What the hell are you doing, Tim? (pt 2)

This will be a long post and it'll still only go part way towards explaining why I'm doing this little ride. It's taken from my diary written about a week after the hospital visit, just after we got the pathology results from the surgeon. It gives a bit of a re-cap of the last post and goes into what happened afterwards.

2045, Tue 24 Nov 2009

Last night sucked, but nowhere near as much as today did.

A cold front smacked up against the side of the state around 3am and blew its guts out for several hours. I found myself in the kitchen for a while, having a glass of water and watching the trees getting flayed under the mercury vapour glare of the streetlights. Cous Cous kept me company in exchange for a generous handful of cat biscuits.

Back in bed and lying awake, I hear Lauren burst into a fit of giggles in the middle of her dreams. She carries on for about half a minute, dissolving into her weird characteristic whoops before quietening down and sleeping on. I stay resolutely and reluctantly awake, full of fear for tomorrow's pathology results. In daylight, I can, with the assistance of sunshine and antidepressants, foresee a smiling surgeon saying, “All clear!” before we romp off down the street for a celebratory coffee. But at 3am, all I can envisage is a doctor swearing under his breath at a page of pathology notes before asking for Lauren, Carol and me to be shown in for the delivery of bad news.

It's rare for my night time anxiety sessions to be anywhere near the subsequent truth. Reality is usually more boring and less catastrophic. For one shitty, shitty time, today, it was spot on.

Lauren was admitted to St John's private hospital at 7am last Thursday. The intended procedure was a superficial parotidectomy - the removal of a gland in her neck that had become the host to a tumour over the last few years. The parotid thingy (I know now this is the salivary gland) lives up under the jawbone near the front of the ear, so the growth that began there when she was still in high school had only recently made itself known as a small bump under her earlobe. Needle biopsies were taken as a matter of course. The first echoes of her diagnosis came in the results of those, which suggested she was in the 5% of cases where the malignancy of the tumour could not easily be determined. Removal was a necessary precaution.

At the hospital, the friendly and generous nurses gave us an idea of what to expect. Lauren's surgery would take about one and a half hours, two at the most, with an hour afterwards in recovery before being returned to her room. Tension ramped up for Carol and me, waiting in the empty hospital room, every time the nurses stopped by to tell us it would be another hour. Some six hours later, they finally wheeled in a pale and still girl, who paused for effect before offering us a finger-wave as a sign she hadn't yet lost her sense of humour.

Before she returned, the surgeon had stopped by to tell us what was happening. The tumour was larger than they thought, he said, and she'd had some problems with bleeding. It was, however, all taken out as promised; it had just been a more extensive and delicate job than he was expecting.

After two nights inside, Lauren was able to leave the hospital. Her speed of improvement had been remarkable and she even came with me to the wedding reception of close friends only hours after discharge.

At the surgeon's clinic this morning, we were welcomed by the screams of a toddler prevented from navigating the stairs by her mum. Lauren disappeared to have her sutures out and we all came in to admire the extent of her scar. Twelve stitches in total, over a distance of some ten centimetres, joined the front of her ear and an arc under her jaw to the rest of her face. Her left upper lip still drooped, paralysed from some trauma to the facial nerve. Carol clucked happily, impressed by the scale of the wound and the neatness with which it had been concealed. Simon, the surgeon, appeared at the door then and invited us into his office for a, “...little chat.”

The name of the carcinoma escapes all of us who were there, but I won't forget the atmosphere in less than a lifetime. Lauren, leaned forward in her chair, nodded in a show of attention, but her eyes were dull with disbelief and fear. By the time that the three of us had worked out that 'carcinoma' meant 'cancer', we were in a huddle about his desk, clutching each other's arms. The tumour was a rare form of cancer; slow growing, thankfully, but one Simon had never seen before. He explained there was a chance that there were some rogue cells remaining around the tumour site, so Lauren would need radiation therapy to reduce the likelihood of regrowth.

We lasted long enough to pay the bill until we started to cry. The three of us went home and sat stunned for the whole afternoon, not knowing what to do. How on earth are you supposed to plan your afternoon when you've just been told your girlfriend is a cancer patient?