The hits keep coming...

...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 babies. I told Bear I'd normally feel the worst for him, but my heart breaks for our children and how they're going to take the news. He's a close second, though! I just can't stop crying as we discuss how and when to tell the kids and our parents. I want to go back in time or at least fast-forward through all of this and know everything will be alright. 

A good part of the day was getting to go out to "lunch" (at 10AM!) together. Bear should have gone back to teaching his AI class, but we were just shell-shocked yet again and didn't want to part ways just yet. I wish we'd taken a picture together, but I did get a picture of the receipt, ha! Pretty much the same thing, right?! 

After Bear got his diagnosis, we went out to eat, which was the last thing we wanted to do, but he hadn't eaten in almost two days. El Indio, one of my mom's favorite places since I was a kid, was nearby and Bear had somehow never been there before (or even heard of it?!?!). It's why the "cancer tags" in my journal are labeled "El Indio." When I needed to name my master spreadsheet, I knew it couldn't look suspicious to the kids, in case they saw it in the files, and "El Indio" is the first thing that came to mind. It's now the album title with all of the relevant pics and I just use it in place of "CaNcEr" whenever I need to label something or refer to it. 

Anyway, our first time at El Indio, they asked a name for the order and Bear said his name was "Bear." When they called out PIERRE, we didn't pay attention, but they called it a second time and we realized it was our order. It was HILARIOUS to us on such a surreal and sad day. This time, he told the (Mexican and Spanish-speaking!) cashier that his name was "El Oso" (Spanish for "bear") and they put down ALOSO. We about died laughing and had to commemorate it on another really crummy day.