Along came a spider

There's no excuse for my appalling neglect of this blog, especially considering that my motivation for starting this was a love letter to my future self; a reminder of where I was at, a crutch for my poor memory.  It was like "The Notebook" in case I ended up single.  (Did anyone notice that nobody actually kept a notebook during the relevant period of the story?)

Anyway, there's no point in apologising.  The reason I'm writing tonight is simply because I'm sitting in a hospital room at midnight.  Thankfully I'm in the lounge in the corner, not in the bed in the middle of the room.  My partner is hogging the spotlight tonight.

It's hard to believe it's only been two weeks since she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  And it was a fluke: She had an abdominal CT scan because of intermittent pain, the the CT scan just happened to catch a small part of her breast.  Her GP saw it and called her in for an immediate evaluation.  Two days later we were talking to the specialist, who ordered a raft of additional tests to see how far it had spread.

Thankfully, it hadn't spread at all.  ("Stages" seems to be a pretty ambiguous diagnosis, but I'll put it between stage 2 and 3, depending on whether or not it spread to the lymph nodes; more on this later.)  Friday we had a follow-up to discuss options, although there weren't really any options: the tumour needed to be removed, and then more testing needed to be done to see if she needed chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

The specialist only operates on Mondays so he scheduled us for today.  (The following Monday was a public holiday, so otherwise we would have had to wait two weeks.  Two weeks probably wouldn't have mattered to the cancer, but it mattered a lot to our peace of mind.)  I spent the rest of the day on the phone to the insurers; trying to get pre-approval on a Friday afternoon  for major surgery Monday morning is as hard as it sounds.

We arrived at 7am as instructed, even though we knew she wouldn't be called until 11:30am at the earliest.  It all sounded very straightforward and I thought we might be home by 3pm, when the kids get out of school, although I did have contingency plans.  It turned out, she wasn't called until 1:30pm, wasn't out of recovery until 3:30pm, and they said she could leave at 5:30pm provided she could walk and pee (not necessarily at the same time).

At 3pm I arranged for friends to watch the kids. At 6pm I arranged for friends to feed the kids.  At 8pm I was arranging for sleepovers for the kids.  My partner was recovering very slowly, and I was starting to wonder if she was going to leave that evening.  At 8pm I collected the kids and brought them home to pack an overnight bag, with the intent to drop them at their dad's.  That's when the middle child started sobbing uncontrollably, saying she didn't want to go to her dad's and begging me to keep her with me.

I still don't know if the issue was really with her father or if she was just worried about her mom, but I didn't have many options at that point.  I managed to get her to pack a bag and make some lunch and I took all three over to their dads, which is when they all started crying!  They were all hugging me and crying and I was trying to comfort them but I was also aware it was past bedtime and I needed to get back to the hospital, in case my partner was ready to check out!

To make matters worse, my phone had died.  I knew it was low so I had it plugged it in while I was waiting for the kids, but NZ (like the UK) has little switches on every outlet, and I'd forgotten to switch it on.  So I was trying to charge it in the car but meanwhile I had no way of checking with the hospital.

The kids finally went inside and I headed back to the hospital, which was only a ten minute drive.  Halfway there my phone had enough charge that I could check my messages, and the nurse had left a voicemail that they'd decided to keep my partner overnight.  By this point I was practically in front of the hospital, but I made a U-turn and went back home to pack our own overnight bag.

I also grabbed some food because by this time I was hangry.  That's hungry+angry, and you could tell I was hangry because I only had some bread and cheese for lunch, I hadn't had dinner, and I was screaming at the top of my lungs at my phone, which had now shut off again and the car charger was refusing to work.  I finally got back to the hospital around 9:30pm, and after checking to see my partner was okay, I then proceeded to sit in the corner, swearing at everything around me, while I texted updates to our friends.  I then finally heated up some food and started to feel better.

Thankfully the nurses were lovely and they gave me a reclining chair, a couple of blankets and showed me where to get tea.  Unfortunately I'm not going to get any sleep because I'm well behind at work, and the rest of the team are in San Francisco trying to land a large client that could very easily make or break the company.  (I was supposed to fly to California last Thursday, but obviously the cancer took precedence.)  So I'll be up all night trying to finish some work to support the rest of the team.  (Did I mention I receive a large bonus if they land this client?)

Meanwhile, my partner's prognosis is excellent.  They took out some lymph nodes during the surgery and will biopsy those to see if the cancer had started to invade them.  If not, and all other signs are clear, she'll be given radiotherapy which is just radiation directed at the breast to kill any remaining cancer cells.  The side effects can be just as nasty as chemotherapy, but in general it is much better tolerated (and her hair probably won't fall out).

It's been a rather surreal journey, from an unexpected start to a rather hopeful finish.  Along the way I kept describing myself as "naively optimistic," not because I was ignorant of how horrific cancer can be, but because I couldn't conceive of it happening to my partner.  I love her completely and the idea of not growing old together was simply inconceivable.  Mercifully, her prognosis was excellent, her chance of recurrence is very low, and as her GP told her, "you will die someday, but it will have to be from something else."

P.S. I don't know why I titled this post, "Along came a spider" but it seemed apt, given how suddenly it appeared, and how scary it was.  Thankfully my partner isn't Little Miss Muffet, and she kicked that's spider's ass. :-)