“C”

We are just players sitting around the table, the dealer gives us the cards we are to play.  So who chooses the cards we get to play? 

This time we got delt a bummer, so now we get to play it.  This past Tuesday my wife went in for surgery – cancer.  We were lucky, it was caught very early, from what they told her just in the beginning stages, so it wasn’t as serious as it could be, yet the physiological effect was present.  First comes the shock, denial, why me, a million questions with no real answers.  Then your mind begins to step off the edge and go into the “what if” mode, wondering, thinking the worst.  We always hear on TV, read in the papers, know of someone who knows someone effected by this carnivorous, ever hungry monster who comes in so many forms, effecting people in so many different ways. 

The worst things for us, and played on the wife’s mind is this isn’t her first bout with this creature.  Also it is something which has run a bit in her family – we watch her mother die from this cruel inhuman way to die – extended for a long period of time, slowly sucking the life out of a person.  Watch the person slowly be eaten up from the inside.  The kindest thing we can do many times is load them up with pain killers so the person can be in a dream state until the body finally can stand no more and just gives out. 

Sometimes the treatments are almost as bad and the monster itself.   The poisons we have developed to fight this monster takes their toll on our bodies.  Sometimes I don’t know which is worse, the cause or the cure.  We have been lucky so far.  The “cure” for her at this stage was an operation.  Now we are in that “waiting game”, waiting for a time period to elapse until her next checkup.  Did they get it?  Will she need further treatments, if so how severe a treatment will be required?  Sometimes I don’t know which is worse, the finding out what it is or the waiting time to hear if they “got it”?  I know it is not me directly effected, but it has had its effect on me as well. 

I get to play the mind games and wonder.  After she told me, the first thing I said was, “We’ll get through this”.  So then the short term planning began.  I am lucky, I am “retired” (yea, right), so I looked at my work schedule and adjusted all my appointments for the near future so I can devote my morning to the dogs, horses, stables, getting things done around here.  Then I planned a customer or two during the middle of the day, then back to the house to finish up around here.  How long will it go for?  Who knows?  We are playing this game day by day.  I was going on vacation the first of November – on hold.  Golf clubs got packed up for the season.  We are just waiting now for that next checkup.  Amazing how short termed your life’s planning can get.  I know I am not the only one.  I personally know of others going though this.  I know of those who are effected personally, so I am lucky it is not me.  I know of those who have lost their life partner to this and those people have survived pretty darn good. 

So our lives have had a little change.  I thank God every day when I wake up I am able to get my pants on all by myself.  We just need to have faith the outcome will be a good one. After all, if we don’t have faith, what is there? I guess the thing in life is not what cards we have been dealt, but how we play those cards.