upside down… or at least turned (dramatically) more upside down than it already had been with the coronavirus.

At around this time on Wednesday, my wife and I sat in the office of her OB GYN while he explained to us that my wife had an aggressive uterine sarcoma that required immediate surgery. An hour later, we were at the office of her primary care physician getting an EKG and physical so she could be admitted to the hospital for surgery, and from there we were off to an imaging center to get a CT Scan. From there it was back home for my wife to pack a bag and say goodbye to our kids (age 12 and 13). We have just told them that their mom had some female problems that required surgery to get better and that she was going to have to be in the hospital for a couple of days. We will address the “C” word with them if and when it becomes necessary to do so.

From there I took my wife to the hospital where I was permitted to say goodbye to her at the front door. No one is allowed in the hospital. I haven’t seen her since then except for Facetime.

Needless to say all of this happened so fast that it was hard to even process. My wife is a total badass and went into “let’s get this done” mode. I was more of an emotional wreck because I felt so helpless to do anything for her or even to physically be there with her/for her.

Our first glimmer of good news came when the results of the scan came in late Wednesday night. According to her OBGYN and one of our doctor friends who also got a copy of the scan, it looked “great”. There was “no evidence of metastatic disease or lymph node enlargement. All normal except for the mass within the wall of her uterus”. In other words, the scan indicated that the cancer had not spread outside of the uterus. As another doctor friend put it, that’s a game changer. Sarcomas are VERY fast growing, and they believe it had grown to the size of a grapefruit in just a matter of weeks or potentially months. If this had already spread outside of the uterus, I don’t even want to think about the prognosis.

She had her surgery Thursday morning. Due to the size of the tumor, they were not able to do the procedure laparoscopically, so unfortunately she’s looking at 5 days in the hospital and they’re saying she can likely come home on Tuesday, or maybe Monday with a little luck. The surgery took about 2 hours and went well without complications according to the surgeon. The surgeon said everything was consistent with the CT scan in that he did not see signs of spread. The lymph nodes looked normal, surrounding fatty tissue looked normal, the ovaries looked normal with no sign of spread, but we won’t know for sure until we get the pathology report on Monday or Tuesday. He did say that the tumor was very large… 22 SONOmeters, which I have since learned is just the way “centimeters” is sometimes pronounced by medical professionals. 22 CENTIMETERS. That’s 8-9 inches. It’s hard for me to comprehend. They said her uterus was the size of a 20 week pregnant woman’s.

The next major step is to get the results of the pathology report to confirm (hoping and praying) that everything outside the uterus comes back clean. From there we will have a consult with oncology, but according the surgeon (who is a gynecological oncologist… so he only deals with female cancer surgeries), given my wife’s relatively young age, and good health, he would expect them to recommend a fairly aggressive post operative course. Apparently even with a clean pathology, you can have micro metastases where if even a single cell gets out and is undetected by the biopsies, it can cause a recurrence. And given how aggressive this cancer is, they won't want to take that chance.

I had mostly dialed back my time on this board over the last several weeks anyway as the whole coronavirus spread has raised my anxiety level so I didn’t need another source to elevate my blood pressure. Since Wednesday, I’ve mostly avoided coronavirus news because I just don’t need additional things to stress me out. But my household has just gone from low risk to high risk, and while we were being pretty strict with our social distancing before this, we will be amping up our isolation protocol quite a bit.

Anyway, as you all know from my posts on this board, I’m not particularly religious, but I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t had my moments in prayer over the last 3 days. And I’d more than welcome prayers, along with thoughts and good vibes, from my extended dysfunctional 'family' on the Soapbox.

Thanks for listening.