Surgery Day 2016 (Part 2)

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!