HOOTERS® Is Not The Name Of An All Women Brass Band…

There are people who feel that breast cancer gets too much attention.

Intellectually, I suppose I can just barely understand their whine…sorry…concern. (http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/04/are_all_cancers) While the comments on this blog are almost exclusively from women and the one male works in a hospital with cancer patients, it sounds almost…trivial in its arguments. And it may in fact either ignore or not understand how profoundly breast cancer attacks not only women, but the men who adore them. At least in the US.

In the land of HOOTERS® “family restaurants”, the annual over-a-million-issue sale of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s Swimsuit Issue, the worship of the Empire of Hefner as a gateway drug for virtually every male porn addiction on the planet – you wonder why an attack on the breast by a nearly invisible disease provokes a powerful response?

I confess that while I knew about breast cancer and cheered on various and sundry survivors, the disease was a distant concern. Years ago, Liz’ diagnosis with Type 2 Diabetes launched me on first the Diabetes Walk and then the Tour de Cure against Diabetes – my son, Josh and his wife will continue the tradition this year as a team of at LEAST two! But now, of course, my focus shifts. Why?

Because breast cancer has become personal to me, and horrible, and disfiguring in a way that diabetes never was. It strikes not only at the very heart of femininity, but at the very heart of the masculine response to femininity as well. But these people with their “breast cancer gets too much attention” concerns miss the point – as I did at first.

Breast cancer is a sort of gateway condition through which much more horrible forms of cancer can enter the human body. Lung cancer. Brain cancer. Bone cancer. Blood cancer. A good friend of mine and his wife just received a monstrous fright – they thought she might have a brain tumor. She didn’t, but bone cancer has been confirmed. Another friend died from a brain tumor many years ago. Still others fear lung cancer (which killed my mother-in-law), leukemia (the young son of some dear friends recently beat this curse). Of COURSE not all of them are a result of breast cancer; they represent a dark spectre that hangs over the 21^st Century. But a breast cancer cure might easily lead to a cure for other kinds of cancer – it’s called “NASA spin off”. In the old days, NASA would invent something for one purpose and then someone would find another use for it: working with NASA to prevent vibration in rocket launches and aircraft, Bill Kauman left NASA and started his own helicopter company...that hit hard times and eventually birthed the Ovation Guitar Company. Weird, but true.

Who knows what we’ll find as we seek a cure for breast cancer? Will a colorectal cancer cure be far behind? We don’t know WHAT will happen once we strike up a real band to march against breast cancer!

NASA spin offs:http://books.google.com/books?id=imGL0f6T-iAC&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=NASA+spinoff,+musical+instruments&source=bl&ots=raeQWjzdFY&sig=ZkIokbe5GgyLJpEJR7Tp5EWpVyA&hl=en&ei=zrCtTcvPOobG0QGMzPG7Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Image: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images04/music_man_crop.JPG

POTHOLES – No Noble Journey Here…

I read a lot of the cancer books, websites, commentary and fund raising sites and people talk about their breast cancer “journey”.

I live in a major metropolitan area, and except for college trips last year to Mankato, I haven’t really been out of Minneapolis much in the past three years. I used to travel all the time – taking real journeys to Hawaii, Canada, Haiti, Nigeria, Liberia, England, Cameroon and other places inside of those countries. Used to travel more in the US – Michigan, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Iowa.

I don’t go many places any more. My journeys have been mind journeys only. And now I’m supposed to be on some noble journey from breast cancer terror to breast cancer (caregiver) survivor.

Pardon me but I don’t feel particularly noble…rather than the Yellow Brick Road, I feel like I’m on a Minneapolis side road; like, say, Washington Ave around West Broadway, spring 2011. THAT road is so full of deep potholes that I actually saw a car on the side of the street with a broken strut.

THAT is the road I am on; no noble YBR leading to freedom. No straight and narrow. A Minneapolis side road full of spring potholes that threaten to smash me into pieces. A pothole that might drop me into oblivion…one of things I’ve felt lately is that there seems to be little…attention…for me. I don’t want to bask. Just have people ask what I’m doing – not “how” I’m doing in relation to my wife; just “How ya doin’, dude?”

I remember something like this happening to Liz when the kids were born. Everyone clustered around the adorable baby. No one noticed the adorable mom. No one asked how the mom was NOT IN RELATION TO how the baby was. It’s hard to get used to.

I can get used to it. I just sometimes feel really, really close to the edge of that monster pothole.

This was a REALLY useful site when reading the official pathology report:

http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/types/dcis/diagnosis.jsp

image: http://blog.silive.com/latest_news/2009/03/medium_03-13-staten-island-pothole.jpg

Unfair Spring and High Dives

Spring has sprung! Snow banks are melting; the robins are back; the pothole fixing crews are out (more on that later!); baseball teams are running laps around the school track and people who haven’t shown a bare ankle since November are bare to the kneecap with sparkle painted toenails.

I don’t get it.

Not at all.

The calendar says April, but my insides say, “Sleet in late December with dark clouds on the horizon, turning to snow with winds gusting to sixty miles-per-hour, temperatures plunging to record lows after that, and expect radioactive fallout as well...”The Reaper is Grim, indeed and anyone who says anything about cancer makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Used to be only the demons could do that.

Nothing in my world is the same and never will be again. Yet the world outside of me continues on as it has always gone. People drive to work, potholes get fixed, students have problems, transcripts get mailed, summer school beckons, camping trips once planned have to be reconsidered.

Nothing has changed outside of me. Everything has changed inside. My stomach hurts all the time. I don’t give 100% at work for, honestly, the first time in my life. I forget about breast cancer for a moment while I’m watching a movie, reading a book or changing the kitty litter and then suddenly I remember – Liz has breast cancer.

I feel dizzy for a second, almost like the time I first did a “real” dive off the high dive at the city pool. Olympic sized, it was long and the tank under the high dive was 18 feet deep. I’d jumped from that height when I was younger, but after spending a summer practicing jackknives off a low board and doing not-too-badly, I decided to try a real, forward dive off the board. Not a “run from the ladder to the end of the board and jump” kind of dive.

A step to the edge, bounce once, bounce twice, let the board propel you up, bend at the waist, kick and plummet. It sounds easy, but my pulse was hammering in my ears for the tenth of a second it took for gravity to pull me to the water’s surface. I cut it cleanly, faster than I’d ever passed through water before. I came up jubilant.

Then I came to my senses and ‘bout peed my pants (or in the pool, as the case may be) as the memory of standing a million miles above the water rushed back…

That’s what it’s like when I remember that Liz has breast cancer.

That’s when I briefly, for a tenth of a second, feel like I’m in free fall and a force as great as gravity is dragging me down. That’s when I’m glad I can grab hold of my Lord. That’s when I think I just might make it, cut the surface cleanly and come back up to breathe.

How the doctors see breast cancer – in simple language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_classification

image: http://flagpole.com/images/jpgs/2010/09/22/RecRev-NuclearSpring.jpg

Observations of a Breast Cancer Husband

I wanted to use a blog title that was simple and would pop up on a normal GOOGLE search, but “Breast Cancer Husband” was already taken (http://www.breastcancerhusband.com/). So was “Stand By Her” (http://standbyher.org/). I went to those sites, but one has been corrupted by endless spam and the other has been inactive for nearly a year. Another I tried seems full of advertising and another still was a long advertisement for an exercise program developed by a breast cancer husbands’ wife.

So here I am, because I need someone to talk to RIGHT NOW and I want to talk to other husbands, fiancés, and lovers of women with breast cancer.

Our journey is only two weeks old. While my wife Liz knew something was seriously wrong inside of her body, I was clueless. Until two weeks ago, a biopsy at the Breast Health Center at Regions Hospital in Minnesota (http://www.regionshospital.com/rh/doctors-specialties/breast-health-center/index.html) confirmed that she had infiltrative ductal carcinoma. It's the most common form of breast cancer. Treatments had been worked out. Research had been done. It is survivable…

A week later, Liz had a bilateral mastectomy.

I’m writing this six days after the surgery.

I’ve searched the internet and I haven’t been able to find an active husband-whose-wife-has-breast-cancer blog that I could chat on. Maybe it’s because their wives have been survivors for years and they can relax, or they can take a step back, or they’re exhausted, or the danger is no longer clear and present.

Not so for me. Based on everything I’ve read so far, this job is only just beginning.

Ah, the name of the blog: I couldn’t call it Breast Cancer Husband, so I went to the thesaurus to look for synonyms and the etymological dictionary for word roots. It all comes down to a “husband” having something to do with farming. Words like cultivate, garden, graze, grow, harvest, landscape, seed, sow, tend and till the soil are all related to “husband”. The word “reap” was in there, too.

At first that didn’t do anything for me, but when I came across “reap”, of course the first thing I thought of was the Grim Reaper. Then my mind went to work, the Reaper’s robe turned pink and I had the image in my head of the Breast Cancer Reaper: cutting down breast cancer, growing hope, harvesting love, creating a new landscape (in more ways that one!), cultivating peace, sowing joy, tending the field, the Garden of Eden, good and healthy eating…

At any rate, this will be a personal blog with medical LINKS and occasional medical comments (or curses?) – I’m no doctor, though I have been a science teacher for three decades. This blog may wax and wane humorous as well. Humor is how I deal with grief and tragedy (actually, humor is how I deal with just about everything and every one…)

We’ll see. All I know right now is that my wife has breast cancer, she, my daughter (whose blog links are below), my son & daughter-in-law & grandson and the rest of both of our families and friends, are dealing with this in different ways.

I should be here once a week, probably Saturdays, and my goal will be to provide something that’s short, personal and helpful.

That is all…

image: http://ny-image3.etsy.com/il_170x135.112225675.jpg