My dear friends,
This is going to be a pretty depressing post, so I apologize for the downer in advance & feel free to go back to reading something else if you're not in the mood. But this is honestly the only place I can express myself at the moment.
I won't be around tomorrow because I'll be taking my wife Christina to the hospital for a minor surgery called a cone biopsy (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervical_conization if you need more detail). I say minor because it only takes an hour or so & she should be home by evening. But this is the first step in treating the cervical cancer we found out about 3 1/2 weeks ago. Best case scenario - this is very early stage and this procedure will remove all the existing cancerous cells. Then she'll need a hysterectomy sooner rather than later, but basically at her discretion. Medium bad case scenario - after the results of the cone biopsy are known in another 2 weeks an immediate hysterectomy will be called for, but that will remove all the existing cancerous cells as well as all the tissue prone to become cancerous. Obviously the worst case scenario is cancer with a capital C. So far that also seems the least likely scneario.
Cervical cancer has one of the highest survivability rates, largely because, as my brother Joel the ER doctor puts it, "A uterus is only good for two things: having babies and having cancer." So if you are done with the former (and we were never in doubt about that) then you don't need to run the risk of the latter. Which is why the 2 most common surgeries in the US are C-sections and then hysterectomies. So we're cautiously optimistic about Christina's prognosis.
At the risk of making this even more maudlin, though, I'm really having a tough time. Ours has not been the easiest relationship to maintain, and in the past few months I have been becoming increasingly pessimistic about the chances for our marriage. Now I am doing everything in my power to fulfill all my duties as a husband and a father & of course to pick up as much extra slack as I can while Christina's dealing with this. But at the same time Christina is quite understandably not on her best behavior even as she directly and indirectly demands more of me. So from an emotional standpoint I'm running on fumes most of the time, and what little energy I have left is devoted to the job search (of which there is still no news other than I shouldn't expect to hear anything until next week & maybe there is another round of interviews yet to come). I keep thinking that the way everything else is going I really deserve to get this piece of good news, but who knows?
Gah! I really hate feeling depressed, but if you got this far thanks for listening.
--mark
