;)
REPEAT
Here we go again. We thought we were going in for a routine CT scan following Terry's October surgery. We expected a clean report. After all, the pathology reports following surgery showed no cancer in the surrounding liver tissue. At first it seemed like that was the way it was going to go. A resident came in and with great authority announced that he had looked at the scan and everything looked clean. He put the image up on the screen and he began to scroll through the CT scan layers. I do not know how to read those things, but I saw a shadow emerge on the screen and then disappear. The resident said it was just scar tissue. "No need to worry." he proclaimed.
We waited. The surgeon, Dr. Yoshida, came in. He was different. He knew. "There is a suspicious shadow." he announced. It was not there at the time of surgery, but there it is now. He said he would set Terry up for a biopsy and then a radio-wave ablation. Not surgery this time, but back into the system.
Terry has a phrase for such moments of bad news. "It is what it is." she will say. I cannot explain the strange comfort I experience in that phrase, but it is there. It gives me permission to refuse the pointless emotional battle of trying to make something be different then it is. It allows me a chance to focus my energy on the reality that is before us. It is taking the enormity of that reality a long time to make itself known to us.
This is our second cancer Christmas. I had thought that by now this battle would be won and be relegated to the level of heroic stories of battles fought and won - stories to tell with gathered family after a shared Christmas feast. But the battle continues. The outcome is still unknown. It is what it is.
Dave Gladstone