all over, I really wished that was one thing I would have handled differently. I wish I would have pushed the issue a little more. I know she was scared and tired and fearful of the future. We both were, and even though this had been going on for a few weeks at this point, we were still kind of in a state of shock. It was all still sinking in. At this point, we were just kind of walking step by step. I was game planning, but I still had a Pollyanna outlook.
The kids met us at the door, which was awesome. It played out in front of my eyes like I was watching a movie. That night was a nice night. It was short because she was so tired, but it was nice. The whole family was back in the house, together. Plus we were still hanging onto the doc’s encouraging words so things were looking up.
It was odd to see her with no right breast and I found myself glancing at it every so often. If she had just been some woman at the grocery store or something it probably would have hit me differently, but since it was her, I saw it in a different light. Robyn gave me a great bit of advice to make a concerted effort to focus on helping build her selfesteem. Even though Gina didn’t tell me it bothered her, I knew that it must have. Besides, it didn’t matter to me. This was my wife, I loved her, and that was that. It would have been no different than if she had a crazy scar on her cheek or some other form of visible deformity.
We met with the doctor within a few days to discuss our plan of attack with both chemo as well as reconstruction. Three of her lymph nodes were positive for cancer so the doctor wanted to start chemo in about three weeks. We wanted to get right into it because once cancer has spread to a lymph node, you already know it has metastasized. The odds of it spreading somewhere else in the body at that point are strongly increased so we opted to go after it with the chemo.
For the three weeks though, things went back to normal. I happily threw myself back into my normal routine of eleven-hour days at work and then a couple nights of basketball with the guys. Even though she was still dealing with the physical pain, she craved her routine as well and as soon as she could, she vigorously re-took her role as head of the household. But even with both of us happily reclaiming our former roles, things felt different. I would catch myself looking at her at various moments and became very aware of those dark thoughts that found their way into my brain. I was scared that I was going to lose her. I wondered how I could go on without her.
The kids still didn’t know the severity of what was going on. They knew Mommy was sick and had to have an operation, so for now they felt like everything was over. Occasionally it would break my heart to see them playing with her knowing what I knew. Eventually we would bring them up to speed and not keep them in the dark, but at this point we felt like why scare them with something so severe when it could be over before it began? There were a lot of people who reached out. Cards and flowers were all over the house. Robyn was around constantly for me, which was nice. Not just that day, but she would call me or check in every so often and that helped me so much.