Cancer Picked the Wrong Butt

My dear friends, Kjersta and Byron, have the most amazing children. Their second oldest, Kat, gave a talk in church today, just after our own Natalie's amazing talk on faith. In the talk, Kat shared times when she felt the heavens were closed to her, including trying to sort through her husband's bonkers immigration issues and his father's terminal illness. While she spoke, I kept thinking about times I have felt the heavens were closed to me, like my whole "Where are our blessings?!" thing.  And then, as though struck by a rod of lightning, it hit me: Throughout Bear's diagnosis and treatment, I have consistently felt the heavens wide open and pouring blessings out upon us. I almost burst into tears right there in our pew as I realized what an incredibly miraculous journey this has all been, full of love and light and soooo much faith.  In 2015, Elder James Hamula gave a devotional at BYU-Idaho called "The Heavens are Opened," in which he shared doc...

After complaining to our friend, Jackie, at 12:45 p.m. about feeling like we were being put off regarding Bear's IV chemo port placement, we are now set for launch in less than a week! THAT IS CRAZY!!! With the holidays, they had said it would be "several weeks" after finishing oral chemo, which was frustrating. Oral chemo ends December 5 and having to wait till January felt scary. We are ECSTATIC it has been moved up!  The downside is that Mallory and Elisabeth will be arriving in the wee hours of the morning the port goes in. I feel guilty because we miss them sooooo much, their time here is so short, and this will take time away from them. But it just doesn't make sense to put it off literally more than a month. Bear says he is a trooper and will bounce right back to hang with us. Fingers crossed he's right!!! Anxiety has already kicked in about all that needs to be done before then. The house is a mess, the yard is a wreck, everyone is coming into town next we...

I feel like half of my journal entry titles are along the lines of: "Time flies!" "Haven't written in a while!" "Where does the time go?!"  But truly! I think of journaling probably every day, but am always so busy and distracted. Then, when I come here to post and see the last entry was October 25th... That's almost three weeks ago!!! What in the WHAT?!  I am having a heavy cancer day today. I'm not sure I can adequately articulate why or if I even actually KNOW why... We are SO fortunate Bear has not yet experienced any side effects AT ALL! Last week, the doctors were literally SHOCKED he was still working. Dr. Lin even faked kind of falling/jumping out of his chair towards us, so you can imagine the reaction a week later! We know chemo and radiation can both take some time to build up, but to be on day 13 of treatment without even the slightest twinge of pain or nausea or irritation is nothing short of a miracle, especially with his DPD diag...

It's crazy to think it's barely been a week since I last wrote anything, because it feels again like I've lived a lifetime since then. I still need to catch up on telling Norah and Ryan, my parents, and then the awful task of telling all of the kids.  Today was an early and crazy day of soccer games for Natalie, Cubby, and Ike, then volleyball for Nat. Siobán surprised us by taking a train down from UCLA yesterday, spending six hours on public transportation, and having Lydia pick her up from the train depot. It was a lovely surprise for Bear after such a crappy week.  We also spent last night with our friends, the Perrys. Michelle needed to carve a bunch of pumpkins for our school's Fall Festival being held today, so she said we could come over after school, she'd feed us pizza, and the kids could do the dirty work, haha. I had said we'd bring drinks or dessert or something, but when they found out about Bear's diagnosis, they insisted we just bring ourselv...

Bear had his "mapping" done today to prepare for radiation. It was an 8AM appointment and I had planned to take the little kids to before school care so I could meet Berek at the cancer center. One of the hard parts about not having told anyone anything yet is the lack of understanding or grace in certain situations. Our kids NEVER go to daycare and didn't want to wake up super early to just sit at the school for an hour, and I didn't have a really great reason as to why they'd have to, so they pushed back about it. Needless to say, I didn't make it to the appointment in time (especially because it only took 20 minutes!) and I was crushed to not be there to support Bear, even though he said it was fine. I still continued on my route, thinking I would drive to his work and surprise him with a hug when he made it back to his office, but he mentioned something about having set up a mock crash scene for his AI class earlier this morning. I told him my plan to meet...

...and they don't stop coming. It feels like every time we accept news and adjust our mindset, the goalpost gets moved farther and farther away.  September 29 - You have colon cancer. October 4 - It's spread to your lymph nodes. October 9 - JK, it's rectal cancer, but just Stage I or Stage II. October 13 - It's actually worse than initial reports indicated, probably Stage III.  October 14 - No, really, it's even worse. Stage III-C, T3N2b.  October 15 - Oh, and it's MSS, not MSI, so it's immunotherapy-resistant, when this cancer responds well to immunotherapy.  For the love of all that is holy, can we just slow it down a bit, people?! We went from 90-95% five-year survival rate the first day to now something ridiculous like 10-15% of 30-50% of 60-70%. There are so many little factors that even the cancer survivor calculators (yes, that's a thing and yes, I use them often) can't figure the math (are we at 1.8-5.2%?! I can't tell!).  My poor, poor b...