Part 1: Loss of Confidence
Often times with aging or any serious medical condition, it can be difficult to tell in real time when one starts to lose their abilities, or grieve things one was once able to do. When one is diagnosed with cancer or some other threatening medical condition, hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back you can often see that symptoms and the grief surrounding them were present if you only knew what to look for.
 
Often, when a diagnosis hits, such as with Kim, and life all of a sudden speeds up, you can get completely lost in the day-to-day. Trying to navigate the new stormy waters of appointments, research, treatments, sharing news with people close to you and getting yourself ready for the unknown ahead. Because of this there is very little time for introspection. You're simply in survival mode. But with the passage of time, and the need to begin to process the experience, you begin to notice all the small griefs and losses along the way; things you experienced but never fully realized or put into words at the time.  
 
I don’t know if it was THE first grief we experienced when cancer entered our lives, but close to it, was a loss of confidence in Kim’s body. What I mean by this is the ability to NOT notice all the little aches, pains, sounds or twitches that all of our bodies make throughout the day. Cancer makes you lose the ability of ignoring all of these perfectly normal aspects in living in a physical body. When things go wrong, that innocence is lost, and it is often replaced with an obsessing over every little bodily abnormality.
 
The human body is capable of incredible things. It is constantly doing things we aren’t aware of, and the regular things we are aware of, well, more often than not we don’t give them too much thought. When we are considered healthy, or without a medical history, things like wheezing or becoming short of breath is chalked up to allergies or being a little over tired. Aches in muscles or bones are given the excuses of aging or doing something we are not used to. Again, shrugged off without too much second thought. Stomach and digestive issues are given many different perfectly plausible excuses. Maybe something we ate not agreeing with us, food poisoning that will pass, eating too much or drinking a bit too much. Anything more serious is often just chalked up to IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).  And the incredibly vast majority of the time these excuses and reasons are all bang on. Cancer is on the rise and becoming more common, it is one of the reasons we feel inspired to do this fundraiser, but it is not nearly as common as all the different things we might feel in our body on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The body is amazing, and the number of things it can absorb without too much of a second thought is astounding.
 
But when cancer became a personal diagnosis for Kim, and for myself as her husband, all of a sudden the daily and normal aches and pains, random digestion anomalies or moments of feeling short of breath all become moments of panic, things to be examined and obsessed over. Anxiety about another potential growth, wondering if the cancer cells were congregating and growing somewhere new. We had lost confidence that all the things Kim felt in her body could just be normal everyday things we all go through. There is something so blissful about ignorance.
 
When cancer entered the conversation, the innocence of ignoring or chalking things up to “that’s just what the body does” was lost, and we began to worry about everything. Everything happening within the body, but also everything happening outside the body. How much rest is too much? How much do we need to change our diet? How much should Kim be working? What does it mean when she feels this pain, or that weird sensation or pressure? All of sudden Kim forgot what it felt like to have a body without the cloud of cancer hanging over it. Hundreds of thought and concerns flittering through our minds each day as we became more and more aware of all the little things the body does, the vast majority of which are totally, organically, normal.
 
And so, there was a loss of general confidence in how her body should feel to her. We became aware, and at least in the beginning, questioning and analyzing everything with much fear and anxiety. Kim had to relearn what her body felt like. What was normal, what needed paying attention to and what could be left alone as the new normal. But the blissful ignorance of having a healthy body and not giving too much of a second thought to this or that, that reality was gone, left behind on the day we entered the cancer clinic for the first time.

​Have you ever lifted up a piece a plywood that has been laying for a period of time in a field, vacant lot, or even just your backyard? You dig the tips of your fingers underneath the wood, feeling the moist ground below the edge of the plywood, grab hold of the decaying wood, and then brace yourself for whatever you might find (organic, mold or rodent) living underneath it? Whatever is under that piece of wood, you know it won’t be pretty.
 
This is a metaphor that has been floating around my head for the better part of the last half-year as it relates to grief. I’ll admit, I didn’t know that there was some residual grief still living under the surface of my life until earlier this year, as plans for this fundraiser began coming together. But then something happened, and as usual, it began innocently enough.
 
I was on one of my post-lunch walks, working off the sugars from my meal. I was walking along one of the streets of our neighbourhood, earbuds in playing a random playlist of songs, when all of a sudden the data on my phone cut out. Wanting to continue listening, I switched over to a playlist of songs that I had downloaded on my phone, songs from about eight or more years back. As I walked along with my feet pounding the pavement and thumb scrolling through song titles, I noticed a growing lump forming in the back of my throat. I found myself scrolling through old song titles, and stopping to play snippets of music I had not listened to in quite a while. What I noticed though while I played these songs, was not so much the songs in and of themselves, but strong flashes of memory, things I had not thought of in a very long time, if ever. They were all memories related to Kim’s struggle with cancer.

On my walk, I hit play and listened to the first minutes of, Beloved, by Mumford and Sons. As the music opened, I all of a sudden remembered driving home late at night from a church council meeting, descending the hill between Langley and Cloverdale, having just shared with the church board about Kim’s final diagnosis, and my need to resign my position as pastor of the church to help care for her in her final months.
I clicked on the song, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, and I saw a scene of Kim and I one evening, me sitting at the desk in our living room listening to this song on our computer, Kim puzzling on the couch. Without looking up, she asked me to change the song because of its almost mournful tune. It was in the middle of her 2018 chemo treatment and life was very tough and uncertain at that moment and she didn’t want to hear that kind of slow music. It brought up too many “what if” emotions.
Seeing many of the faster, heavier songs on the playlist, I began having visions of listening to these songs at an almost deafening volume, both in the car leaving work to come home to a nauseous Kim a couple days after chemo, or in my earbuds biking in the Watershed, just trying to drown out the thoughts, scenarios and darkness of Kim’s diagnosis, chemo and upcoming surgery; trying to work off the anger I felt towards the cancer that was changing my wife and our marriage so quickly.
 
In thinking about this over the past couple months, and finding myself unwilling to go back to listen to those songs for fear of those emotions rising up again, what I have come to realize is it that though I think I did a fair job of working through my grief around Kim’s passing, (I did a series of blog posts on this which you can find my scrolling down a couple pages on this blog), I have done very little work in dealing with the grief of Kim’s cancer journey itself. Of seeing Kim suffer through her cancer, and the death by a thousand cuts to the life we had once envisioned for ourselves. The roll of being a caregiver to a spouse, the five-year burden seeing Kim change because of the cancer, seeing myself change because of the role I had, seeing our marriage change because of this cellular intruder. The countless suppressed emotions, the jumping to end-of-life conclusions, while at the same time denying what was happening in front of us. It all takes a toll that sometimes you don’t realize in the moment as you are just trying to hold life together, trying your hardest as the caregiver though none of it comes naturally, and seeking to put on a brave face while doing it.
 
What I have come to see, and has become apparent through the process of writing thus far in this fundraiser, is that the grief of being widowed, and the grief of watching your loved one suffer through cancer are two different things. They are related, but I have come to see that though I have worked through a lot of the pain of being widowed, I have never really come face to face with the grief of being an intimate witness to the hardship of cancer.
 
And so I find, though this was not the plan at the beginning of this fundraiser, that it is time to dig my fingers into that forgotten moist soil and lift up the plywood that I have kept overtop of the grief of having watched Kim suffer for five years, particularly the last two and a half years of her life. To see what needs to be exposed, and maybe in the process, help others on a similar journey.
 
More to come next week.

​This year, on Kim’s birthday, June 12th, Carrie and I found ourselves camping out near Vernon, outside of reliable cell service. For Carrie and I, this was our first camping trip together, and now that we are back home I can say that we got through it without killing each other.
 
Now I am not a natural camper, most of what I know about camping I learned from Kim, so naturally, I shared a lot of my wisdom, passed down from Kim, on this trip. I also spent a lot of time last Friday, June 12th, Kim’s birthday, reflecting on many Kim camping stories, which is when I wrote this post.
 
Kim loved to camp. She came by this love honestly, camping each summer as a child and teen with her parents and siblings, and in her later teens with her friends at a cabin in Orville. As single young adults, our group of friends would head out into the woods from time to time as well.
 
After my transplant, Kim and I ventured out on our first camping trip in 2011. We packed up her parents tent trailer and hit the road. Soon after this, her parents bought themselves a trailer, and Kim and her brother, Paul, took over the pop-up trailer. We spent roughly 6 summers holidaying in the old Jayco red-and-white. Sometimes the fridge would work, other times it was hopeless (at least to me, her dad always had a way to get it to fire up). It was a great time, with a lot of laughs and miles put into those small single axle wheels.
 
While Kim was recovering from her second surgery in 2019, we realized just how fragile life was going forward, and how much Kim was now being effected, due to her chemo treatments, by the cold and other environmental factors, so we decided to throw financial caution to the wind and bought our own custom made Escape Trailer. We received it in early June 2019, and hit the road.
 
Kim made that trailer her own. She put her stamp on every square inch of that trailer, customizing all the cabinets with what went where. She loved outfitting it with its own dishes, silverware and supplies, everything one might need in it to simply be able to hook up and go whenever we wanted to.
 
It was in that trailer or just outside it, while camping with Kim’s parents outside Cranbrook in summer 2020, that we got the confirmation over phone call that Kim’s cancer was back. That trip, in late July, was the last time I pulled that trailer. After spending time with her parents in Cranbrook, Kim and I backtracked to Christina Lake, our favorite place to camp, and met Tim and Heidi and their kids there for a week of camping, Kim’s final camping trip.
 
That was an emotionally awkward number of days. In many ways we knew that this final diagnosis meant, but being in Kim’s most-happy place, we didn’t want to admit or acknowledge it. We didn’t want to face or name the reality that we knew we were potentially dealing with, but we knew it within our hears to be true.
 
On our last day there, with check-out being at 11:00am, Kim and I went for an early swim. I was secretly wondering if this would be the last time we would swim together, the last time Kim would swim at all. I said nothing, trying to keep the early morning dip lite, but as we stood on the shore drying ourselves off, looking at the beautiful crystal clear water in front of us, Kim named what I already felt, saying, “I wonder if this is the last time I will see this place.” It was more than heartbreaking, if there could be such a thing.
 
And indeed, it was Kim’s final day of camping.
 
I would say that camping really was one of, it not Kim’s most favorite pastime. She loved lakes, loved to be in natural bodies of water, for just loved the peaceful atmosphere of the BC outdoors. Kim was a great camper. Lists of everything needed, everything packed and found again in its proper place. Organized and detailed. Efficient, practical. It all came back, again, to the things she valued––the people who made camping fun, the efficiency and organization of a trip well planned and executed, and the generosity that our beautiful natural surrounding have to offer.
 
It has now been six summers since Kim graced a BC Provinical Park with her camping-loving presence. But I know her camping legacy still lives on in the lives of the people closest to her. The Escape Trailer is long gone, I knew I could never camp in it again. But her supplies are littered around with her brother’s camping supplies, and as I write this, looking around the campsite that Carrie and I are relaxing in, I see as well many pieces of equipment that Kim used, or techniques of washing or storing things that she taught me. Her finger prints and legacy everywhere. I can still see the smile on her face, standing behind a camp stove, or her head bobbing as she swam in a crystal blue lake.  

​We thought it was time to give a bit of an update on how the fundraising is going. We are very excited to announce, that less than two months in, we are already at 22% of our goal. Over the last month, we have continued to see donations coming in, albeit a bit slower than after the kick off, which is what we anticipated. I have also had to pull back on some of my blogging and work on the fundraiser as things got busy on the farm and I had a number of preaching appointments. We are excited!
 
We want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has donated thus far. It is so encouraging to read through the names and know that so many people have been touched by Kim, and have wanted to remember her or be part of her legacy in this way. We deeply appreciate all the emails of appreciation we have gotten for the fundraiser, and for the blog. I myself have been grateful to have this opportunity to meet my goal of writing more regularly, and to dive a bit deeper into my memories of Kim through my writing, even if some of those memories of our last years are difficult to bring up.
 
Again, we are humbled with how our different communities have stepped up in this way to help make a very real and practical difference in cancer care in our region through this fundraiser. I am confident that together we can reach our goal by the end of 2026 and we know there is still a long way to go. 
 
If you are thinking of donating, have any ideas for us, or would like to partner with us in getting the word out to your own family or community, we would love to hear from you. Any ideas are welcome and I would love to sit down and be of any assistance I can - please reach out through the contact page on this website.
 
As we enter the summer months, I hope to continue blogging about Kim’s story, although the blogs might come at a bit of a slower pace. 
 
Thank you again for your partnership in this. I know Kim would be so thankful, and incredibly proud that her memory still lives on so strongly in so many lives, and that her legacy continues to move people to make very real and practical differences in this world.

I felt small.
I felt alone.
I felt scared.
I felt I was in a movie, and this is the tragic scene where the guy stands alone in the crowd, people rushing past him with places to go, but he stands still, solitaire. The camera pans out to see him standing, staring straight ahead at nothing, while the world passes by as if nothing happened. But something had happened, and this was real life- no pause or fast forward here. 
 
I turned and immediately found a quiet spot in the cafeteria to sit down, but a place where I could see where we had just been standing.  I began to collect my thoughts, but as soon as I did, the tears began to bubble up.  I knew I had to keep a calm head; there would be time for grieving later.  I looked at the spot in the hallways where the surgeon and I had just stood to make sure this was all real.  I repeated in my head the best I could the conversation we just had, confirming in my head the news just given: Kim has colon cancer. I stopped, caught my breath; the tears began to roll. 
 
After about a minute of sitting and trying to collect myself, I realized the wealth of information I had just been given, and that now needed to be shared.  I had to begin making phone calls, calls I desperately did not want to make.
 
I am not going to record in detail how those calls went, as there is no script to follow when you are calling family to interrupt their day with this kind of life-changing news. I caught Paul, Kim’s brother, on the skytrain, desperately scrambling to get off at the next stop so he could hear me better, as we both wept openly on each end of the phone. I asked him to call his parents and Kim’s other brother, as I could not bring myself to do it.
I caught my sister, Lynette, just coming out of a nursery, buying plants. I caught my dad feeding our cows, him rushing to find my mom milking cows, so they could grieve together. It was all so surreal. We knew the surgeons would find something, but we had all comforted ourselves with the news that it wouldn’t be this bad. The words ‘colon cancer’ just came right out of left field.
 
And then, I had nothing to do but wait.
 
I had asked Paul to come to the hospital to wait with me, but first, he had to commute home, pick up and drop off their kids, and pick up Sonja. And so, there I sat.  Not until Kim ended up passing away five years later did I ever feel a greater sense of helplessness than when I left the empty family room, where I made the phone calls, and walked the hallway back to Kim’s empty hospital room.  I don’t know if I ever felt more awkward, either, walking the hall, past the nursing station, around the corner, and entering her room. The place where her bed had been only 5 hours earlier now sat empty, an empty space, the same emptiness I now felt inside of me. 
It would still be another two hours until I would be able to go down to the post-op room to see Kim.  I was sitting in a completely vacant hospital room, waiting for my wife to wake up downstairs from a surgery, which had now changed the course of our lives forever. 
I walked over to the window and peered down to the street below, busy in a late afternoon sun.  Nurses were walking past the door in the hallway, going about their business, and I was looking down on people walking the street. Walking from work, from school, from appointments in the outpatient building next door, or appointments in the hospital, all people who were totally oblivious to my eyes staring down at them, contemplating the fact that my wife had just been diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer, and that our hopes and plans were crumbling around me in real time.
I moved a couple of items–blankets, facecloths, some alcohol swabs–from the large window ledge and propped myself up onto it, swinging my legs up so my back was against the wall, and I leaned sideways up against the large window.  I let my head fall against the window and tried to center myself, trying not to think about all the things we didn’t know, trying not to think about how awful Kim was feeling waking up from surgery, about the horrible feelings and reality that was setting in for our whole family. I just tried to focus on the next step, waiting for Paul to arrive, and wondering how that meeting would go.
Somehow, time began to tick past.  I would hop off the windowsill every ten minutes, pace the room a couple of times, and then hop back up.  At one point, I saw Kim’s nurse in the hallways, and I asked if or when I could go down and see her.  She came back about ten minutes later, saying it would still be another hour or two as she got word that though Kim was waking up, they were having a very difficult time getting her pain under control. Knowing that Kim was now awake and in pain just made the feelings worse. 
After about ninety minutes, as I was sitting huddled up against the window, Paul and Sonja walked into the room.  I hopped down off the ledge, and as I hugged Paul and held him tight, we both began crying.  We held each other for what was maybe the longest hug of my life, and then I hugged Sonja, also crying at the reality we were now facing as a family. 
We stood in a small circle for about ten minutes as I tried to recount everything that the surgeon had told me, and then what the nurse had just said about not being able to see Kim because of the trouble they were having in getting her pain under control.  
It was at this time that my fear about Kim not yet knowing about her diagnosis, and now the whole family knowing, plus whoever else they may have already called to help process the news, really began to set in. A new sense of urgency in wanting to see Kim began to take hold. 
The real fear I had was that by this time someone, either her surgeon or a nurse, had told Kim the results of the surgery and that Kim was now lying downstairs, in great physical pain, but also suffering the grief of knowing that she had cancer and with no one there to support her.
Sonja (who is a nurse-practitioner) decided that enough was enough, and it was unreasonable that we were not yet able to see Kim.  She went to the nursing station and about five minutes later came back and said we were heading downstairs to see Kim.  It was now approaching six o’clock, and the pressure was on to get Kim out of the post-op room, as they like to move as many patients up to their rooms in the evening as possible. 
We walked to the elevators and began the slow descent to the surgical floor of the hospital.  Down a long hallway, passing the Operating Rooms where so much had just happened.
We came to the end of the hallway, where there was only a locked door, an intercom, a camera, and an alcohol foaming bottle.  I called in to say who we were and who we were there to see.  The staticky voice came back that we could only go in one at a time, and to make sure we washed our hands before coming in. 
Sonja and I foamed up our hands. I left my bag with Paul, and we went in.  I didn’t know what to expect; after all, I was usually the one in the bed, not the visitor.  I went to the nursing station, and they pointed me to the back corner, where I could see Kim lying in a bed, a nurse beside her, and I could tell right away that she was awake. My heart dropped.
We walked over to Kim and could see that she was aware enough to recognize us.  She was in a lot of pain, and right away Sonja began talking to her about the pain and how she might better be able to get it under control; that she really needed to use the pain meds she was being giving, and to hit the self-prescribing button which gave her a shot of pain meds whenever she began feeling pain, just to get it under control and get out of the recovery room as quick as possible, and to help with the healing process.
As Sonja was in conversation with Kim, I took a couple of steps back to talk with the nurse.  I asked her if Kim knew her diagnosis yet, and she said no.  The surgeon had not been in to tell her, and she, the nurse, thought it best if either the surgeon or a family member told her.
As I walked back up to the bed, Sonja looked at me, and I shook my head slightly, indicating Kim did not know.  Sonja said she would go and get Paul, thus leaving me alone with Kim for a couple of minutes.  We chatted a bit, and as Kim asked me how the surgery went, I said it went fine, and the surgeon said it was a success.  I was trying not to lie to Kim, but I also had no clue how to bring it up.  I just kept saying it went well, and Kim didn’t have a colostomy bag, which was one of the risks of the surgery in general.  As the minutes ticked by and I found myself needing to stretch the truth more and more to answer Kim’s questions about what was going on, all of a sudden, the recovery room got quiet. The nurse had gone to the nursing station, and I figured this was the best chance I would get to break the news to her.
I paused, looked at Kim, and repeated the line the surgeon had said to me, “Kim, the surgery went well, but there was a surprise...”  I figured this was it, face it head on, rip the band aid off, “...you have colon cancer.”
She looked at me with a dazed but inquisitive look, “Oh...that makes sense...I have heard nurses talking about colon stuff...but it didn’t click that they were talking about me.”  She began to tear up as the confusion, fear, and dread of the “C” word set in.
“We have no clue what this means.  The surgeon said she got it all, it went really well, and you don’t have any more cancer in you as far as she could see. They found out in the middle of the surgery, once they did the pathology on the tumor on the ovaries, they then saw it on the colon, and they called in a second surgeon to operate on your colon. They also took a bunch of lymph nodes just for testing.”
Much of the rest of the conversation is a blur.  Paul came in and hugged Kim. I think at this point, all three of us were standing and visiting with Kim, rules be damned at this point. 
Very quickly, as Kim got the hang of the pain pump and medicating herself, her pain began to come under control, and she was able to be moved up to the floor.
We waited outside the recovery room as they prepared to move Kim.  She came rolling out of the double doors where we were standing, and we all rode the elevator back up to her room. Her nurse and a second one were on full alert when Kim was wheeled into her room, now about 9:00 pm.  It took about an hour for Kim to get settled, to get the pain back under control after the move, and to be tired enough to attempt to sleep.
Of course, there was no way that I was about to leave Kim all alone.  It was not because she had just had surgery or because of the pain she was in, but there was no way imaginable I was going to let Kim be alone with the news that she was now a person with stage four cancer.  However, being in the hospital, I knew I also wouldn’t be able to stay; it was already past my own drug time, and I had not brought my nighttime meds with me. I also knew it was going to be a long week ahead, and I could only be of help to Kim if I stayed healthy myself.
I asked Sonja if she would be willing to stay with Kim, to sleep on the La-Z-Boy chair in the room that pulled out into a bed.  Was this selfish of me, was it putting my own needs in front of Kim, was it weakness? I don’t know.  I just somehow knew that Sonja was going to be the best person to stay the night, even better for Kim than me.
She graciously agreed.  Paul left to go home and spend time with their kids.  A little later, when Kim had dozed off, I gently kissed her forehead and made my own journey down to the parking lot.  
The day was finally coming to an end. A day I will never forget. Our world, as a family, had just been turned upside down, our lives never to be the same again. We were now on a journey we had no idea where it would lead. We had been jarred with an explosive force, from one life path of life into another, one we never wanted to imagine.


Sorry for the delay in posting this; it has been a busy two weeks with work and fundraising. If you are still reading along on this blog, I really appreciate that. We so appreciate all the support and donations received so far. It has been amazing! 

On the morning of Kim’s surgery, we were taken downstairs at around 11am for her prep.  Her anesthetist was a Dutch guy, whom Kim right away connected with, poking fun and pleading with him not to go “cheap” with the drugs he would give her. They got an IV line started. We waited for another 30 minutes for everything to be finalized and prepped. When it was time to go, I left the pre-op room for the long wait ahead.
 
In looking back, I shake my head of how optimistic, or better put, how naïve we were at the time. I was the only person at the hospital with Kim, and waited alone (although family members offered to wait with me). We acted like this was just some simple day surgery. But maybe it was that we were just being protected from the anxiety, protected for a last couple of hours of innocence before our lives changed forever.
 
As Kim went in for surgery, I settled into some chair just outside the surgical waiting room, in the main cafeteria. The surgery would take three hours. I read a book for the first hour.  After that I went for a walk around the hospital block, stopping in at Bean Around the World for another coffee and baked treat, once again picking up my book to kill the time. With an hour to go in Kim’s surgery, I went back to the hospital and settled back down in the cafeteria with a clear line of sight to the waiting room, which is where Kim’s surgeon said she would meet me once surgery was complete.
 
I was surprised that as I waited that last hour my emotions began to percolate.  I began to imagine what the possibility of cancer would mean for Kim, or about what no cancer would mean, and what that would mean we were dealing with. I realized I was also feeling, already, before surgery was even over, a further loss of innocence in our marriage, that here we were again in a hospital, Vancouver General, the same place I had my transplant surgery, but now it was Kim under the knife. Not only did questions swirl about my future, but now also about hers. As Kim had been struggling with her health now the past many months, I was feeling that we were already losing something.
 
I checked my watch and noticed that three hours had now passed since Kim was taken in for surgery. I got up from my spot and sat at a four-chaired table a little closer to the waiting room, so I would be able to cross the floor and hallways by the time the surgeon reached the waiting room door.  When I checked my watch again, another 10 minutes had passed and there was still no one in surgical scrubs around. I got up, walked over to the waiting room to make sure I could see where I was sitting from there. I ducked my head inside the packed room, seeing if by some improbable chance someone would ask, “Are you George? A surgeon had just been in asking for you.”  But with no one raising a head, I loitered outside the door for a few moments, and paced the hallway between the waiting room and the locked operating ward’s doors. I looked at my watch. Another 15 minutes had passed. Kim was over thirty minutes overdue.
 
I moon-walked my way back to my four-chaired table, not taking my eyes off the waiting room doors.  There I sat, now counting how many times the big hand on my watch would go around, counting up three, four, five minutes. Now seven more minutes. 
 
Kim was now 45 minutes overdue and the tension was really starting to build inside of me. Now I knew enough about healthcare and surgery to know that things could have been delayed.  Maybe Kim was not taken in right away when they said she would be; maybe Kim was prepped for surgery but the surgeon was late; maybe there was a slight complication beforehand, pushing things back; maybe, and very likely I tried to convince myself, they had complications with her IV, Kim’s veins were notorious for collapsing and rolling. I tried thinking of any excuse possible to account for the delay. 
 
By now my phone had gone off a couple times with Kim’s parents concerned about an update, asking if I knew anything or if Kim was out of surgery.  I answered one of the calls and said in as optimistic a voice possible that Kim was not yet out of surgery, but I would call then as soon as I heard anything. But as the minutes ticked by my spirit began to fade.  Had I heard code blue called?  Had I missed the surgeon coming out, could she not find me?  Did something catastrophic happened?  Was Kim still alive? Did they find cancer in her ovaries, is that why it was taking so long?  There had been no contingent for waiting what was now over an hour past the time she should have been out.  As the hour turned into seventy, then seventy-five minutes, my anxiety only grew. 
 
Then I looked up and there she was.  The surgeon, looking into the waiting room door with a questioning look on her face.  I was up and striding across the room willing her to look up at me as she closed the door and looked around. We made eye contact and I was standing as a needy child in front of an authoritarian parent within two seconds, pleading for a smile and look of affirmation from her. 
 
The surge and utter drop of emotions I was about to feel over the next ten seconds was like nothing I had ever felt before, nor since that moment.
“The surgery went well and Kim is fine,” the surgeon began, “however, what we found is that Kim has colon cancer.”  It was in that moment that I felt as if I was standing at the gallows with the noose around my neck. The judge had come out and in some miraculous way pardoned me, “The surgery went well and Kim is doing fine…” A surge of relief, of thanksgiving. A surge of life shot through me as in the millisecond of a brainwave I thought all that stress I had felt over the last couple hours was for nothing. But then, there was no period at the end of “doing fine.” Instead there was only a comma, and before I could comprehend the “however,” the words “colon cancer” filled my ears and struck my heart. Colon Cancer.  It was as if the judge who had just pardoned me now in the same breath pulled the lever opening the trap door. The noose tightening, my breath taken.
The surgeon kept going with words and phrases I only just comprehend: “Pathology done during surgery showed primary colon cancer.”  All of a sudden, I realized she was still talking to me.  I quickly snapped back to present reality, but all I could think about was how surreal this moment was. Here I was standing ten feet away from a cash register that I has used many times to buy food, with people passing by as if nothing of significance was happening, and here this surgeon was telling me Kim had serious stage four cancer.
“It spread to both ovaries so we had to take them both, we also took a number of lymph nodes for testing.”  It was at this point that I finally got a hold of myself. I was being given life changing news and that I needed to hear and remember. “Listen up! Make sure you listen! This is not the time for emotions, take in what she is saying, ask questions. Listen!” From then on I was zeroed in. 
“It was a good thing the surgery was being done here as I was able to call for a gastro-oncologist surgeon in the OR to come and help with the surgery” she continued.
Now I snapped to and finally responded, “So there were two of you working on her? I just want to confirm you said colon cancer? How much of the colon did you need to take, does she have a bag? So, it was colon cancer in the ovaries too? When can I see her? So, to confirm, it is colon cancer? “Will she need chemo? Would you say you got all the cancer you could see? And just to confirm one last time, colon cancer?” 
 
One thing to know about me is I can be quite insecure, and it all of a sudden hit me that I was going to have to make some phone calls and in about 10 seconds this surgeon will be gone. I realized I would have to tell our family about this news, and I was the only person hearing it.  And so, I thought to myself, I had to be 100% sure that I got this news right: colon cancer. As I confirmed for the last time that it was colon cancer that Kim had and that it had spread to her ovaries.
​
The surgeon asked if I had any more questions.  I felt I had done a pretty good job thinking and listening; she had done a great job standing with me, sharing the news and taking the time to answer all my questions, but I also didn’t want her to go. I wanted to ask more, but the questions weren’t coming. For some reason, I wanted to have her presence, her expertise and its comfort linger, but I knew she had to get back to work. I thanked her for her time and for the information. I got final confirmation on when and how I could see Kim. The surgeon then turned to walked back towards the OR. And there I stood, feeling more alone then I had ever felt in my whole life. What do you do after receiving this kind of news?

​As I have mentioned before on this blog, there is very little I can remember from 2016, the year that Kim was first diagnosed and treated for cancer. I suppose this is due to the shock of it all and being overwhelmed with this whole new experience. Other than our wall calendar scribbled over with appointment times and some rough notes in a notebook, I have no recorded account of how Kim’s first cancer experience unfolded. But from the scribbled notes and studying old calendars that Kim kept in a cardboard box, a rough time frame has begun to take shape in my memory.
 
In the beginning, maybe like most cancer diagnoses, I remember the excuses we made for how Kim was feeling. She was in her early 30’s; who is thinking about cancer in their early thirties? It was more than a year out, maybe more like two or three, when Kim began talking about and quietly complaining about changes in her gastrointestinal system. She saw her doctor, and it was chalked up to irritable bowel syndrome. This made perfect sense as it was not unheard of, and Kim had always been a bit irregular. However, as the seasons passed into years, and the symptoms of slight pain and constipation slowly progressed over time, a mild concern began to grow. By the beginning of 2016, her pain and now almost constant constipation were joined by a much more alarming symptom of abdominal swelling. By late winter 2015/16, it looked like Kim was in the early months of pregnancy.
 
Throughout the previous year, Kim had been sent for imaging and bloodwork, all showing normal results. However, a CT scan in Feb 2016 clearly showed that her reproductive organs had now joined the cause for concern. This imaging actually shifted any focus we had on her bowels or colon and placed it squarely on her ovaries, as the imaging showed what might be a rather large cyst on one of them. Whether it was a cyst or her actual ovary that was swelling couldn’t be said for certain, but there was clearly a pocket of fluid growing there. Throughout the months of March and April her ovary began filling at an exceptional speed. By early March, Kim was having trouble going for long walks. By mid-month it was visible to most people that she had gained a lot of weight. We were put on a waitlist to see an oncologist specializing in ovarian cancer, as this was the working hypothesis of what was potentially going on.
 
By the third week of April we had already made three trips to the local Emergency Room in Surrey, as Kim’s pain was becoming unmanageable. It was at one of these visits we were referred to an oncologist as a precautionary measure, but the appointment would most likely not be for another month. This was unacceptable based on how large Kim’s abdomen was getting. Each time we arrived at the ER we spent hours waiting, only to be sent home with a prescription for pain meds but not much else. Kim was now suffering due to the pain, constipation and obvious weight she was carrying around in her belly, looking eight months pregnant by the end of April.
 
I graduated from Regent College on April 29, 2016, with my Masters of Divinity. I remember, distinctly, walking across the stage of the Chan Centre at UBC in my cap and gown, receiving my degree, and looking out over the audience. I knew that Kim was so proud of the five-years of work I had put in, but as I looked, I distinctly remember seeing her sitting beside my parents, doubled over in pain, barely able to look up to see me walk. When I met them after the ceremony in the reception area, my parents were standing beside a staircase with Kim seated on the stairs, not able to stand for more than a couple minutes. We quickly made our exit home.
 
As we had learned though my own health struggles, navigating the health-care system is not always as orderly as we’d expect or like. We had learned many years before that though it’s a public health care system, it is also “every man for themselves,” and the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Kim had a coworker, who had a family member, who had a friend who was gyno-oncologist. His office was an hour away from where we lived. Within days of our last ER visit, and a few days after my graduation ceremony, he made time to see Kim. He hinted that yes, this could be some kind of cancer, probably ovarian, but that ovarian cancer is often treatable and had good survival rates.
The most important thing about this visit, however, was that this doctor had privilege’s in the main metro-Vancouver hospital that we wanted to get Kim into.  This meant the next time Kim needed the ER because of pain, we could skip the local hospital and go straight to VGH. We didn’t need to wait long to punch this ticket. The following Sunday morning, just three days after seeing him, Kim was unable to stand or sit due to her pain and her massively swollen abdomen. I had responsibilities in church that morning as an associate pastor, and so we called Kim’s parents who took her to the ER. I followed soon after.
 
I don’t remember much at all about that day, other than that it was made clear to us right away in the ER, before I even got the hospital, that Kim was not going home anytime soon, and that surgery was going to be a top and urgent priority. The VGH team did not like that they were seeing at all. They were able to quickly get Kim’s acute pain under control, but she was still very uncomfortable. 
 
They got her down for surgery two days later, on Tuesday May 10th. We liked her gyno-oncological surgeon, someone extremely competent who was admittedly rough around the edges and brash, but someone after Kim’s own heart. Bedside manner be damned, she knew what she was doing and that, in our opinion, was the hand we wanted at the scalpel.     

​Some people have asked, or hinted about, how my wife, Carrie, is doing with all this fundraising and blog stuff.
 
When Carrie and I first met, I would say I was in a “neutral” place in life. I had come through the shock of grief and the dark days of confusion in not knowing who I was or what I wanted in life. Throughout the second year after Kim passed, I was beginning to find some stable ground in life, but that was about it. I was stable, neutral.
 
I was also incredibly lonely. As much as I am an introvert and enjoy my own company, I also, like everyone, desire companionship. It was nearing the two-year mark of Kim’s passing when I told a good friend of mine, Anthony, that I was interested in meeting some people of the opposite sex, developing new friendships, and just seeing where things went. Anthony knew a lot of people, and he knew me well. He was someone I trusted. As soon as these words left my mouth, he smiled, tapped the table we were sitting at, and said, I know the exact person for you to meet. From there, the rest is history. I got Carrie’s number and gave her a text, and then a call, and we set up a time to meet a week later. I’ll admit, I was not a strong believer in a future with her after our first date, but by the second, I knew I wanted to get to know her a lot more.
 
Our courtship was quick. We met in April 2023, were engaged in September, and married the first weekend in November. This is not a timeframe I would recommend to many, but both of us had done a lot of awareness work on ourselves over the previous years. Being in our 40’s, we knew who we were, what we wanted (and more importantly, what we didn’t want), and we quickly shared that with each other. Early on, we shared our “essentials” and “non-negotiables” in life. As I said, it was fast, but it was also intentional. And it was amazing.
 
Carrie brought life and joy back into my life. I said above that I was in a neutral state. I was going through the motions of life. There were things in life that made me happy: working on the farm, an evening out with a friend, but it was all “take it or leave it.” Carrie brought me something that had been lost for a long time. It is hard to put into words what that was, but she brought something akin to substance, depth, and beauty back into my life. I had done the repair work needed to stabilize the broken shell of a building I had become with Kim’s death, but Carrie helped me to rebuild- to take the boarded-up plywood and turn it into something beautiful and growing, something I did not think possible. She brought back the essentials of what it means to be a flourishing human: love, hope, and joy.
 
Carrie and I have been partners, a team, a union ever since. It was early on in our relationships, when we began talking about finances, I suppose, that I shared this vision of one day wanting to do “something big in memory of Kim; something having to do with a new scanner.” Over the past two years, Carrie would check in on how I was feeling about this, and I would push it off. It was this past December, as we were thinking about the coming year (2026), that she pushed a little more firmly and said that this should be the year we do this. It was not about getting it off our agenda, but she believed it would coincide well with it being five years since Kim passed. And she was right. Over the five months that we have been planning this, I have checked in often, and each time Carrie has been an enthusiastic partner in this initiative. It is really only because of her encouragement, her hard work, and her creativity in the background that this is happening at all.
 
Carrie understood from the beginning that yes, Kim will always be part of my life. We all carry our past around with us, and when you share your love with someone, and that person is ripped away, whether they be a parent, child, or spouse, that tear never goes back to perfect healing; there is always a scar. Carrie understands and has spoken about how my marriage to Kim has made me into the person I am today, and it is why she loves me, for who I am, and how I have been shaped by my past experiences. It is also why I love her so much, for who she is and how she has been shaped by her own life experiences.
 
I understand and seek to be sensitive to Carrie’s place in all of this. She is my wife, and I love and cherish her so much. Though I write all the blog posts, Carrie helps in editing them and speaks up if there is something she might not be comfortable with.
 
Yes, there are difficult moments for me in writing, when I get emotional over certain memories, and so we talk about it. But we always work through this hand-in-hand. Yes, it is awkward, but those are the perils of living in a broken world and opening ourselves up to love.
 
A couple of people have commented on how amazing Carrie is for taking this on, and they are right! She is amazing. She is strong, courageous, generous, and has so much love to give. I am truly grateful and honored to call her my wife. We are partners in all things that life throws at us and in all things we engage in. We both appreciate all the love and support, as well as concern, that people have shared with us. We will continue to walk through these next many months of fundraising together, a team, a couple, a union.

It has been another exciting week on the fundraising front. Huge THANK YOU’S to everyone who has donated so far! The momentum from our week-one donors has carried into week two, and we have already surpassed our first $100,000 goal! Thanks to your giving in these first two weeks, over $60,000 in matching funds have been unlocked, bringing us that much closer to our $750,000 goal.
 
This past Wednesday afternoon, Carrie and I had a special opportunity to hear more about the new BC Cancer Centre coming to Surrey/Cloverdale, and the new technology being put into it. We got to hear from Dr. Anand Karvat, a Radiation Oncologist with BC Cancer, who spoke directly about the two new PET/CT Scanners they want to purchase.  He talked about how this new cancer centre will be the most state-of-the-art and advanced cancer centre in all of BC, and how they are hoping to implement the newest ways of treating cancer, especially using the technology of these PET/CT Scanners, and the new Cyclotron, which will support it with radioactive isotopes. This will be cutting-edge treatment in a specially designed space for it.
 
Dr. Karvat talked about cancer rates continuing to climb in British Columbia, estimated to affect 1 in 2 people in the coming years. He spoke of how the Fraser Health Region, being the fastest growing area in our province, badly needs this new cancer centre; it can't come fast enough. On the positive side, he also spoke of how BC has some of the best survival and cure rates in the country due to the investments in treatments, clinical trials, and technology.
 
We were excited leaving, understanding a bit deeper how, through this fundraiser, we are all investing in the future: our community’s future, the future of a potentially loved one who may one day be diagnosed, or maybe even in our own future.
 
Please continue to share this initiative with those you know and drop me a note with any questions.  Thank you again to everyone who has, is, or will be thinking of donating to this cause! We are seeking to honour Kim’s legacy through this initiative, and in doing that, to make a real and practical investment in the future of cancer treatment here in our own backyard.

“Someone, somewhere knows something.” This was the phrase that Kim and I said as we walked out of the Vancouver Cancer Centre in Sept. 2018 following her third scan (see previous post if you haven’t read it yet). Kim had undergone three months of chemo by this time, and the potential surgery we were placing our hope in was dependent on what this scan would show.  If the scan revealed that the chemo was doing its job in shrinking Kim’s cancer, then surgery would be a go.
When the results came a week later, we were overjoyed. Indeed, the chemo was being effective, and surgery was scheduled for Feb. 2019, after Kim had completed all six months of chemo and recovered her strength.

What followed the results of this scan, however, were some of the darkest days of Kim’s cancer journey. I only recently, for the first time, read some of the writings I made during that fall of 2018. At that time, I wrote about how difficult this second series of chemo treatments was on Kim, and also the difficulty and stress it put on each of us. 
 
We did get through it, though. In December 2018, Kim finished her final round of chemo. In 2016 and 2018 combined, Kim suffered through 12 months of chemo, a total of 24 treatments, each treatment lasting at least 3 hours in the chemo clinic, plus another 48 hours of long-infused chemo treatments at home. Kim was so strong throughout all her treatments, persevering when all she wanted to do was stop. A true testament to her character.
 
With the completion of her final chemo at the end of 2018, her fourth PET/CT Scan was booked for mid January 2019. This scan was not so much for us, but it would serve as the final map of Kim’s abdomen for the two surgeons who would be operating on Kim in February of that year. For Kim and me, the scan felt quite passive. The results didn’t matter so much to us; the surgery was booked, and this scan was for the benefit of the surgeons.
The surgery would be an all-day, very intense affair. The surgeons would begin by opening Kim’s abdomen and slowly, methodically, scrape and cut away all the cancer they could find. That fourth PET Scan that Kim had would show them where to look and how far into each organ they would need to cut, if not outright remove. Once the removal of all visible cancer was complete, they would do what we called a hot-chemo-bath. They would insert a tube in one part of her abdomen, and another tube in another part. They would then close her up. One tube would pump hot-chemo into her abdominal cavity, while the other tube would slowly suck it out. The chemo would cycle through her abdominal cavity, thus bathing all her organs and tissue, seeking to kill any remaining cancer cells in the area.
 
After surgery, Kim was once again declared to be in remission. Her bloodwork returned to normal, and no cancer could be detected in her body. Kim had fully recovered from her surgery by April 2019, and we had a wonderful year ahead. Kim returned to full-time work at Elim Village, and I as pastor of Bridge Community Church in Langley.
 
And then it all changed. In Spring 2020, Kim began complaining about sciatica pain. She had had two clear CT scans since her surgery, so we comforted ourselves by saying that maybe this was just her sciatica acting up. However, a third routine follow-up CT in early summer showed signs that all was not well in Kim’s body. By the time August 2020 hit, and Kim was sliding for the fifth time into a PET/CT Scanner, it had already been confirmed through x-rays, CT’s, and bloodwork, not to mention the increasing pain Kim was in, that the cancer was back. On the day of her fifth and final scan, we felt utterly defeated.     
 
Kim had made up her mind, already at the end of 2018,  that she was done with chemo. By the time of her scan in August 2020, we also knew that any further surgery was not an option. The surgeons had performed all the heroics they could for Kim.  This fifth scan was therefore not so much a first step in making treatment decisions as a final step in helping Kim make her final decision. The one time we did not want this most definitive scan to spit out its report, it did so nonetheless. This final PET/CT Scan showed that the cancer had spread throughout much of Kim’s body–abdomen, lungs, groin, and back. It showed it pushing up against the nerves in her back and also against her digestive tract. Our oncologist did her job, gave us trial treatment options, but we knew what the scan said.
With the help of that final PET/CT Scan, Kim decided that her time on this earth was now coming to an end. She opted out of any further treatment.
 
PET/CT Scanners are the best we have in imaging technology. These scanners provide answers in the midst of confusion, as we experienced early on with Kim’s cancer in 2016, when we had to make important decisions about her treatment regimen, and to get a baseline idea of where her cancer was. Her second scan, in 2018, told us that Kim had to get back on chemo to give her the best chance at surgery and a potentially healthy future. The scans provide comfort and assurance that treatment is working, as we experienced in Sept. 2018, and that next steps on the path to treating the cancer can be considered. These scans provide a roadmap for surgeons, pinpointing where and how to operate. And in the end, they can help make that most important final decision. We had gathered all the information possible, and though it hurt, it helped us make the right decision to cease further treatment.

Throughout Kim’s cancer journey, though we were usually reeling and heartbroken whenever Kim had a scan, we were also incredibly thankful for them. They spit out very difficult information to process, but truly valuable information we needed to go forward at each juncture of her journey. And even that last scan, as difficult and final as the results were, we were able to nod and accept them with a measure of peace. We had done everything we could, Kim had fought the good fight, and now the scan showed that the time had come to truly focus on what mattered most in life: Faith, Hope, and most important, Love.

Thank you for joining us on this fundraising journey.