Tom beat cancer.
Let me say that again, Tom beat cancer.
Okay, one more time in caps…TOM BEAT CANCER.
My heart is full, I have goosebumps as I type and I sort of want to puke. That’s what happens when your surgeon comes in and tells you and your amazing fighter of a husband that there was no active cancer in the tumor and the fight is over. We do not need to do anymore chemo; our last and final step is this surgical recovery.
We were not anticipating results until tomorrow but our surgeon, who was about to go into an appointment, saw the pathology and immediately came up stairs because he was excited to tell us the results. The only emotion I can put around this is shock. It’s almost the same type of shock we had when we first found out it was cancer – just a much happier type of shock. When he walked out of the room Tom and I just stared at each other – had the biggest smiles come across our faces and couldn’t believe what we had just heard. If Tom wasn’t in so much pain or hooked up to so many tubes he would have flown out of that chair – it’s truly unbelievable. The odds were not in our favor that this would be the end - but as I’ve said many times – this cancer picked the wrong person to mess with.
This has been a fight; we are not naïve to think we don’t still have a tough road ahead as he recovers from this surgery, but what a difference it makes to know that each day he feels better is actually a better day rather than a good day before the bad days of chemo return. This fight has knocked us down so many times, it has been the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do, but we got back up every damn time because we were not going to let it win. I couldn’t have done this without the fight in my husband – he kept a smile on his face, which in turn kept a smile on mine. Proud doesn’t even describe how I feel about Tom right now – I will forever be in awe of what he managed to do over the last 128 days of our life, and I know he will finish out his surgical recovery strong.
We will get a lot more updates tomorrow from our oncology team and are eager to find out how this will all finish up – so more to come on that tomorrow. After reading my post so far to the Editor-In-Chief (Tom), I asked if he wanted to include anything in the post this evening. His reply was exactly what I was going to close with – a thank you. I feel like I’ve said it 100 times but this would not have been possible without our doctors, nurses, techs, friends, family, and coworkers. In line with our fight analogy – we needed people in our corner and we had an army of them. Like I said in the beginning, there are no words...More to come tomorrow...