Chapter 3

December, 2006

Don came home unhappy and subdued, but not hopeless. He came upstairs to our bedroom to talk to me, because we’d agreed not to tell the kids anything till we knew exactly what we were facing.

“It is what it is,” he said, a Zen-like pronouncement that he would utter many times over the next few weeks, somewhat to my annoyance. I was capable of being calm, to a certain degree, but Zen was beyond me.

The next morning he talked to the doctor some more, and the doctor opined that he thought it was probably lung cancer.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “You don’t smoke. You’ve never smoked in your life, or even lived around smoke. How on earth could it be lung cancer?”

“The doctor says they’re starting to discover Hodgkin’s patients are at risk for lung cancer later,” he said. Still very calm. I felt like throwing things, and he was annoyingly calm.

Rather than throw things, I fell back on my usual method of searching the Internet for information. I rapidly found that the doctor was right—studies were beginning to show Hodgkin’s patients who’d had both chemo and radiation were at risk for lung cancer. The risk wasn’t as elevated as it was for smokers, but it was there, and it usually occurred somewhere between ten to fifteen years after the first diagnosis of Hodgkin’s. Which was about where we were.

I stared at the screen for a while and cursed lividly in my head, then fired off a bunch of links to Don. Knowledge is power, I told myself. The more we know, the better we can fight this thing.

But the more I read about it, the more I began to realize that if it was in fact lung cancer, fighting it wasn't going to do much good in the long run.

*****

March, 1992

"The doctor thinks I have Hodgkin's disease."

I took off my jacket and threw it on the couch. I was working as an insurance underwriter, a job I'd eventually give up when our first child was born. Don was an IT consultant, but he'd taken the day off, because it was his birthday. He'd gone to the doctor to get a lump in the left side of his neck checked.

The lump had been there for quite some time. It had actually been there in July of 1991, when we got married. But since it didn't hurt, and since Don was still in his mid-twenties, and therefore invincible, he didn't worry about it much. His family and I pestered him to get it looked at occasionally, and finally it grew to large enough proportions that he decided it wouldn't hurt to let a doctor examine him. By this time the thing was a good two inches long, and an inch wide.

I frowned at him. "What's Hodgkin's disease?"

"It's a form of cancer," he said.

I stood staring at my perfectly healthy, young husband of less than a year, and shook my head. "Can't be," I said.

"The doctor thinks it is," he said, with typical Don calm. "They're going to do a biopsy next week."

They did, and the biopsy showed that it was in fact Hodgkin's.

Just like that, our whole world turned upside down.

Read Chapter 4 here.