that minnesota institution

There's nothing like the Minnesota State Fair to take a gal's mind off her cancer. Liz and I took Daniel this morning and had a good time looking at photographs in the Fine Arts building, petting horses, looking at other farm animals and just walking around. And of course, we ate. Here's what we consumed, in order:
• Mini donuts.
• The new Cool-Aid pickle-on-a-stick. (I loved it ... I ate mine and half of Liz's.)
• A corn dog (with sweet tea for me).
• Sweet Martha's cookies. (I think it was the highlight of Daniel's State Fair experience.)
• A fruit pie, so I could get something healthy into Daniel's stomach.
• Cheese curds.

lucky number seven

Sept. 7 — a week from tomorrow. That's my surgery date. It gives me enough time to complete two freelance articles I'm working on, which is good. I just hope I can keep from worrying myself sick over the next eight days. Maybe we can make it to the State Fair and the Picasso exhibit at the Walker before then, too.

I am overwhelmed and heart-warmed by all the generosity people are showing right now: offers of food, childcare, hugs, prayers and support. It means so much to me, and to Steve. We will try to take you up on whatever we can.

Now that I know this tumor is inside me, I notice it all the time. It's not irritating or painful or anything, just a presence that bumps against my rib or down in my pelvic area. I probably would have chalked some of it up to pregnancy, my growing uterus, but now I know what it really is. Last night, every time I turned over, I kept wondering, am I putting too much pressure on it? Am I squishing it? Is that bad? I am glad that this tumor is, from what they can tell, fairly freestanding. At least it has not encroached into any my organs, or my bloodstream. At least not yet. I'm having a CT scan this afternoon to make sure it's not in my lungs.

Daniel just woke up. Gotta go.

things are moving

This afternoon we met the doctor who is going to do my surgery. He's with the University of Minnesota-Fairview system, which is very highly regarded, and I think he's going to be good. As good as anyone can be with this kind of sarcoma, at least. Plus, he and I have the same birthday! He brought the chief resident with him, and all I could think was, "OK, what is a chief resident again? Who is the chief resident on Grey's Anatomy? Is it Dr. Bailey?"

I should know the date for the surgery tomorrow sometime. He wants to get me in quickly, so he's going to move a few things around for me. The surgery itself will be long — four to five hours — and I might lose my kidney. Hopefully I won't lose any part of my vena cava (the big blood vessel), but if I do, they will have to graft something in to replace it. Hopefully I won't lose the baby, either. But that is a big unknown.

Both of us felt better leaving this doctor this afternoon than we did leaving the one this morning. Maybe it's just confidence that I'm going to get the best care possible. And that even if the cancer comes back — there's a 40 to 50 percent chance of that happening, which seems so high to me — I can hopefully expect to live a while longer, to keep fighting this as long as I can with regular checkups and careful scrutiny.

I'm kind of numb right now. I just had an interview for an article I'm working on, and at one point, she brought up pregnancy and feeling her baby move and the visitation story of Mary and Elizabeth, and I ended up telling her everything. Not very professional, but I don't really care.

I want to say something to people who might be reading this and haven't heard from me directly. I'm sorry you have to find out this kind of news on my blog, and that I'm not able to call all of you personally. I know it's not the best way to learn bad news. I simply don't have the energy to call a lot of people right now, and I hope you understand.

And now, I need to go spend some time with my family.

this just gets suckier and suckier

Back from the appointment with the surgeon. This isn't going to be the easy fix I hoped it would be.

This thing is big, the size of a cantaloupe, 15 to 18 centimeters, and it is irregularly shaped, and it is pressing against my kidney and the vena cava (a major blood vessel running down the center of my body) and wrapping itself around my aorta. It's probably been growing in me for five years. (How could I not have felt it until three weeks ago?) It is, in the words of Dr. Suhr, "complicated" — too complicated for his surgery clinic and the HealthEast hospital system, apparently, to handle. So he's recommending the University of Minnesota or the Mayo Clinic. He was able to pull some strings and get us an appointment this afternoon with a doctor at the U of M, who he says is very good and he would send his own family to him. I haven't had a biopsy yet, but I think it's safe to say this is a bad thing, a sarcoma. I don't know if we are going to lose our little baby, but I have a bad feeling about it. I overheard the doctor on the phone telling people at the U of M that "time is of the essence" and using words like "abortion." I feel like this might end up being a fight for my life, much less the little one's. Oh God, it's heartbreaking to think about what could happen.

I am hovering in a wierd place between disbelief, sadness and fear, yet somehow a little removed from it all, like the emotions haven't sunk in all the way. I have been crying off and on, but I've also been cracking jokes with Steve (bless his shocked heart) and baby-talking with Daniel. Somehow, listening to old hymns of praise like "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty" brings me a sense of comfort, like a reminder that there is so much beautiful in this world in spite of this. I hope I can stay strong and positive through all this. So far, I'm holding it together, but I see such a tough road ahead.

Ironically, my life insurance policy arrived in the mail today. So at least we've got that going for us. Ha.

Anyway, everyone, thanks for all your support. It means so much. By the way, some of Steve's family knows what's going on through this blog (you know who you are!), but we'd like to tell the rest of the family ourselves, so please keep mum. :)

the c-word

The doctor called with the results of my MRI. My mind is all hazy with shock and the words he used swirling around my head. Mass. Cancerous. Large. Likely malignant. I need to see a surgeon now. I have an appointment tomorrow. I can't believe, can't fathom, that this is happening. What does this mean for my unborn baby? What does it mean for my life? What does it mean for Daniel, for Steve? I am just ... stunned ... I never expected this to happen now in a thousand years. I've got to pull myself together, for Daniel's sake at least. He still needs to eat and play and cuddle and have his diaper changed, after all. We're going to go to Woodbury to meet Steve and have lunch so we can talk about this in person. Pray for me.

please ...

... let it be nothing bad.

I seem to have some kind of unidentifiable something on the right side of my abdomen, near my liver. Blob. Lump. Mass. Medical types have referred to it those ways, but all I really feel is a hardness when I press my fingers into my right side just below my rib cage. Nothing hurts. I spent almost three hours at the hospital this morning getting it looked at on ultrasound (got to see the baby, too), and they were able to rule out certain things, like that it's connected to my liver or kidney or gall bladder or reproductive system. But the radiologist told me it's really hard to identify stuff in that part of the body on ultrasound. They'd do a CT scan if I weren't pregnant, but all that radiation could hurt the baby. So tonight, in less than an hour, I am going back to the hospital to have an MRI. I am just praying that it will be nothing more than an embarrassingly large glob of stool stuck in my intestinal tract and not something worse. The doctor also murmured something about enlarged lymph glands. I don't even want to Google that or think about it unless I have to. Because my sister has been down that road, and it wasn't pretty. Whatever it is, knowing will be better than not knowing, I hope.

I walked in the house after my ultrasound, and Daniel was in the high chair having lunch, and he gave me a big smile, and I got all melodramatic inside, thinking, I have to live to see this boy grow up. Later, I let tears fall, but not when he was looking because I don't like him to see me like that, and I already had a big sobfest in front of him last week over something ... I don't know, something hormonal that made me cry.

I really hope it's nothing. Please send a few prayers our way.

birthday

I can't believe our baby is already 1! We had a bunch of people over to celebrate, and the weather was perfect. The house and yard were crowded, but it was fun to see everyone, and it must not have been as packed as we imagined it might be because we had lots of leftover food and drink. (And I thought we might run out of cake — ha. We have enough to freeze and use for Steve's birthday in October and mine in January if we want!) Daniel had a couple of meltdowns toward the end, but that's to be expected when it's nap time and there are people everywhere. All in all, I think he had fun. Here he is with his birthday cake (free from Lunds!), which (hooray!) came with little rubber duckies on top. Daniel was delighted!



I think he knew it was a special day. He kept grinning and pointing at the Curious George Happy Birthday banner we'd hung up over the table, and we sang Happy Birthday to him throughout the day, just because he won't get to hear it sung to him again for another year. Here he is this morning in his PJs. His walking has just exploded in the past few days. He does his little stiff-armed Frankenstein walk all over the place, and he pops right up after he falls down, as if he'd prefer to try the two-footed method over crawling.


One of my favorite moments, toward the end of the party, was watching Kerry's 7-month-old triplets getting passed around among our friends. (This is Ewan — right? — with Chris, and Noel with Liz. Liz and Chris are married, and I think they are going to be wildly creative and wonderful parents someday.) I think all my play group friends and their spouses took a turn holding them. It was really sweet beyond words. I love my friends.

faces of 1

We went out in the backyard this afternoon after Daniel had recovered from his big birthday party (i.e. took a long nap) and shot a few more pictures for posterity.

two hearts

It's grey and wet here, and it's been raining all weekend. We're soaked and damp. It feels like Oregon in the winter. Three years ago this weekend, and again a year later, we were at weddings, and both were blessed with warm, sunny days that make this time of summer just perfect. And now, this.

Daniel woke up crying last night around 3, and it took a long time to get him back to sleep. I think he must be teething. Sometimes I wonder if he has bad dreams. Anyway, Steve and I were so tired when we got up, and so dragged down by the weather, that we decided to skip church. Instead, we piled Daniel into the car and took a long drive, over to Stillwater and up the St. Croix River, through the quaint little towns. We did our own version church in the car while Daniel took a sound nap. I read the readings, and we talked about how they fit into our lives. (They were fierce readings, nothing pretty or easy. They were about taking unpopular stands in the face of society's values, being willing to follow Jesus even if it causes division within a very family.) We do these Sunday drives every couple of months, and I love them. And need them. They give us time to really talk, something we used to do all the time. Now, we rarely get enough quality time to talk about things besides Daniel and the day-to-day of our busy lives. It's crazy how that time together just slips away from us.

I've been thinking about how last year around this time, I was starting my protracted week of start-and-stop labor. I was so tired of being pregnant. All I wanted to do was meet the little boy who had been growing and kicking and rolling around my belly all those months. I don't think I ever would have dreamed that one year later, another little heart would be beating inside me. Life is so unpredictable.

morning laundry

Steve says he looks like a little ghost. I think he looks like a house elf, just given an article of clothes (and thus his freedom). But then, I have been reading a lot of Harry Potter lately. At any rate, I think he looks adorable in his dad's T-shirt!

friday five:: word association

Short and sweet from the RevGals: Below you will find five words. Tell us the first thing you think of on reading each one. Your response might be simply another word, or it might be a sentence, a poem or a story.

1. vineyard — the wineries we visited in Sonoma in May.

2. root — root vegetables, such as potatoes and yams, and the fact that fall is almost here, and it will be the season for those foods.

3. rescue — the efforts to rescue everyone from the 35W bridge collapse.

4. perseverance — Harry Potter's quest to find the horcruxes and destroy Lord Voldemort.

5. divided — our parish, over styles of liturgy and worship.

i'm here

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, though this blog may make it seem otherwise. For one thing, I've taken to using Daniel's nap time as an opportunity to nap myself, or to reread the Harry Potter books (I'm going backward and am on Order of the Phoenix at the moment), instead of logging onto the Internet like I often do. I have a few writing assignments that are keeping me busy, too. And finally, life has just been crazy these past couple of weeks, and if I started writing about it now, I would be here until midnight. So I won't go into details right now, but I will soon ... I promise.

horrible

Our hearts and prayers go out to the people who were on the I-35 bridge tonight when it collapsed. What an awful, awful tragedy. I can hardly believe something like this could happen here. We are OK; none of us was on that stretch of highway today. I appreciate the many e-mails we have received from friends and family checking on us.

baby steps

For the first time in his life Saturday, Daniel walked! I was out to lunch, so Steve got to see it first, but Daniel was happy to give a repeat performance when I got home ... and every day since. He stands all solid and proud and then starts to shuffle forward, legs stiff, like a zombie with a big grin on his face. It always ends with him in my arms, giving me the biggest monkey hug, which is the best reward for both of us.