#RoundOne

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?   It was January 2004…..ok, I kid.  This WAS when I first put the moves on John.   He told the story differently, but if, “I’m going home, are you coming with me?” isn’t the greatest pickup line ever, I don’t know what is!  (Sorry, Mom!)  I feel like for people to get the full concept of where I am in life, I need to start from the beginning, and go through each round of the big C, and I will try to give the Reader’s Digest version.  John’s diagnosis wasn’t easy.  It started with a cough that wouldn’t go away in the Fall of 2012.  He was prescribed antibiotics for walking pneumonia, and then a CT was ordered.   We should have known something was up when he missed a call from OSF only hours after his scan.  His family Dr called him the next morning (yes, the DOCTOR, not the nurse) and said “worst case scenario” this could be lymphoma.  We saw a pulmonologist, Dr W…who is AMAZING, and he did a brochoscopy to get some biopsies of the enlarged nodes in John’s lungs.  When I say amazing, I mean we pushed off the procedure for two days because we were headed to a Dave concert…… and sure as shit he played Dave in the procedure room as he was put under!!   While all of this was happening with John, I had a few issues myself.   I ended up with an MRI of my BRAIN (yes, there’s one in there), and was put on medication to reduce my prolactin levels, as well as meds for PCOS.  Yeah, we have this trend of having more than one thing happening at a time.  At any rate, we ended up at the oncologists office, a few biopsies later, samples sent to Mayo clinic and with a final Stage IV diagnosis and chemo started on January 31, 2013.  I have this thing with dates……..I just remember them for some reason.  I wasn’t at the clinic with him when his treatment started.  He called me as they were preparing to start the drugs.  We had to have a difficult conversation, as the nurse had informed him that this drug could potentially sterilize him.   We could have delayed treatment, but made the decision to proceed since he was literally coughing about 45 minutes out of every hour at this point.  Yeah, try watching TV with that going on!  We didn’t know at the time, but we became the most favorite patients of this nurse…..and she quickly became one of our favorites too!

John took these rounds of chemo like a champ!  Six rounds of RCHOP and we should have been done, but after round 4 he ended up in the hospital for 8 days.  On the second or third day, the Boston Marathon bombing happened.   He had nothing better to do than watch TV, and we joked that he could have had the case solved just by watching the media!  He ended up having some treatments with a friends mom, who also had lymphoma.  I can still hear their conversation clear as day, “Man, chemo farts are the worst!” to which John replied, “I thought it was just all this Mexican food we have been eating”   While I HATED every second of John being sick, I was so happy to know he had someone to talk to about his treatment, who knew exactly how he felt.  In fact, every time he was sick, we knew someone who was also going through treatment.  July 8, 2013, we got the “complete response” news.  Ya see, with lymphomas, the word remission isn’t used until you are cancer free for 5 years.  (sidenote, lymphomas and leukemias are staged differently than other cancers!)   At any rate, we celebrated that complete response with a party with family and friends, and said Peace out Lymphoma, see you never!

In celebration of John being healthy, we took a few trips to Tennessee and hung out with great friends.  We went to the Grand Ole Opry, toured Jack Daniels, and shut down Nashville!!  A month or so later we were in Memphis, drinking on Beale St, and touring Graceland.  We were thankful.  We never enjoyed our time together more.  We learned during Round One that we have awesome friends and family.  We learned that only you, (or perhaps your nagging spouse) knows your body the best, and if something isn’t “normal”, freaking get it checked out!   Cancer didn’t define us, it didn’t keep us trapped in the house. (we had to get all that mexican food from somewhere!)  It taught us that you have to put one foot in front of the other, and make it work!  We stayed in the couple of days after treatment, and then resumed normal activities until the next appointment  More than anything, we learned we had to Just keep livin’.  Maybe I use it too much… but it’s more than a movie quote to me.  Yes, people, its a line from Dazed and Confused!!  When I met John, he had JKLIVIN on his license plates…..it resonated with him LONG before cancer.   It just became our motto because that’s all we knew how to do!   And there ya have it…. Round One.