Our cancer journey

It's been almost 2 months to the day since I had my seizure and I learned I had a brain tumor. These past two months have been, in a word, frustrating. Don't get me wrong, there has been so much good and so much love directed our way, but that's not what I want to talk about. Perhaps I'm giving into base instincts by venting my frustrations, but they have to go somewhere. I can't keep them inside any more. It's just after midnight and I'm sitting alone on our living room couch, literally seething with frustration and a host of other emotions, but frustration seems to trump them all.  Lindsay's last blog post detailed the status of my medical journey, so I won't belabor the details here (to spell them out in more detail would only frustrate me further). Suffice it to say that 2 months after my diagnosis, I still do not have a surgery date. I likely won't have surgery until January, when I can upgrade my insurance to a plan that covers neurosurgery...

 The human mind is impressively capable of erecting walls. These past few weeks, we have been able to mostly ignore what is happening and return to a routine of cooking, picking up children, working, reading, sleeping, etc. Then, last week, sitting in the neuro-oncologist's office at DFCI, we were again reminded of the futility of ignorance. He said, "If you do nothing, the tumor will eventually affect your ability to speak and move the right side of your body." And just that sentence, being reminded of the inability of walls to actually enact change, brought us out of the numbness of routine and back into the unpleasant reality we are actually living in.  I have realized that I am a control freak. I get very anxious if I don't feel in control of my life. A tumor is the essence of loss of control. I was relishing the calmness of control over small moments- cleaning the living room, planning a data analysis. However, it was merely a dream. We cannot ignore this. We can...