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“Are you in pain?”
I make my way to her, sliding my arms around her waist. “It pains me that you have to deal with any of this. It pains methat we have to put on a show around Astrid until we know with certainty. Then it will pain me to tell her. Life cannot be lived without pain.”
Her blue eyes remain unblinking while she swallows hard. “It’s a misdiagnosis. I know it. And we’re going to be so glad we got a second opinion. You hear about it all the time. Someone gets diagnosed with cancer. They spend all of their money ticking things off their bucket list, only to find out they never had cancer.”
I smile, pressing my lips to her forehead, and hum just the right way so she thinks I agree with her.
I don’t.
It’s a rare case that someone’s misdiagnosed with stage four metastatic pancreatic cancer. Early-stage breast cancer? Maybe. Early-stage lung cancer? Perhaps.
Hope soothes her.
That hope will eventually run out. But for now, I let her have it.
“Let’s go to bed.” She wraps an arm around me as we head into the bedroom.
As soon as she’s asleep, which has been taking a lot longer since my diagnosis, I slide out of bed and spend most of the night in my study researching cancer online.
There’s no “cure” for what I have unless I buy into the stories of miraculous natural cures. Cancer is an insidious plague that we’ve come to accept as almost a “normal” part of life.
Tragic. But all too common.
Truth? Iamlooking for a miracle in the truest sense of the word. So, I go back to the basics.
What is cancer?
Why does it grow?
What do these “miraculous” cures have in common?
This is a rabbit hole deeper than the journey to the center of the earth. But time only matters to those who don’t have much time left. So, I have to take this journey because I love my life.
My wife.
My daughter.
And I don’t want to live a life where I know my time. If that bus hits me tomorrow, so be it. But I don’t want to know today that tomorrow is my time.
By noon the next day,the biopsy results confirm the initial diagnosis. An hour later, Amelia has me scheduled for a second opinion.
I bite my tongue. Smile. And nod.
As much as I want to tell her we must be prepared to hear the same scenario, I don’t. If I spend my nights researching miracles, it’s okay for her to cling to any little scrap of hope she can find.
“Ifwe don’t get a better prognosis,” she rolls toward me in bed while I read a book that arrived in the mail today, “then I say we start chemo as soon as possible.”
I turn my head, eyeing her twisted lips and narrowed gaze. “I certainly hope ‘we’ are not starting chemo.”
“You know what I mean.” Her face relaxes while her hand slides along my chest. “And we have to discuss how we’re going to tell Astrid. If you’re sick or losing your hair, she’ll know something’s wrong.”
While I’m glad that she’s keeping an open mind to the nearly one-hundred-percent chance that the second opinion won’t be any better than the first, I’m not sure why she thinks it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m having chemo.
“I agree. We need to decide how we’re going to approach this with Astrid. But I’m not having chemo.”
Her face sours. “What are you talking about?”
“Why would I go through chemo?”
