Thank you cousin Cynthia for texting me and remembering I was due to have a scan at Baylor around this time. It reminded me that I have been remiss in updating all of you. My apologies. May madness sucked me in and life in general made me want to pull out.

I was uncharacteristically quiet about this last scan. I even drove to Baylor alone and had the scan then drove home the same day (5 hours round trip). Dr. Curley was kind enough to agree to an over-the-phone appointment the following day so Charles and I didn’t have to drive to Houston for a 15 minute office visit to get the results. This also I noticed resulted in me not wetting my pants. An unforeseen bonus!

The first CT scan I ever had was done here in Austin 3 days after I learned I had cancer. I remember it so vividly because it was one of the most terrifying days of my life. The scan would confirm or deny whether or not the images the ultrasound picked up were in fact cancerous tumors. In retrospect I’m sure there wasn’t much doubt that what we initially saw on that ultrasound was indeed cancer but I had spent the entire weekend scouring the internet for what else it could possibly be. I desperately needed to know it could be something benign that wasn’t deadly.

Lying on that hard cold table I was shaking violently. My body convulsed in measured ripples, my teeth audibly chattering despite the warm blanket that was draped over me. The technician was kind and spoke softly and assured me the scan would be quick and easy. I wasn’t scared of the scan itself, I was terrified of the results it would churn out.

This last scan, two weeks ago today didn’t hold nearly the weight of that scan 31 months ago, yet I found myself shaking as I lay flat on the table preparing to play peek-a-boo with a space aged doughnut hole. The whoosh whoosh of the cylinder as it circulates is so familiar to me now yet it’s not my friend. It can betray me at any time. I had to talk to myself so my breathing would settle, telling myself that all I have is here and now. “Be in the now Hills. Breathe. Find your true self and the rest will unfold.”

Five minutes before I lay down on that table I was changing into the hospital gown in a tiny room with six lockers and a mirror. I called Charles at work to tell him I’d read all the recent pathology reports that morning from the scans done during my infection last fall and realized that lymph node we’d seen on the scan 2 months ago hadn’t been there during my infection. This meant the enlarged lymph node was new, post infection and that meant it couldn’t have been residual inflammation from the infection. Charles knows that I am not a doctor but that I sometimes like to play one on TV. He calmly told me it wasn’t a great idea to extrapolate these kinds of conclusions after I’ve read reports I’m not so great at interpreting. At this point I am crying and coming unhinged. He let me be scared but refused to be scared with me.

I think it’s important to shed light on what it’s like for the spouse of a cancer patient. On this particular day of my scan we had a normal morning, getting breakfast, making lunches, getting our kids off to school. Charles drove off to work and shortly after he left I got in my car and headed to Houston. Charles carried with him all day the anxiety that scans represent and in addition he hoped I would drive safely there and back, not be lonely, sad or overwhelmed and prayed the news the next day wouldn’t be awful. Charles has all the stresses of his daily job, meetings, emails, plus showing up in the way that’s expected. Then his phone rings in the middle of his work day and it’s his wife who is crying because she’s suddenly faced with uncertainty. She is also very clear that she has proof things are bad. She is whispering into the phone and being very certain that the words she is speaking are facts. She wants reassurance that things will be alright but you see she has all these facts that are very concrete telling her things are not alright. Here’s the important thing I want you to know: there are so many things my husband could have said to me that would have made this situation worse and so few things he could have said that could have made it better. How do you help the person you love while she is sinking into the dark abyss of her own mind? How do you keep yourself from falling in after her?

I actually don’t know how Charles manages to keep his composure when these scenarios occur yet he does so with extreme grace. His refusal to believe the stories I tell him which are based in fear and not fact is one of his greatest gifts. He could be short with me because you know, he’s in the middle of ten things at work and has a meeting in 4 minutes. (which was the case when I called). He could unleash his own fear and escalate the situation so we both felt worse. He could just shut down and be unavailable. Somehow he is able to transcend the entire situation and convey his love, his total devotion and his belief that we will be ok. THEN he has to hang up the phone, banish the image of his crying wife in a hospital gown 165 miles away and walk into a meeting like his entire life isn’t hanging in the balance.

All of you spouses/partners and parents who live with cancer patients, you are my heroes. Nobody, including me has any idea how difficult it is to walk in your shoes. There are so many emotional land mines to navigate and you never know when one is going to blow up in your face. It’s a terrible reality of cancer. I am so very grateful to my husband for being my partner in all this. He didn’t sign up for this, I’m so sure we didn’t ever see ourselves in this scenario, but man does my man shine.

SO, scan results from May 16th:
The lymph node we saw back in March outside the liver is still enlarged. Contrary to the facts I gathered from the previous pathology reports that same lymph node was there during the infection. Dr. Curley looked back at the images themselves and saw it. The radiologist though it had grown some since the scans from last fall, Dr. Curley did his own measurements and disagreed. Scans are highly subjective. No other areas show any cancer (liver, lungs). Either that lymph node is enlarged because of the infection and or all the other disturbances that have taken place in that area (the temporary stent that was put in then taken out when I had a bile leak post surgery in the Fall) or it’s cancerous. I will go back in 3 months, mid-August to scan again and see what we see. If it gets bigger that’s a red flag. If it gets smaller or goes away that’s good. I will get MD Anderson to do an over-read of the scan I just did and see what they think it means.

Charles felt relief at the report, me – not as much. I’m trying not to focus on it. The kids are out for the summer and I am looking forward to less of a schedule.

That’s it!

It’s well past my bedtime.
Sweet dreams,
xoxo Hilary

13th Anniversary – May 24, 2016