When Blaine was diagnosed, he was in Swift Current in the doctor’s office and I was at work. Blaine was having lunch with his brother and sisters when he got the call. The doctor wanted someone there and so Blaine put me on speaker phone for the meeting. I remember exactly where I was standing and what I wrote my notes on when I got the call. I also remember my reaction. The news was not great and part of me didn’t want to believe it could be true. Yet in my heart I knew that the doctor wasn’t telling us this on a whim. I actually thought Blaine had a hernia or something. I never thought for a minute it would be cancer and so it came as such a shock.
I remember packing up my things and heading for home. I remember calling Blaine and talking to him as he drove home until he got to the place where there was no service and then painstakingly waiting for his arrival.
Blaine and I had been through some things together for sure. There were many moments where we faced adversity together but this one was bigger than we could have ever imagined. Our first instinct was always to go walking. We would walk down the road and back. We would talk things over and come up with some kind of solution for our plight and we would feel better. There were not many solutions for this one though. I remember saying as we walked something like, “Well these doctors don’t know us and how we work together and so we aren’t going to let what they say determine the outcome.” I also knew I did not want to live without Blaine. The thought of that was just too much to imagine. Blaine also took a positive outlook right from the start. We had a plan and we were following it step by step.
Meeting with the oncologist was stressful. We decided we didn’t want to know the time lines that went with his prognosis. I still think that was a good choice. I always felt that was just a self fulfilling prophecy to know about how long the doctors predict you might survive the illness. We knew that chemotherapy would buy us time and we knew time is what we wanted. Time to come up with a plan for healing.
Now some people would say that there is such a thing as false hope. That you should face facts. I believe there is always hope and to deny someone that hope is wrong. Miracles do happen and there are lots of stories of cancer survivors that defy the odds. One of the books I had ordered was by an author from Alberta named Kristie Anne Mah. Her husband healed from pancreatic cancer. I also found cases online where patients had made complete recoveries from stage 4 cancer. This is what we held on to. It was still the best decision we made. Right until the end, we never gave up hope and in my opinion there was nothing wrong with that.
We never did get to meet the oncologist in person. With Covid it wasn’t possible. The first appointment was like a zoom meeting and then after that there were phone calls. When I think back on the way that all happened it was so impersonal. I believe our oncologist was a caring individual but the system was broken. Just another of the effects of the pandemic. Sure there was an effort made to share all the information and answer any questions we had but in the end there was just a voice on the other end and he relied on our verbal description of how Blaine was doing to guide the treatment rather than a physical examination. Sure it saved us some miles but it also made things difficult as time went on and especially in those final days.
This was the beginning of a long, arduous and challenging journey. One that no one wants to ever think about. Hope got us through. Do you believe in miracles? I still do.
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