Inspirational Stories

My wife left me after 33½ years of marriage (37½ including dating) and 2½ years into my remission. I read stories about a spouse, usually a male for some reason, who up and left his partner either during active treatment or when everything looked like the patient, the person, would live, but I never thought any of that would happen to me, and it sure as heck did. She fell out of love with me, with caring for me, with helping me. I may have been an ass, but I wasn't an asshole ― you know what I mean? She probably feels she didn't deserve any of this either, but . . . curve-balls and crosses . . . the vows were momentary.

I left that house with 20 or so boxes, many cancer items (soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, nighttime diapers, boxes of Tylenol, very few joyous memories, and no pictures at all), and a laundry basket full of ratty clothes shoved into my sister's car. She and I got breakfast, and I unloaded the necessities into my mom's house, broke down, and the rest my sister took to her basement. That became my life ― a spare room and a basement.

Nowhere in my cancer treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), later transformed into diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), and pain management thereafter did anyone ever tell me that, along with cancer taking a kidney from me, the full use of both lungs, my sexual potency, the ability to remember "stuff" (conversations, memories near and distant, what the heck to get again from the grocery store), the ability to move well, to feel the ground right there, or at all some days, as well as providing me with the super-power ability to have explosive diarrhea at the most inopportune moment, without warning, and not, sometimes, making it precisely into the bathroom or over the bowl, and having underwear and shorts to scrub clean in complete embarrassment and humiliation (and I couldn't throw any of the clothing out because I didn't have a lot of money to buy new stuff), or it hits at Wegmans, and I haven't eaten a damn thing, but it's happening, really happening. I hope there's a stall close by and not occupied. I wear two boxers daily now, to catch the beginnings of propulsion. Doctors and nurses just said that all this would be . . . difficult.

The real venom of cancer is that it has the unique ability to destroy families. I have lost everything . . . someone who I thought was my best friend, my house, furnishings, my dog (had to put her down right after my ex-wife asked me to leave (without a job, I'm on SSDI, without a residence, without things for the residence, without a car, but she still wanted me to leave), my sons (they have sided with her), and my grandson. (There may be more grandchildren. I wouldn’t know. Cancer blanks out faces, too, after it has forced the choosing of sides.) Families ― and they, in turn, have lost my side because you can't have it both ways. Cancer strolls along and takes a dump on you and then sometimes strolls away or stays for dessert while breaking dishes at the table. How does the family clean up the mess? I have seen two ways ― leave and stick . . . maybe complacency at the end of the marriage, so maybe three ways. (Please be wary if the other person stops going to doctor appointments with you. That means something.)

Then, one learns resiliency. I have told myself many times in the middle of the night when I thought of going to a sporting goods store the next morning and purchasing a gun and then traveling to a wooded area and aiming said gun into my skull (and this was after I was discharged from my marriage and while living in my mom's spare bedroom because there was no other room at any other inn) that if I can withstand 10-inch needles going into my back for biopsies or taps and survive a stem-cell transplant (which was far worse than the bad flu the doctors had told me it would be . . . dangerously low potassium, blood having to be drawn from my foot because my line stopped working, not eating, not sleeping, having every doctor on the ward show up at my room, and survive the lovely round after round of Revlimid® . . . right, those after-effects will go away . . . sure) that if I can stand before that wall of water when the dam breaks, then I can damn-well live a lot with a little.

Of course, the Sicilian in me goes right to the dark side and sees curses and a bus running over me as soon I wrote that above sentence, but it will happen again; cancer or something will come knocking on my door. One can only dodge for so long.

I am alive. I was grateful then but more so now. In the 18 months that I have thankfully lived with my mother, aside from losing all the pieces of me initially, I have rebuilt everything, all the scraps, and shards, and turned them into a stained-glass window to catch the light that only I have to like. I took my rightful divorce share and bought a car and requisite car insurance. I met a woman, fell in love with a woman, got healthcare somewhere in there, got it because I needed to get my pension, listened to a woman, proposed to a woman, found a house with her, and am buying a house with her, wrote my first novel, as well as 150 pages of poetry.

Mostly all on my own.

Then one understands faith in God and the softness of prayers. I love the Guy. I pray. I thank Him for her and my few means ― every day. It may not be how other people would go about it all, but I don't really . . . anyway.

I never asked for any of this, but dang it, I'm adapting, making stuff up as I'm going. And I'm not going to go climb Everest or anything like that. What I am going to do is go out to dinner with this woman who knows what's in store for her and us, and who loves me more than I can possibly fathom. I'm going to go to the zoo and see my favorite rhino rolling in the modest pond of water, and focus on him and her arm around my shoulder and my hand innocently on her lap. That is the moment.

I told my oncologist when all this began that cancer doesn't mess with me, and I won't mess with it. But it has, and I'm punching and cursing back with the only strength I have left in my fist, in my vernacular ― and that is the word "again." It may do so but so will I until I am too weak or too tired to continue.