Trials and tribulations; A three word description that succinctly describes my wife and her health ailments. In this entry, I’ll try to best to explain a milestone recently met that’s lifted a large weight off our shoulders; more specifically, off my wife’s shoulders. While running the risk of over dramatizing, let me say that the collective of my wife’s health ailments are short of being terminal or life threatening. They’re more along the lines of being just real big pain in the ass daily. Until recently. The latest information had us face to face with mortality and the unexpected changes that life tends to hurl your way.


To appropriately set the stage that I’m not exaggerating about my wife’s challenged quality of life; let’s start with a brief attempt at a summary of her ailments. I'm not a doctor, but I did spend some time in a Holiday Inn recently. I’ll take some heat from cataloguing this here but I’m hoping to put the context of the news into perspective.

Let’s see if I can get most of them; there are the chronic headaches. There’s the TMJ. There’s the tailbone issue from some injury which makes sitting, standing, and whatever difficult. I’m not poking fun at her; I’m merely painting a general picture of the challenges. The more serious ailments; there’s the hip dysplasia that doesn’t allow her to walk long distances or stand comfortably. There are the complications which suggested we would never have a second child. And most importantly, there’s the 300-lbs gorilla in the room in regard to the sudden passing of her mother and the legacy of terminal illness.

For all of the above, my wife has been through tons of tests, had hundreds of medications prescribed, met with various medical experts, tried holistic alternatives for the pain, and even tried séances with witch doctors with bad mojo. Well, maybe not that last one. But the most important test occurred within the last weeks:

Genetic screening for the cancer gene.


All of the other tests for all of the other stuff may have been more invasive, more demanding, and required a longer commitment. This genetic screening was just a blood draw followed by a waiting period for the results. I can only imaging what it’s like to sit in a lab, with a needle in your arm, and wondering what the results will be. Go on live your life normally while you wait. I couldn't do it.

First of all, I hate needles. Let me qualify that with that I hate needles which are in my bloodstream. Needles with ink = I like. The answers to your future are traveling up that sterile needle into a vile. Such a trivial exercise in healthcare now exists as a gatekeeper to your predetermined existence and longevity on this terrestrial orb. It’s hard to believe the small red contents of that vile can possibly unravel such a large knot of untold genetic secrets. But it’s just that. And while we as humans can live with the worst of news and conditions, we do enjoy the occasional good news and positive health findings for inner peace.

As uneventful as blood draw is, I can’t help but imagine what was going through her head at the time. But for her, she has always been much more methodical in her thoughts than me. Logic tends to ‘escape’ me at times. From our conversations, it was just another day in a nondescript doctor’s office, then lab, and then home. To me, she portrayed the whole experience as a ubiquitous event that we ‘all go through.’ In a testament to her strength, she’s unflappable through any event, situation, or disaster just like her mother.


But the history is there, whether she externalizes it or not. Her mother passed away from cancer far sooner than we expected. It’s completely fathomable to be affected by the terminal legacy that you inherit with cancer. But my wife never really talks about it. That could be because I take up most of the bandwidth in our house. It wasn’t until the news arrived via a call on her cell phone that I knew how deep this went.

It was a typical work day for me in the office with grown men requiring babysitting. My wife headed south from our home with the boys to attend a birthday party for our cousins’ son. The party was hosted at a building where children could relentlessly bounce, climb, and earn rug burn after rug burn while sliding down air-filled slides and scaling inflated castles. Now it seems strangely appropriate that she received the call while at this party. The news must have sucked the air right out of the room equivalent to the quantity of air in that slide that Son #1 was wrangling. After the news reached her cortex, the neurons began firing effectively, the information was being written into her consciousness, and there was comprehension, she began making the calls to inform us of the results. Of course, no one answered the phone.


If you haven’t figured it out yet, the results from the genetic cancer test run on my wife’s blood came back negative. And negative results are actually positive news. My wife doesn’t have the cancer gene. That’s very good news. It all came just days before Mother’s Day. And with that, we can’t help but think that someone special, taken too soon by this disease had something to do with breaking a terminal cycle of mortality. Does the news preclude her from future ailments? Probably not but that’s because we are never promised tomorrow. However, what we do know is that the probability of my wife being here to see her very own grandchildren is now MUCH higher. I am thankful for the forever we now have.