The call came early on a June Wednesday, one of those mornings when the sunshine beams through the slats in our window shades. We were both still in bed. I could hear the modulation in David's voice, the note of surprise as he rose from between the sheets to continue the conversation in the hallway. Perhaps this made the dialogue more businesslike. After knowing one another for forty-three years, he certainly wasn't hiding this news from me. The cells were malignant but slow growing yet they had a lot of volume.
As a precaution, he had had the prostate biopsy eight days earlier. He insisted on driving himself to and from this uncomfortable test and had not given it a second thought. Even though his PSA (prostate specific antigen) level in his blood was elevated, he had no other symptoms. I don't know why I had a sense of foreboding.
We showered, made coffee and readied ourselves for the day. David went to his office while I took Miriam to music class. Gratefully I focused my attention on dancing and singing with my granddaughter. I pushed her in her stroller back to my house. I could hear Jess and her boys tossing a ball in the yard. As she unlatched the gate to greet us, I couldn't hide what I knew. "Dad, cancer?" Now it was out as it should have been. David and I talked with our other children and made an appointment with his urologist to start to figure out what this all meant.
Setting up homes and raising children, we have always been a good team. I bought myself a small black notebook that could fit easily inside my purse. David and I clicked into overdrive as we met with surgeons, medical oncologists and radiation oncologists. Carefully I jotted down notes at each meeting. We became well informed about the disease and its various treatment options. Our sources were doctors, their articles in medical journals and one book in particular written by a world-renowned specialist. The details of David's case pointed toward surgery done in the traditional "open" way as opposed to the newer robotic method.
It's hard to be private about your life when your face is strained from the long hours spent driving your husband to consultations, body scans and MRI's. Slowly it became easier for us to limit our social contact to a short list of people who wouldn't mention the prostate information they had gleaned from the internet or clamor to tell us about their second cousin once removed who was convinced that radiation was the best and the least risky choice.
I poured my nervous energy into ironing my husband's linen shirts, a simple task that yielded concrete results. Cooking nutritious meals consumed me. I believed that his body would recover better if he ate roasted organic chicken stuffed with quartered apples and herbs snipped from our garden or seared halibut resting on a bed of greens with sautéed sweet onions, yellow peppers and sliced radishes. We cuddled, never asking ourselves "Why us?" We felt lucky that he had a form of cancer that could be managed.
As the surgery date approached, in the middle of the night I began to pace the house, my thoughts frozen at the instant when I'd have to kiss my husband and leave him with the anesthesiologist and the surgeon. My children insisted that they would be with me, as did my sister-in-law. They all became my precious on the ground team, fielding cell voice messages and e-mails.
Jess and Aron brought me coffee and pastry, the Danish stuffed with raspberry preserves that I used to devour when they were small and I wasn't counting calories. In the recovery room, we could visit, one by one. After Jason stayed with his dad for a bit, I took another turn. Soon David requested his daughter-in-law, Cecily. "Don't I have another daughter here?" He wondered. A nurse looked at me and said, "You have many blessings."
