this wasn't supposed to happen

Sid had an endoscopy done last month, something to do with checking his upper GI tract and GERD and stomach lining and blah.  I don't recall the exact reasons why he had the procedure done.  What is important about this endoscopy is that the doctors found something in his duodenum that shouldn't have been there and they biopsied it.

It is cancer.

We found out yesterday that Sid has cancer.  Specifically, follicular lymphoma.

I will never forget the way the air left my lungs when I heard those words.  I will never forget the way I stood there, looking at him, and he had not heard a single word the doctor had said.  "What's that?" he whispered to me, and I was too stunned to work up the breath to respond.  I mouthed back, "cancer."  He cried.  I didn't.  I still haven't.  I don't know if I can.  It doesn't even feel real.

I went to the grocery store today and felt like everyone would be able to see that I was absolutely shattered.  Like, look at this woman pretending to be normal!  Who does she think she's fooling?  I put things in the cart because that's what you do at the grocery store, but I wasn't paying much attention to what I picked up. I tried to remember that Sid had asked me to get ramen, and Spagett wanted dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, and we needed more coffee. And the whole time, I'm inside my own head screaming WHO THE FUCK CARES, SID HAS CANCER.  People asked me how I was doing and I said "fine" because that is what you say when someone asks, but I am not fine.  I am a mess on the inside.  I don't know how I'm supposed to finish my report this weekend and do my take home exam and go to school on Monday like there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

All I know is that this wasn't supposed to happen.  It wasn't supposed to be like this.  But it did, and it is.

DV is fucking disgusting

When I was 17, I had an epiphany.  It came in the guise of my stepfather, who didn't like my attitude while I did homework and he shouted at me over one thing or another, tossing me like a ragdoll into the corner of the living room and tipping the recliner that I had been sitting on over onto me.  He tried to hit me, punch me maybe, I'm not sure which, but I remember he must not have been trying very hard because I had thrown my arms over my head and was blocking the blows.  And my mother.  My mother just stood there and watched this happen.  So did my younger sisters.  I don't blame them for not intervening or calling the cops.  But my mother did nothing.  And afterward, when I confronted her about it, she denied the entire thing had happened, that I had overreacted and blown this small spat way out of proportion.  She tried to make exuses for her husband, when his actions were inexcusable.  She tried to gaslight me.

That was when I realized that my mother would deny, deny, deny this man's actions, and keep making excuses for him, until one day she ended up dead at the wrong end of his temper.

He pulled a gun on her the other day.  He's been keeping a girlfriend in the home he shares with my mother and pulled a gun on my mom when she dared to demand a divorce.  She refuses to leave, refuses to call the cops.  She is still making excuses.

She could have died, and she is still making excuses.

I feel sick.

I knew this was coming.  I've known it for 13 years.  And yet I still feel totally blindsided by all of this.

I suck at blogging

Yea verily, truer words were never spoken.

Holy shitsnacks, I have been BUSY.  My first year of nursing school is done (it was all prerequisites, so hold your applause), but I held onto that 4.0 GPA for both semesters and made the deans list.  I took "advanced algebra with into to trigonometry" and walked in expecting a firing squad.  Would you believe I actually fucking enjoyed that class?  I had people in this last semester's psychology class telling me they'd already earned one degree and this was the hardest class they'd ever taken, EVER, and I had no trouble with it.  I feel like I'm on a roll.  I feel stupid for being so scared for so long, when even though it's a lot of work, it's not as scary and awful as I thought it would be.

Never did manage that half marathon, though.  My longest run was 8 miles and then my heart gave up.  No really, it did.  I woke in the middle of the night with palpitations so bad I thought "this is how i die" and it lasted for the longest fifteen minutes of my life.  I'm ashamed to admit that I wanted to pretend like nothing had happened, but the thought of Spagett finding me dead was enough to motivate me into going to the ER.  No pulmonary embolisms, no heart attack, nothing off on the EKG.  Was referred to a cardiologist.  I love this guy.  I really do.  He's a shit-talking little Indian guy who makes me laugh even though I'm sitting in his office with a fucking heart problem.  I've done a stress test and worn a Holter monitor and taken magnesium supplements because I had low mag, and the general consensus at this point is that I have some kind of arrhythmia, most likely AV node re-entrant tachycardia.  But we are waiting to see what another specialist, an electrophysiologist, thinks.

Oddly enough, even though this is my heart we're talking about, I'm not as freaked out by this as I was by Sid's neck mass (FYI, it was totally a thyroglossal cyst, the surgery went fine and you hardly notice his scar).  At any rate, the cardiologist has me on Toprolol to help with the arrhythmia and I have noticed a huge difference.  The side effects are kind of wonky: I have headaches a lot, and not the kind you normally think of as a headache, but an "oh my god, everything is going to hit me in the head" kind of headache.  And the weird-ass dreams I have on this medicine are sometimes goddamn terrifying.  I wake up like "oh thank fuck that was just a dream..." quite often now.  Even though the idea of undergoing an ablation procedure to treat the arrhythmia scares the shit out of me, I think that, long term, it would be a better option than this medication.  I will do it if I am offered the option.

I've been told "gentle cardio only" so no interval training, no massive jumps in mileage.  I run 2 miles sometimes 3 times a week and do a "long run" if it's not hot as balls.  By long run, I mean 3-4 miles.  It's whatever.  I'm just glad I didn't have to stop running entirely.

But, swear to shit, someday I'm fucking running that half.

edit:  I totally forgot to mention the (to me) worst part of this whole arrhythmia thing.  The wooooooorst.  Coffee.  I had to give up caffeine.  Oh yeah.  Yeah, it was not pleasant.  However, I like feeling like I'm not dying, and I like not having to deal with coffee headaches, so overall it was a good thing.  I drink a bottle of water in the mornings instead of coffee: I tried tea but I felt like it was a weak replacement.
All or nothing, baby!  I've adjusted, and I treat myself to decaf coffee or regular tea if I feel like I need a pick-me-up, but usually it's just water for me.  How blah!  Why starky, I do believe you are becoming a bore!

confession

I am struggling.

My first semester of nursing school is coming to a close, and I have straight A's.  That's not the problem.

It's everything else that's the problem.

I think that Spagett has ADHD.

I can't deal with him.  I can't.  I can't mediate between him and Sid any longer.  I feel like I'm losing my mind.  I can't deal with being forced to side with my husband or my child in this bullshit drama that has become our home life.  I can't.

And yet, what choice do I have?

When the time outs have not worked, and neither have the spankings, and Spagett is throwing toys at my head because THAT is his definition of "playing with toys", when you tell him to play quietly and he starts throwing things at the ceiling fan, because hey, it's quiet, isn't it?  When it's mid afternoon and you can see his body is in need of rest and yet he can't lay still long enough to allow himself to nap, when it's midnight and he's still awake because he literally cannot stop running around and we have to be up at 7 am, but if you just lock him in his room and try to go to sleep yourself, he's going to tear everything apart and scream so loud that the whole neighborhood will hear...

What choice do I have?

When Sid has checked out, and all his contributions to the problem involve screaming "shut the fuck up, go away," what fucking choice do I as Spagett's mother HAVE?!

This is not what I wanted for my little boy.  This is not what I wanted for Sid and I as parents.  I feel like somewhere along the way, I have done something wrong, I have made a bad decision, and now every single one of us is paying the price.

So yeah.  Seriously, what do I do?  What choice do I have when I'm the only one left to handle the problem and I've been slogging away at school work for goddamn hours and I still have homework to do, and laundry and dishes, and everyone still needs dinner, and here's my kid who doesn't give a shit how many times you punish him for throwing things and climbing all over the furniture, he's just going to keep right the fuck on doing it, what the FUCK am I supposed to do?

sweet relief and a zombie run

While we still don't have solid answers, the MRI results are in and the doctors are saying the mass in Sid's neck is most likely not cancer, but a benign thyroglossal cyst.  While it will require surgery, from what I understand, it's a fairly simple procedure with minimal scarring, and the likelihood of it coming back is fairly small.  Sid also does not have MS, but a cervical osteophyte: in layman's terms, he's got a bone spur in his neck.  We are so relieved.  I can't even tell you how it feels to not have the weight of that worry constantly bogging me down.

So I ran my zombie race on Saturday unburdened by personal bullshit!  I actually didn't run much of it at all, the ground was way too rocky, uneven, and muddy.  The times I was running, I was full out sprinting and trying not to slip and fall.  I pulled something in my right ankle, which I totally didn't even feel until after the race was over, and my back got wrenched pretty well when I did some hard twists trying to keep my balance in the slick clay mud.  Overall, I enjoyed the shit out of that race and definitely intend to come back again next year.  It was worth every fucking penny: I had the time of my goddamn life out there, belly crawling through stinky mud, getting shocked, and crawling through mucky water up to my neck.  Dirty as hell at the finish, but so much fun.

being brave

The Mansons are facing some tough times right now.  Sid has a mass on his voice box, and is about to undergo testing to figure out if it's cancer.  His doctor is also testing him for Multiple Sclerosis, after years of weirdness.

Maybe it's not cancer (but maybe it is).  Maybe it's only benign nodules (but maybe it's not).  Maybe it's not MS (but maybe it is).  We'll have answers soon enough, and I think knowing has got to be so much less scary than this uncertainty.  I can't speak for Sid, but I know I'm going about my daily business feeling like I'm waiting to be hung: the noose is around my neck, and I know the floor is about to drop out from under me, but I don't know when.

Right now, running is what is keeping me sane.  What I've learned while outside sweating and plodding are keeping me from losing myself in anxiety, and until now, I had no idea there was anything at all to learn from putting one foot in front of the other, but that itself is the lesson: all you can do is put one foot in front of the other.  Keep moving, and eventually, it will be over.  It feels like it will last forever, but it ends.  It will end.

Plus, The Zone.  Oh, The Zone.  Fuck a runner's high, The Zone is where it's at.  There's nothing at all but the silence.  Nothing else.  No worries, no doubts, no voice in your head telling you shit you don't want to hear.  Just the rhythm of your breathing and your feet on the pavement.  I call it my brutal meditation, and it is glorious.

Sometimes I have to remind myself, I am doing this.  I am running, I am going to nursing school, I am going to sit in the waiting room while Sid has his surgery and wait to hear what the doctors say.  I am doing it.  I am brave, I am strong, I am doing this.

And it helps.

big changes at Manson Homestead IV

No, I'm not pregnant.  Good lord, perish the thought.

I'm starting nursing school in September.  This is a big deal!  HUGE!  This is something I have wanted to do for ages and couldn't work up the courage to go through with.  Because, you know, it would be difficult.  And maybe I wouldn't be good at it.  Just trust me when I say there were myriad reasons why I constantly talked myself out of taking the big step and actually applying.  And every single one of them was my anxiety talking.

The fact that I recognized it and talked myself out of being afraid is another big deal.  Because lets face it, I am a huge ball of worry.  I don't have full blown anxiety attacks anymore, but I still manage to give myself palpitations over silly shit.  In this instance, I had an epiphany.  There really is no other way to describe it.  I realized that I was letting my fear rule me.  I was letting my fear dictate the course that the rest of my life would take.  And goddamn if I didn't sit down that very day and apply to nursing school, because you know what?  Fuck that.

Another thing I went ahead and did even though the thought made me vaguely nauseated is sign up for a Run For Your Lives race.  I'm gonna be chased by zombies!  On an obstacle course!  A couple of my friends have done it and said it was a blast, and I have planned on doing one for ages but never did because Landwhale.  Fuck that, too.  I've lost 15 pounds, I'm lighter than I was when I got pregnant with Spagett, and I'm in way better shape.  Still slow as fuck, but getting better.  I'm training for a half marathon, for gods sake, I can handle a good ol' fashioned apocalypse.