A year ago today my love was going through his first cancer surgery, just two weeks after finding a big mass via scope. This was 3 months after countless ER visits, 6 cat-scans and almost dying from 2 deep vein thrombosis clots that lodged in both lungs which is when he was in intensive care for 3 days and his survival rate was 20%!
He's had 3 more of these surgeries since where the surgeon scooped out half of his bladder like a melon but this 1st time actually went so deep it perforated his bladder! It was a looonngggg day and night...15 hours in the hospital! He was home that same night but with a catheter and I had to stay up all night emptying the bag and watching for the size of clots coming out...the next day we were getting the catheter out and that night we were back in the ER with very scary and awful excessive bleeding, because of this for following surgeries he was kept overnight thankfully!
Then it was the torturous wait for biopsy results. We've done this process 4 times since. At this time we didn't know it was a highly aggressive cancer, "A Killer" as the doctor put it. We got that news the day after his 44th birthday, 2.5 weeks later!
As you might only imagine it's been an exhaustive time but he's beautifully and officially 1 year cancer free now. But of course for us the clock restarts every single time a scope is coming up or every time we wait for biopsies. Every time he has a new pain we panic the cancer is back.
That will be life now, panicking, being afraid...that's what cancer does to you, it instills endless fear, it snatches away your lightness of heart, it smothers any kind of joyful naivety that the bad things won't happen to you.
I'm surprised by how fast the year has flown by, but at least that means that the worst year of both of our lives has flown by too!
He was my hero before all this, for his beautiful tenacious heart. But now he's also my warrior beast, I've seen him go through so much bone chilling immense amounts of pain, suffering and fear with more grace, kindness and toughness then I've ever seen before in my life. I love you Jonathan Peterson aka @deyfennslayd.
