Reality vs Hope

I almost started this with the line "you are probably tired of hearing about cancer" but thought if you are then stop reading. I'm sure tired of writing about cancer. I'm 110% over living with it in my home, but somehow can never escape it's grasp on my life. So here I am writing about it one more time.

Last week was a tough one in our home, and surprisingly nothing really happened. The only reason it was tough was because neither Jeremy nor I want to accept our current reality. Again nothing has changed in our reality, Jeremy has another spot on his lung, we've known this for almost 5 months. Nothing new to us, but something neither of us want to deal with. At this point I don't even remember if I blogged about his spot a year ago that was treated with radiation.....mainly because this is my reality. There have been so many spots, so many treatments, so many scans, so many biopsy's I lose track of them all. I also stop talking about them. I used to blog about every last one because it was the easiest way to be sure everyone knew what was going on. Now I'm sitting in a "Meditation Room" at a hospital, waiting for Jeremy to come out of his most recent biopsy while texting a friend about our Easter plans. You know who knows I'm here....my babysitter.

I am not bitter about this in the least. I honestly felt like at one point my families lives consumed a great deal of time and energy from most of our friends and family. Now they have all moved on to their realities and that is a good thing! This is just my reality. Most likely this biopsy will confirm he has a spot of lymphoma and after this Jeremy will have another round of radiation. He will let his direct manager know he needs to work short days for a week, will leave early, drive himself to radiation, come home to finish the work he missed and no one will be the wiser. Our children will not know it is even happening. How mundane this sounds to me is unsettling.

As Jeremy and I were working on our small talk before his procedure we were asking each other silly questions. I asked "What are your 5yr life goals?" His response was not so silly "To be cancer free." So with our reality we can't escape, or past we can't forget there is this small little thing that gets us by...Hope. Every scan, every biopsy, every day, every year we hope this will be the last. One day it will be, but until that day our humor gets us by. As we were greeted by our admitting nurse this morning Jeremy sarcastically told her "there's no place I'd rather be on a Thursday!" As she looked back at him cross eyed she said "you need some help" He looked at her and said with a big smile and no sarcasm in his voice "It could be worse, it's only cancer."