(no) fun with doctors, the conclusion

so i know this is all jumping around and all, but i feel it is important to get all of this down; to keep the record full and up-to-date.

when we last left me, the wife, and my poor husband j, he had finally, after a harrowing day spent trapped in the dirty halls of the st vincent's er, arrived safely at sloan kettering where he sat some more. an unscheduled trip to the hospital over a weekend means a lot of sitting around and waiting for things to happen. you wait for the resident, who then has to wait to talk to your attending doctor, who then has to wait for the mri, who then have to take their sweet ass time in getting your head stuck into their machine. on the weekends in the hospital, even more than on a week day, NO ONE is in any hurry.

no one, that is, except me. which brings us to the breakdown over childcare. most of the time, for whatever reason (denial? insanity?), this all is actually managable. it sucks, but you can do it. you just get up and go to the doctors appointments and try to continue on with life. where it gets really stressful is when there is only one of you and you need to both be at the hospital with your husband and also be at home taking care of your 16-month-old son. that is the hardest part. it's like being the star of some bad home movie version of "Sophie's Choice": who are you going to choose? your seizure-stunned husband? your separation anxiety-phased son? and what about you? where are you in all of this? you get the world's scariest phone call, but when do you get to fall apart over it?

i don't know about anybody else, but for me, it's in the er and then again in the hospital room. there's this tension that exisits when you are the wife: you have all this stress because of your sick husband and your son, but you can't let on that you have the stress. personally speaking, i TRY not to let on, but then sometimes, it just all comes out and i blame my husband for everything! and then i feel like the WORST wife in THE ENTIRE WORLD because my husband has cancer and i am mad at him because i am stressed out about being stuck at the hospital with him and i feel like i am neglecting our son by leaving him with anyone for too long. oh the issues that cancer brings out in everyone; oh the baggage!

so as i am falling apart for the second, third, who's-counting-anymore time... we finally see the doctor with the mri results; well, the doctor and her 3-year-old daughter, which is a little weird cause how do you ask if your husband is about to die in front of a little wide-eyed blonde elf? (it turns out that doctors have babysitting issues too.) but the whole weekend was so bizarre, so surreal that it all just made sense to be told that the doctor did see some more tumor growth, but just beyond the resection cavity, in an area that would be too high-risk to operate on and that j would be needing some radiation (in the end, it turned out to be so much more than that, but that's a whole other post) and to respond with "are you going to go to the park today, little darling? our son is!"

in happier news, she discharged j so we were at least able to get back in time to enjoy some of the most beautiful day so far this year at the park with a. we take our happiness where we can get it.