My favorite things

It was lovely to spend a long amount of time with my husband until it came time to leave. He gave me a look of pure sorrow that I had to go and it broke my heart. But I had to go retrieve our son, who has become an honorary member of Megan's family this week, and I needed to get some sleep. I also missed our kid and was looking forward to snuggling him. I cannot be two places at once and it pains me.

But Rich is much more lucid so he can text me now. We even had a decent conversation as I waited for dinner at Beth's. And Ian fell asleep in the car on the way to Beth's so that made bedtime very easy.

I just look forward to all my favorite things being in the same place again.

Coming back to me

While I've been with Rich every day this week, he hasn't really been himself. Oxycodone will do that to you as will a belly full of staples. We haven't talked about the tumors. We haven't talked about chemotherapy. We haven't talked about the game plan really at all. We've talked about the color of his urine. We've talked about trying to eat. We've talked about how many laps he's walked. We've talked about his pain levels and his blood pressure and if his feet are cold or not.

And those are all necessary conversations to have. But I'm looking forward to having real conversations with him again, even if they're conversations about cancer. He's right next to me most of the day and yet I miss him.

But over the course of today, he's come back to me. He was picking up steam and able to talk and walk when I left around 6:30. He and Laura were about to do their laps. But then Laura started texting me about afibrillations and X-rays and moving to a new ward for extra monitoring. Since Ian was asleep already at Megan's (after barfing all over her, her sofa, her coffee table and most of the hall), I took the opportunity to go back to him.

And while we're in a new area of the hospital with a ton more monitors and nurses and doctors that all flew out of a clown car, I'm happy. Because as I raced back to the hospital and came into the hospital room where everything was packed up to move him, Rich looked at me and was all "Hey!"

Rich has said more words in the last three hours than he has all week. I wanted to tell Megan that he was doing better since I had just sprinted out of her house leaving my sick kid with her. So I told Rich, "make a face that looks happy and healthy so Megan won't worry."

One in a million

There has been a lot of concern to understand exactly what kind of cancer Rich has. The large umbrella that it falls under can be found at the PMP Awareness Organization web site. I warn you, though, that web site is a rabbit hole of medical terms. Even the PMP web site covers pseudomyxoma peritonei, appendix cancer and other peritoneal malignancies. We're waiting around on a biopsy result that will hypothetically tell us what kind of tumor Rich has, or at least where it originated. We are guessing that it's his appendix, but we'll find out for sure.

What I'm finding, though, is that even within the patients in the PMP support group, every person is unique. The symptoms, treatment, chemotherapy requirements, quality of life, length of recovery ... everything is different. Trying to understand what Rich's cancer experience will be like based off of those others seems futile.

But in a lot of ways that's freeing. We know that Rich has something in this family of diseases. We don't know how he'll react to the chemotherapy. We don't know how the tumors will react to the chemotherapy. And comparing him to others is not really worthwhile because there is no one else exactly like him. (We've all known that for a long time, but the medical world is confirming it.)

So for now it is Rich's disease. We're going to prescribe Rich's healing treatment plan to get him out of this hospital, which involves laps and naps. Then we're going to do some homework and soul searching about Rich's desires. And we will probably then try a course of Rich's chemotherapy. After that, we'll have a Rich CT scan and compare that with some Rich tumor markers. And then we'll decide what to do next.

I have decided to live outside of the statistics. And for the moment, that gives me peace.