Longest week of my life...Michael

I hate that my first post on here is going to take a negative tone, but I wanted to chronicle the first few days from my point of view and then how God and my Jenny changed that.

So my wife and I are watching Sunday Night Football and she tells me, "I have a really weird bump on my thigh, do you think I'm growing  a new muscle?"  So I look at it and my initial thought was that it might be a torn muscle that hemorrhaged.  Although she didn't have any pain that made the most sense to me since she had just had a pretty good leg workout the day before.  

So the next day after going to the family doc and getting no answers we all decided that maybe a trip to the local ER was in order.  Of course I have all sorts of things going through my mind but I felt like everything would be fine, after all it always is right.  So after getting the boys in bed and waiting for her to call, or Kim to text, I finally get a call from Jennifer and she is crying. The only words I really remember her saying are "mass" and "possibly malignant".  After that point I was lost.

So the next day we call the osteo-oncologist that came recommended by the hospital staff and he can get us in 2 hours later.  So we load up and drive to Baylor Hospital in Dallas.  Our doc comes in and says lots of stuff but all I really remember him saying is, "My suspicions are that it is malignant" and he orders a biopsy for two days later.  

So now I'm freaking out.  I spend the next two days learning everything I can about sarcomas (the initial suspected culprit) and trying to find statistics.  Numbers that had been gathered by faceless men, women, and children that came before us.  I wanted to know what our "chances" were.  These are the times when I went to my darkest places.  I was scared for my wife.  I didn't want her to be sick.  I didn't want her to feel bad.  I didn't want her be scared.  And most of all, I didn't want her to not be with us.  I cried a lot and prayed a lot.

Thursday brought the day of the biopsy.  Jennifer and I went early to do all of the paperwork stuff, and our moms and Craig (Lois' rock) came later.  When the Dr. came out to talk to us all I really remember (I seem to zone out a bit don't I) is him saying, "my suspicions are true and it is malignant".  He said that his initial diagnosis would be a sarcoma but pathology would tell us for sure later.  So there we have it, I guess that was the first official diagnosis of cancer.  The next step was a bone scan and CT scan to see if it has gone anywhere else.

It's Monday now and we load up to go do the scans.  Jennifer and I drive back to Baylor and she does all of her scans while I wait and work in the waiting room.  She tried to bat her eyelashes and smile to the lab tech in a lame attempt for results but he wasn't budging.  He's a stronger man than I, I could never tell her no.  So we leave the hospital with a CD of the images and no information at all but we have an appointment on Tuesday with the surgeon to get the results.

That afternoon Jennifer got curious and wanted to see the images so she put them in our computer just to see if she could pull them up.  When she did not only did the images come up but so did the report.  She yelled at me and hung the phone up on her mom she was so excited to see it.  So now we're both reading frantically and I can honestly say I didn't understand one single word of it.  So I ask her what it said and she says she's not sure but it sounded pretty good.  

Finally Tuesday rolls around and we go see the surgeon to get the official results from somebody that actually understands them.  He walks in and says that he has good news and that the cancer had not spread anywhere else.  I can honestly say that was the very best news I had ever been given.  Then the shocker...It's not sarcoma, but lymphoma.  Wow, and with that the entire game changed.  Treatment, doctors that we will see, everything changed with the new results of the biopsy.  So now we are looking at chemo and radiation rather than surgery and radiation, but all-in-all I think that all of the information was very positive.  

Next, we drive home and this is where my entire line of thinking has changed.  My wife, my best friend, my boys mom has just been officially diagnosed with lymphoma.  What do I do for her?  How can I make her feel safe?  I have no idea what to do.  So I ask her what she wants to do after we pick the boys up from school.  Her answer was let's go to the gym.  So we go to the gym and she gets on the elliptical machine.  I warmed up in the cardio section close to her and just watched her.  She was focused, driven, and pretty hot looking if I must be honest.  I finish my warmup  and go start my lifting which is in another part of the gym.  I finish my first two lifts and go check on her.  She's got her iPod rocking and she is kicking that's elliptical machine's butt at this point.  So I go back and keep lifting.  After a couple of more lifts I go back and just peak around the corner and she is still getting after it and by now is sweating up a storm but still looks pretty dang good.  Long story short...I finish my lifting and go check on her and she says she just wants to finish up.  She ends up doing an hour total, on the day that she was diagnosed with lymphoma.  That's when I decided to stop worrying about what might happen to her.  I was looking at her as a victim, but she never did.  I'll never make the mistake to underestimate my wife again.  She is strong, beautiful, smart, determined, and "lumpy" has no idea who he just picked a fight with.