The walls turn into waterfalls

It’s amazing what we cling to or, paradoxically, how the shape of our lives find a way around or through obstacles like aquatic life forms claiming a submerged automobile.

Julie’s mediport was sewn into her body two days after her diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia. This port would allow chemotherapy to bypass her veins and enter directly into a major artery for more than a year. 

Laying just above her heart, thin skin pulled tight against it, the port was our first wake-up call that cancer had changed us in ways that are still difficult to explain. 

During those early days, we had no idea at all what was ahead of us or the importance of the secret interior life of bones. Every treatment came with a long list of possible side effects. Seizures. Comas. Long-term organ damage. Death.

Over the course of more than a year’s worth of transfusions, blood tests, chemotherapy, and flushes, the little bugger had taken its share of abuse. Several times, the hospital had sent Julie home with a tail hanging out of the front of her shirt and it wasn’t uncommon during inpatient stays for her to have two or three lines leading to the port and another leading to the pick on the opposite side.

If you hugged Julie hard enough, you could feel the port against your own chest. 

That port was removed on Monday. A few days earlier, Julie’s bone marrow biopsy had come back without any trace of leukemia, and removing the port was a sign of confidence from our oncology team that she will need no chemo in the short-term. 

We brushed against cancer in the same way as you brushed against the port during a warm embrace, and as you might imagine, it has changed us. 

Some priorities that seemed etched in stone a year and a half ago seem less solid today, but many other relationships are stronger today than they were before we started this journey. 

We’re not certain how others process life events like this, how they encounter the knowledge of how precious our time together is, or how they gather what they’ve learned and attempt to move forward.

We face unknowns: Julie’s job at the university couldn’t be held for her, though she has returned to teaching part-time and hopes to find her way back to the university somehow this fall if possible. Randy was laid off recently and we also decided to put our house up on the market later this month and are renting a friend’s house in Maine until the housing market settles down a bit. And we don’t even really know what we want to do when we grow up.

Maybe you feel like this, too? After all, cancer is a wake-up call but every single morning is: what will we do today?