back on the table: radiation part 2

j and i often joke about how it takes us at least two tries to get things right. in our life together, our "firsts" have usually been a disaster: our first christmas, our first birthdays, our first anniversary etc... our first christmas together is a doozey of an example. what i love most about christmas is presents. i love giving presents; i take an inordinate amount of pride in picking out the most perfectly perfect gifts. and even though i don't mean to, i expect the same: i want my gifts to be just-what-i-wanted-without-knowing-i-wanted-it. basically, i want you to read my mind. i don't want to have to do anything so low as drop hints or make blatant requests!!! read my mind! if you love me, you will read my mind and find the perfect gift!

(you start to see, perhaps, the roots of the disaster of our first christmas.)

nothing that j did get me or could have gotten me for christmas that year would have been right; i know that now. for whatever reason, my emotional expectations about our first chrismas together had spiralled completely out of control. and so, you will not surprised to hear, that christmas morning 2004 was a train wreck. i had spent weeks of my time and much of my money buying j the perfect gifts: an engraved iPod, a book he had mentioned six months ago that he would like, fleece-lined pants to wear after snowboarding. my whole self, body and soul, were wrapped up in those gifts.

i won't bore you with the actual events of that fateful morning, but suffice it to say, there were tears and threats of leaving and what was supposed to be a cozy hallmark moment was more like a scene from dante.

unreal expectations: they'll get you every time.

sometimes, as we go through this second round of treatment, this second round that is starting to eerily resemble the first, i think about the surreal idea that perhaps we are being asked to do this all over again because we didn't get it right the first time. (and if that's true, who is deciding we needed a do-over? a question for another time perhaps.) the first time, in some ways, was as disasterous as that first christmas for a lot of the same reasons: unreal expectations, on both sides. i wanted j to be one way throughout treatment and he wanted me to be another way. we both failed each other. we both blamed each other. we both resented each other. even as we found out about the new tumor in his brain, we were still dealing with the emotionally aftermath of the first tumor.

this second time around, i am happy to report, things are different. i won't say they are necessarily easier, but they are better. maybe it's because we know a little bit better what to expect; maybe it's because we are constantly working on getting through this as a couple and with a, as a family. all i really know for sure is that even though this is terrible and it sucks and it's hard and all of those overwhelming things that come with dealing with cancer, it's not a disaster.

which all leads me, the very long way around, to the first day of j's radiation treatments. he said going in that it was like deja vu all over again: the feel of the hard table, the blue light of the treatment machine, the smell of the beam. and the mixed emotions about all of it: happy to get started and get these tumors out of his head, sad to be back in the same place he was almost exactly a year ago. it was good to get treatment underway, but it was a hard day to live through.

and for me, it felt just surreal to be back in another waiting room, waiting for j to be treated. it's really the worst feeling, having him be taken by a technician through yet another set of heavy, dull-colored doors; waiting and trying to imagine, and at the same time not imagine, what they are doing to him. at one point, a technician (or a nurse? i couldn't tell which) came out into the waiting area to tell me that j was going to be longer than anticipated because if he was going to start treatment that day, his doctor would need to ok the radiation films they took. while i was grateful to be kept abreast of what was going on, my heart started pounding like a hunk of lead in my chest and i could feel my eyes widen the way they do when i am trying to listen very hard to something i imagine is very important. it scared me the way the technician sat down and at first, i couldn't understand what she was telling me. my first thought was that something was wrong: they had found something else and now he couldn't be treated; something had happened to him while he was on the table, getting films.

but it wasn't any of those things. while the doctor had told us j could have his first treatment on the day he did his films, the technician thought he was only going to have films done. she had told me he would be just 20-30 minutes, thinking that he would only have films done, but because he was going to have actual treatment, it was going to take longer. j had asked them to come and tell me, so that i didn't worry when he wasn't out when they said he would be.

so in the end, j got his first treatment. and the best thing i can say about the whole day is that we got through it; it was terrible, but not a disaster. and the pearl of wisdom i can take away is don't drink a whole lot of caffeine before going into the radiation waiting room.