The night before had been sleepless, but what is new? Amazing how your body begins to function just fine that way, huh? Although, you should do more than 'function', I'd guess...Early Monday morning the phone rang. Not so early that it woke me, by any stretch, but early enough that when I saw Caller ID with Dr. Turner's number, it made me wonder.
I have grown use to his voice having an immediate calming effect. It doesn't matter what he is going to say, his presence radiates even through the phone, and it is a magic that is incredibly rare. I started by thanking him again for the previous days news. I told him that we had spent all night talking and that we are in a million directions now. That is when he told me that the pathology we had been waiting for was in...did I want to hear it?
I had never been more ready, yet not, for anything in my life, I don't think. "...Based on the information in your pathology report from your biopsy, you are both ER and PR positive..." I knew what this meant. Wait? What did it mean again...? I had to go over it again..."Okay, so...That means that, basically, that it is almost as good as it gets as far as the prognosis and treatment of my Cancer...but is the worst possible news for keeping this baby, right...?"..."Exactly."..."Okay, so this is the concrete information that we needed. This means that, in essence, this pregnancy is killing me, as we speak. And that the sooner it is terminated, the sooner I can hope to get better? As in...if I even attempt to just hold the pregnancy in for even a couple more weeks, I have just taken time from saving my life...correct?"
Yep, all correct. The pregnancy was killing me. And waiting even 2 more weeks would not only damage me and my prognosis, but it would do so unnecessarily, since we could not save him. Even trying to 'hold out' for as long as we could...or he could...it would do nothing but damage to both myself and the baby. The chemo and treatments that I needed now would be extremely harmful to him...to not take the treatments, would kill me. Dr. Turner said that he would make all of the arrangements for us to go and have the procedure done in Seattle to terminate the pregnancy. He said he would handle everything and for us not to worry about taking all of that on, too. For us to "focus on what matters" (and boy would that take on new meaning even more as time went on). I later found that this also meant he would find us a hotel with a very good locale which gave discounts for what we were there for etc...unreal.
And so it was. It was no longer time to continue searching for 'how' we could make this baby happen for us, but rather how we could let this baby go in the 'right' way for us...and for him. But now we knew, with this bittersweet (what a terribly mild word to try and choke out) news, that I stood a better chance at life. But the journey had just grown so much longer and harder. So now was the time...to find our lesson, to find any good, any beauty and grace and respect that could be found in this lesson along our journey. Jon and I had miles of walking within our souls to do.
May we only find the strength.
