The Meltdown

It finally hit him. The Big C, cancer, and when I reached over to touch him the other night, he barked and growled at me like an animal who had been wounded and was in excruciating pain. As if I was the one who had inflicted the blow. What do you want? he said, what do you want. I just want to touch you. C’mon, he said, everyone knows what they want, as if he was prodding me to challenge him to have sex just one more time. It was not a good night. He had done, during the last few days since the test results were revealed, what men are acculturated to do, to suppress the anger, think lightly of it, be cavalier, pretend it isn’t serious, hold it in and be strong. I even began to think, aw, it’s nothing. We talked about who takes out the garbage or unloads the dishwasher, what’s for dinner, how the day went. Life as usual. Then, blam. Crisis. This is REAL. I confess, I was hurt by his outburst of anger, accused him of pulling away from me and disconnecting, and went to the couch to sleep … or at least make an attempt at it. It was a long, not good night.

He’d gotten a phone call from a nurse who delivered the news rather matter-of-factly as she asked to schedule the biopsy appointment for mid-June. Wait a minute, he said to me the next morning, after pouring out tears of fear and sincere apology, I had this test done in March. He sobbed. His body shook. I held him. I listened, stroked his back and kissed his neck. Why was it they were calling me at the end of May when the test was done in March, he said. What happened? What’s going on here? We both know. We work for major medical centers. Patients fall through the cracks. And he wasn’t paying attention. My husband is scared, anxious, wondering how long he will live, what his quality of life will be, whether surgery will be necessary and if it is, knowing that he will be incontinent and lose sexual function. I think this scares him more than it scares me because while sex has always been important to both of us, this diagnosis is more than that. It is about mortality and how much time is really left, how many days, months, years. Is this slow growing or virulent? The anxiety of waiting until July to hear the biopsy result (sorry, we have a practice of not giving that information out over the phone) after we return from vacation. I say, call the doctor and tell him about the time lapse, ask to be seen sooner, take a stand. He does. The doctors says, no worries, take your vacation, your PSA is low and the test is 75% accurate. There’s time to see what’s going on. One has to be a believer in something to live in this world.

So, for both of us, this is really taking a step back and asking, what are the priorities? reflecting on our lives, what we want, how we want to be together as we go through this. I want to say, this isn’t happening to us, it’s some kind of dream. I always was a conflict avoider. But, now I am conscious, more conscious of this relationship, and how much it means to me.