(mostly written yesterday, about this time of day)
This will be a bit more personal of an endeavor than I ordinarily post. Quite a bit more so, I suppose.
I just dropped my wife off to have an endoscopy done. She's somewhere in the "GI Associates" building there. I was required to wait in the parking lot due to COVID-19.
It's been a long journey to here, five years. Although she felt great then, yellowed eyes and a pasty, jaundiced skin were a red flag. A CT scan at the ER revealed "a mass." Those are not words you really want to hear from a doctor. An endoscopy showed a tumor blocking the bile duct. The tumor was damming up the duct, hence, the yellow bile was backing up into her bloodstream. She was diagnosed with duodenal cancer.
She had a "Whipple." We'd never heard of a Whipple, but we know all about it now. It's quite an operation. And, we learned a whole lot more about how humans work inside over the past five years. A little evidence emerged to us while watching Jeopardy one evening. The category was "internal organs," or something like that. My wife and I both just jammed every one of those questions. We correctly got them quickly and easily. We'd also learned about CT scans (AKA, CAT scans) and how they are quick and easy because they are essentially black-and-white X-rays in 3D, about PET scans which require some radioactive tracer gunk to be injected into your bloodstream via IV and how "hotspots" of activity light up on a computer screen. We learned about da Vinci Surgical robotic devices and the amazing things they can do like avoiding a large 10 inch+? incision during a traditional Whipple (and we got to play with a da Vinci device ourselves at a health fair).
In a Whipple, we'd learned about the pancreas (how it both creates insulin to regulation blood sugar and how it helps with digestion), the bile duct from the liver to small intestines, the gallbladder, the artery that supplies blood the pancreas and small intestines, the duodenum, the stomach. And we learned how during a Whipple operation most of those things are severed, or severed and removed, and then rerouted and hot-wired back together in a non-natural fashion, yet one that still works. We learned about chemotherapy. We'd learned way too much the hard way, by way of the Whipple procedure.
In recovering from cancer, there are milestones that you cross and quietly celebrate.
This endoscopy is being done as a double double-check. The five year PET scan a few weeks ago "lit up" in the large intestine. PET scans are in full color. Yellow and red means bad. Actually, it means "activity," which is another word for "worry." The surgeon suspected a false positive, but wanted assurance. So, here we are.
Today, what I really wanted to go over was four letters. Actually, it was four words that just kept recurring to us. I got where I just shortened them down to the first four beginning letters: FBSS.
The four words are: faithful, brave, strong and stubborn.
Faithful
My wife and I are both Christians. Going through a situation like this really makes you look at your faith. I guess this type of thing either strengthens your faith or maybe it weakens one's faith. Thankfully, this has strengthened our faith and we just understand that things are in God's hands and he works the good for us all the time, even though a lot of times it's very hard for us to see this. That's why it's called faith...confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Brave
The B is for brave. When you go into an operation or procedure, like my wife going through right now, you have to be brave. You have to clench your fists a little bit and go after it. That's hard to do. Which brings us back to the first letter. It's hard to be brave when you're put under and you're totally out-of-control. Before you go under, you have to be faithful that God is indeed working the best for us--through the doctors and assistants--and that he's holding onto and bearing us up while we cannot. That takes bravery and faith.
Strong
The first S is strong. You've got to be strong when you are going through the recovery, both physically and emotionally. You've got to be strong to go through occupational therapy and physical therapy. Especially, you've got to be able to grit your teeth and push, even though you feel weak and it hurts. You've got to just fight through it.The old adage "no pain, no gain" is at work here. And, when a setback occurs, you've got to summon the strength emotionally deal with the setback, set a new next-step, then move forward yet again. Though you're weak, you have to muster strength.
Stubborn
And the last word is stubborn. This word may seem out of place, but it kept stubbornly coming back up anyway. The ordeal is not easy and you get a lot of information, from a lot of doctors and nurses and healthcare workers, and you've got to kind of stand up for yourself sometimes. You can, and should, take other people's words, they're the pros after all. But, listen to your own body and stick up for yourself when needed and stubbornly speak out, question, and stand up for yourself when you have to. Being stubborn also kind of goes to earlier words...when you're feeling not very strong at all, you've got to stubbornly keep pushing to do the physical therapy for instance. When you're scared of the next procedure, or concerned to hear the next results from the last test, you've got to stubbornly buck up and press on.
Those four words just kept coming back to us, one, then another, then looping back and meshing with and interacting with the others.
I started writing this yesterday, while my wife was having the procedure done, and am finishing today. The results of the procedure? "Everything looks perfect," were the doctors words!
Those four letters and those four words have helped us. Maybe these words will help somebody else, somewhere along the road too.
