... day 27

Today my wife will be officially halfway with the external radiation and 2/3 (or 4/5, depending on how they decide) done with the chemo. I am relieved and amazed every day that goes by that she is feeling good and upbeat and ready to go.

She has weathered some of the worst of this storm much better than some of us; from the first day I've mostly been so panicked I could barely function. I had to drop several things I was doing and just forget about them. I did not have the capacity for my usual 200-projects-at-a-time. For the most part I didn't know what to do and I wished for the first time in my life that I had a real job. A boring, 9-5, do-it-and-forget-it sort of affair... you know, the kind of thing I hate. I wished someone would just give me a shovel and point at where a ditch needed to be. I tried to complete some projects and mostly failed... anything that required an attention span went right in the shitter.

Without her folks here I'm not sure how this would have gone. They've just been here. In the best possible way. Big stuff and little stuff... like, they just show up and vacuum. That sounds stupid, but how many times in the last month would I have thought to get the vacuum out? Zero - there'd be dog hair up to your knees in here. They came across the country with bats at the ready, ran right at this thing and started swinging. Don't f*ck with her folks. You'll lose.

Anyway... the reason I think we've really made it through some of the worst part isn't because I'm not worried about the future... or I think the side-effects - which are supposed to get worse over the next couple weeks - will magically not get worse. Some of this is behind us because the brachytherapy team on friday took the time and made a real effort to point at clear water ahead; something no one else has done for us... not that they haven't tried (but, at least for me, failed). Yeah, I get it, there are other "possible" outcomes... but now I see the break in the clouds where I couldn't before.

I think Phoebe always did see the break. I had to pretend I did. As a good friend told me "you can't prepare for every eventuality... you just can't. You can't live for the worst-case scenario, because there is ALWAYS a worst-case scenario". Yeah, right? It bothered me that somehow that sentiment seems all glass-half-empty... but it's not. That sums up, more or less, the "human condition" or whatever. I suppose I could get hit by a meteor today. That would suck. I guess I'm not worried about it, but I suddenly understand crazy paranoid people a little better.

Enough rambling. I believe now what she always has - that this will be behind us soon... and I'm back to trying to figure out where the hell all the parts to all these damn projects got to...