The Debriefing, Part 2

Read the first part of the story here.

Once I committed to the surgery that day, we were whisked away through the secret passageways of the hospital – the ones you don’t see if you are just visiting there - to the operating room. They allowed me into the holding area while they prepped him and asked a ton of questions that I mostly answered for him because he was still drugged. Then I signed the consent form because he wasn’t in a legal state of mind to do it. They showed me to a waiting area right next to the building where our room was, but I had no idea how to get to it from there. I was completely lost in a maze of corridors until my dad showed me the way back to the room later.

I sat outside on the sidewalk and called our families to tell them what the GI doctor found and that he was in surgery. Half of my family was coming to sit with me while the other half took care of Ella and Luke. I nearly lost my composure while talking to Dave’s brother because I didn’t know how to tell his Nana. She doesn’t hear well over the phone, so I felt like she needed to hear it in person, and I felt so guilty that I had to ask his brother to give her that news on the eve of her birthday. I still hope that was the right decision.

Then I went inside to wait. A crowd of love surrounded me and distracted me for the 2 hours of surgery. We were the only people in the place, and that was nice, too. When they called me back to the consultation room, I went alone, but my dad followed me. That was an act of kindness I really needed but couldn’t ask for; I was so grateful.

As the surgeon talked, I grabbed a piece of paper and the pencil from the middle of the table to take notes and keep myself present. I knew I would need to tell Dave everything, and I didn’t want to miss anything in my shock. He was telling me that they got the tumor from the colon, but he found 3 more in the small intestine. He also removed the swollen lymph nodes from that side of the abdomen. It didn’t look like a typical colon cancer; it might be some sort of lymphoma. He called Dave a “diagnostic dilemma” because his case was difficult from the minute we arrived in the ER. Because of his age and the strangeness in the number and location of the tumors, they decided to send them to the pathology lab at Vanderbilt . It would be six days before we knew anything else. If it is lymphoma, it might be in other parts of his body; chemotherapy is a strong possibility. We won’t know anything until the pathology report comes back, but all three surgeons involved in this case tell us that we want this to be lymphoma because it is so treatable.

I absorbed this news and cried like a baby on my dad’s shoulder for a few minutes before I went back to the rest of my family. There, I gave my first recitation of everything I’d learned – a practice round, for when I would later tell Dave. The thought of telling him that there was more bad news was more than I could handle in the moment. I cried and cried, then got myself together to make all the phone calls again. More practice rounds that I desperately needed. Sometimes just saying the words that scare you over and over again make them not so scary anymore.

They finally called to tell me he was out of recovery and moved to his room. I met him there and settled in for a long night. He was in so much pain, so he spent the night trying to survive it and peppering me with questions that he didn’t remember the answers to until the morning when he told me, “I’m ready for a debriefing now.”

So, now he knows, and like me, he’s practicing saying the words that scare him. We will wait some more, with joyful hearts and lots of hope and even more “Please God.”