A Woman of Substance

   I love this picture.  It was taken at our daughter Brooke's wedding at the end of this past May.  The photographer was amazing and she spent the entire day with the wedding party recording tender and funny moments. This picture was taken minutes before the wedding party headed down the aisle for the ceremony.  Joy had poured every ounce she had into this day and our role was nearly complete.  The guests were in their seats, the music was drifting into the room, and the wedding party was giving each other a last round of hugs before heading down the aisle.  This picture was as close as we came to crying that day. We knew we had done all we could and we were happy with Brooke's choice for a mate. The day was magical and everything went just as we'd planned.  It was just a bittersweet moment when you hand your last baby over to be married and you realize that all our lives would find a different balance from this day forward.  

   Little did we know how much we would face in finding that balance less than 30 days later when we found out Joy had cancer.  We went from thinking that we were heading into the time of life where we could start thinking about life after work and about traveling to some of the places on the bucket list we'd recently compiled.  We'd been discussing selling our business for months and wondering if we would ever know when the time was right.  It's funny how quickly something like cancer can help you set your priorities in a new order and urgency.  Knowing that all of our kids lived a considerable distance from us made selling the business a must if I was to be able to help care for Joy. It truly is a God thing that we were able to get a fair price and completed sale within 60 days.  The closing of the sale happened the same week as Joy's surgery.  I don't think that was an accident.

   I won't go into the months that followed as I've covered them in previous blog posts.  What I want to discuss is what I've learned about the woman I married.  There are so many "no accidents" in the past 18 months that it would take an entire book to list them but I'll try to boil it down to a few really meaningful insights and discoveries.  We'll begin with this.  Joy is an amazing woman.  I don't say that lightly.  In the 25 years I've known her I have seen her blossom into someone of substance and influence.  I'm not talking about jobs or possessions.  I mean there are times I feel like I married a rock star.  A room changes when she enters.  David Phelps sings a song "Everyone that sees you" and the chorus goes like this:

               

           Everyone that sees you always wants to know you, and everyone that knows you, always has a smile.

   That is exactly who Joy is.  It begins with her smile but it is complete when people get close to her and discover who she really is.  She is real and courageous to the core.  It hasn't always been that way but she has worked so hard to set aside her fears, old mind tapes, and past failures.  She decided that her cancer would not limit her and that she would not hide from how it changed her.  Need further proof? 

   You know I wouldn't have posted that without her permission.  All the beauty and smile is still there. I want her to feel comfortable to go around like that as much as she sees fit since wigs are so hot and uncomfortable.  The Joy of 10 years ago would never have let anyone see this.  At that time in her life, it was all about image. If I look good, I am good.  Perfectionism was her friend, not her captor.  She gave all that up a couple of years ago and decided that life and relationships are more important than an image.  She intentionally chose to be real and to show up for every part of life.  That takes courage and a willingness to be vulnerable.  What she has learned (we talked about this in depth the last few days) is that just showing up affects people. And, don't fool yourself, just showing up is courage.  People are drawn to courage. There is so much more grace given to the courageous than the coward. She also told me that being vulnerable gets easier with practice.  You want the true definition of intimacy? It isn't sex. It's letting yourself be seen honestly and completely.  So, in a nutshell, Joy chooses to show up for all of life, including the ugly parts where she'd rather hide. 

   All that aside,  I have a new found appreciation for wigs.  I mean, being real is fine but it's OK to look as normal as possible.  It's amazing how much it looks like her real hair.  The worst part of having a wig around is when I wake up in the middle of the night to head to the bathroom. Turning on the light only to find Joy's head on the bathroom counter can cause a heart to jump right out of your chest. It's hard to go back to sleep after that.  

   We head back to the hospital for another 5 hours of chemo tomorrow.  That will be the 2nd of 4 treatments and we hope to be done (other than the last reconstruction surgery) by December 10th.  With any luck, Joy will be back at close to full strength by Christmas.  That would be wonderful since we are scheduled to have all of our kids home this year for the first time in years.  In closing out this post, I want to add the favorite picture I took while we were on a recent trip to Colorado. We went out there early this month to try to capture the Aspens turning gold. We found very few good pictures of the Aspens but I found this one while we were hiking in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. It spoke to me as a perfect illustration of where our lives are and who Joy truly is right now. If you know that area, it is very arid with lots of scrub bushes and few flowers.  This little bunch of flowers was erupting out of a crack between a big rock and some hardpan soil.  I had to touch it to be sure it was real and not some one's idea of a joke. They were real and a message to us that there can be beauty in unexpected places and that all of us can bloom where we're planted.

The Puzzle Savant

    Before I begin this post I need to apologize for being so long between posts.  Although I find it hard to believe that anyone actually reads these posts, I have been getting some serious flak about the delay. I'll explain more in my next post but the truth is that this process is just so overwhelming and exhausting that I just didn't want to talk about cancer anymore. I'm finding that I'm just not as tough as Joy. She continues to amaze me.

    So, as I write this chapter I'm sitting in the chemo suite watching over Joy while they pump the poison in her veins to destroy any remaining cancer cells. At least that's the plan. The reality is that only 5% of women are helped by chemo and we can only hope we fit into that 5%.  We are participating in a national study here at KUMed that will hopefully help them identify which 5% of women actually benefit from chemo.  As it now stands, chemo is standard treatment for most breast cancer patients and that is a troubling fact since the chemo is so hard on the body and 95% are doing nothing more than taking toxic risks while hoping for the best results.  We certainly were clueless about all this before our journey.  As good as medicine is, there is so much they just don't yet know. Our experience at this hospital has been very good. They go out of their way to answer any questions and to present any and all options and risks clearly. I'm impressed by the level of care in an environment where it must seem like there are more questions than answers.

    While this whole process does wear you down, there are some moments of serendipity and humor. Our favorite has been morphine.  Joy on morphine has given us some stories that will undoubtedly expand over the coming years.  Due to the removal of both breasts and 18 lymph nodes on the left side, Joy could only sleep in a recliner in the living room.

Brooke, Elizabeth, and I took turns camping out on the couch while she slept.  She always started her naps looking so peaceful but then the hot flash would hit and she ended up sleeping more like this.

We had to wake her for meds, bathroom breaks, and to empty the 3 drain tubes from the incision sites.  Joy would usually wake up and begin to talk to us along with several folks that weren't present.  The best times were when she tried to get us to engage the invisible visitors in the conversations.  Her conversations occurred at odd hours and made sleeping on the couch difficult as I always woke up with a start thinking she needed something or was in pain only to discover she was staring at a blank spot on the wall and talking up a storm with persons unknown and unseen. One time she was talking and turned to point at me and then back to the blank wall and said, "Scott Campbell is right there and he can't see you".  I confess I stared at the wall for a long time to make sure there wasn't someone there. After all these conversations, she would, at some point, realize it was the morphine talking and start to smile or laugh.

    While those episodes were entertaining, none were as funny as trying to put together a 1500 piece puzzle with someone on morphine. Let me tell you, it was a hoot.  The puzzle was difficult and the girls and I would go 5 or 10 minutes at times before finding one piece that fit. Joy, on the other hand, would sit there and we would hear. "Oh, found another one" about every 30 seconds. 

    It didn't take long for us to realize that she wasn't the puzzle savant she appeared to be. Take a look at this picture of a tree she put together. We laughed until we cried and had to take apart nearly everything she'd done.

Needless to say, we watched her progress a little closer after that discovery.  It was a time we will always remember and cherish.