The worst day(s)

I haven’t written for a while because I’ve been too busy falling apart and trying to put myself and the boys back together. Things just never let up.

Meowy is getting her tail amputated because there is a tumor at the base of it.

There is a flying termite infestation in my bathroom (pest control appointment is scheduled but not until next Wednesday).

I have an ovarian polyp that requires laparoscopic surgery.

I’ve been on disability due to my mental health since late September, but the claim is still not approved and frankly the approval process has created so much stress that I’m just as much a wreck as I was before the disability period started.

The boys are having their own struggles, which I won’t go into detail about, but it’s so hard to see them this way.

What’s been helping me – besides therapy and meds – is writing. I’ve been doing flash non-fiction. Flash pieces are short, under 1,000 words. I like the focus on saying more with less. And because tomorrow is Andy’s birthday, and November 3 is the anniversary of that horrible day when we learned he had cancer everywhere, and November 20 is the anniversary of his death, I have been thinking about the horrible month a lot.

I continue to hope that things will get easier once we’re past the first year, or at the very least, don’t get any harder.

My flash piece is below.

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Last Fall in Vermont

We’d been to the ER in Burlington so many times before – when I fell in the basement and broke my fall on a table and almost bit through my lip and had to go in for stitches and check for head injuries because I had dark circles forming under my eyes and a growing lump just above my right eye; to take Andy in for what I was certain was sepsis – again - five years after he’d nearly died from septic shock – to learn it was (thankfully) Lyme disease, caught early enough to be treatable; when Andy went to get an ultrasound on the giant lump on his neck and learned it was cancer; when the aftereffects of the radiation made him vomit repeatedly and I insisted he go in and eventually he got tired of waiting and we left; and then, when he called me at 4:15 am, two months after he’d finished radiation and had a clean bill of health, and the pain in his back and shoulders that he’d complained about for days was so bad that he couldn’t stand up.

It was the tail end of fall in Vermont and my friend Sofia was spending the weekend with me. I woke her up to let her know I had to take Andy to the hospital, and could she just take care of the boys when they woke up? And she said yes, and I knew she would because she is a decades long friend who has become family, and I left, and drove past the cattle next to my rental house and the sheep across the street from the house we owned and down the long driveway through the nearly bare trees, orange and red and yellow leaves covering the ground, and went into the house and found Andy sitting on the mattress – which he kept on the floor - and unable to stand.

I helped him get dressed, as gently as I could, and then scoot down the carpeted flight of stairs on his butt, one step at a time, slowly, in agony, and then it was a slow process of supporting his weight as best I could – he was down thirty-five or more pounds from the start of his treatment – and somehow getting him through the kitchen, down the rickety stairs on the porch, across the gravel walkway to the stairs, and into my car.

It was thirty minutes to the hospital, even with me speeding, and instead of parking and walking in together as we usually did, I went to the front of the ER, got a wheelchair, and took him inside to wait for me.

In the five minutes it took me to park the car, they had him in triage and they didn’t even send us back to the waiting room like usual, just back through the beige sterile hallway and through the double set of doors into the ER.

They directed us to a room we hadn’t been in before. It was close to the nurse’s station and just around the corner from the bathroom.

They asked about his cancer treatment and we assured them that it was gone, the oncologist had said so, and the doctor who managed the radiation had said so.

They started looking for answers, running blood tests, taking x-rays, and then someone came in and told us that the cancer was not gone, and it had spread, and in the images they took of his torso, it was present in his ribs and liver and lungs and sacrum.

He didn’t understand how bad that was, but I had some idea.

I hoped I was wrong.

I called Sofia and told her what we’d learned and said that they hadn’t told us what it meant, and I said, “that’s really bad, isn’t it.”

Sofia works for a cancer foundation. I knew she knew more about this than I did.

“Yes, Sweetie,” she said, gently, in the tone I’ve heard her use with her children when they were young.

“I’m so sorry. It’s really bad.”

And it got worse from there.