October 3rd – You can’t bring me down

First off, let’s take it from the start….Have I ever mentioned that Mel advocates for my health far more than I do. I think it is safe to say that if it was not for Mel, chances are that I would be dead by now. I can think of multiple instances over the last 5 years where she pushed me to look into things and i thought that they were fairly minor. Every time she does I end up in surgery though. This is a word of advice to everyone. If she is pushing you to get checked, you are going to get cut open. I am not sure if she has some shares in surgical supplies that she is keeping secret and hidden from me, but that seems to be the trend. Yesterday my dear wife, Mel, kept on pestering me to contact my oncologist friend. The minute she woke up, she would ask me have you heard back. While I was in meetings, I would get messages. 3,476 messages since 7am till I messaged in the afternoon. That is approximately 8.91 messages a minute. I do not know where she had the time!  She was getting anxious having to wait till Monday to hear back from my other oncologist. Luckily, I have an amazing team and I eventually sent him a message. I would like to admit, that I really suck at pestering my friends for follow-up when I ask them about things. Mel pointed out that when we had our originally appointment with Linford that he said that advocacy was important and to call as often and as much as we wanted. I think Mel should also seek social support for all of this, but that is a post for another day and story. I do not think I need it though as everything is awesome, everything is cool when you are part of a team. I digress a bit while I ramble about nothing. My friend said that he had spoken to my surgeon and Linford and that they both want to be as aggressive locally as possible. The surgeon is supposed to get in touch with me about booking a surgery, but his impression was he was hesitant. I got this impression when I had the biopsy as well. If he does not want to do it then the options are we try and find a surgeon from Toronto to see their opinion on what to do or we do a stereotactic radiosurgery. Contacting someone from Toronto will result in delays as we will need a consult and do all of that.

So this is being put back on the tumour board for discussion and I am now waiting to see what it going to happen. He asked me what I wanted to do and I said I am going to defer to him as he is the expert. If he says that I need to sacrifice a goat by throwing it into a volcano, I am all in! I am expecting to hear back either later today or on Monday. I do not think I am going to harass him today though as I will hear back from someone hopefully on Monday. If I need to have surgery in Toronto I am going to miss out on all the little perks that I get in Sudbury, though there is still time to make friends with leadership down in Toronto. I would be ready to go down whenever and not pack much as I will be in a hospital room. I would need my cell phone, laptop and chargers then I would be good.

Mel on the other hand would probably yell at me and remark how she has to prepare and pack for the whole family. I have a toiletry back always packed for emergency travel and I randomly toss things into one of my compression bags for travel. She always mentions that if I forget something that it is on me. I will tell you that I often forget things, but I do not always care. When we go away for the weekend for hockey or for some sort of a trip we always manage to completely jam pack the van. Xavier’s hockey bag and equipment is huge and takes up 1/2 of the back of the van. Our kids do not like using hotel blankets so they bring their own. We need to compromise on room temperature so I need extra blankets. Olivier likes to bring one of his plushies and his own pillows. All of this adds up. Mel has a checklist that we go over to make sure we have everything, and even with this checklist we have forgotten things as both her and I will throw  things into the vehicle and we do not cross check what has been done, so what we do now is we verbally ask and check it off. As some things are in small grocery bags by the door we sometimes do not know if it is suppose to come or not. 95% of the time it does, and the other 5% Mel asks why did we bring a box of chicken stock. I figured she wanted to make soup at the hotel. She rarely cooks in my kitchen, so maybe she would at the hotel with their pots and pans that no one cares about. I am not going to harass her to wash the pots right away at the hotel.

Traveling together when you first start a relationship can be interesting. I remember one of the first times Mel and I went away together, it was for a friend’s wedding on Manitoulin Island. Our relationship was not known by many people at the time, but my academic supervisor at the time, Persinger knew that I was going away on a trip with some girl I was seeing. He remarked that it would be a test of our relationship. We rented this nice quaint B&B room. When we arrived the layout was interesting. It had an attached bathroom, but there was a caveat to it. There was no door. It was like a half-wall. We were not aware of this and I can see how something like this really pressure tests a budding relationship. One of my close friends in Toronto had heard me mention a girl but did not think she existed. He had recently gotten engaged and invited me to his engagement party and I asked if I could bring someone and he said sure. When a physical real life person accompanied me he was shocked. I think this was the first time that I had brought someone to introduce them as opposed to casually bringing someone. They had thought El was fictional.

My nickname for Mel was derived from our time when we started dating and we were keeping it secret from everyone except our closest friends.  The name came from a Me First and Gimme Gimme song “Elenor”. I also have it as my ring tone for Mel. It amused me with “Elenor, gee I think you’re swell”. For short I always called her El and when she would send me messages, if it was a secret she would write El. It is close enough to Mel, where you just drop the M. I had always wondered how well we would travel together because of the sheer amount of planning that we do. We have quite the detailed spreadsheets prior to making any decision. We both do a lot of research prior. I was not sure how we would react if things did not fold out the way that we anticipated. What happened though was as much as we liked to plan, if things fell apart we did not care. We could buy what we were missing. We did not argue about forgetting things. She would scold me and I would laugh and we would move on. There were no hard feelings or worry about anything. Forgetting something was not the end of the world. As long as we were there together it did not matter. We could replace anything we were missing, as long as we were together we could overcome anything. Even now the kids will sometimes get stressed out a bit if we forget some thing, but we reassure them that it does not matter. We can just buy it if we forgot.

If we need to travel for any procedure I know that she will come with me no matter where we have to go. Luckily her work has been extremely supportive of things and there is an office for her work in Toronto. If she could not take me I have several friends who would accompany me. I can forget to bring everything and go empty handed and we would be ok. Mel, our family and friends would all happily go on the adventure with me with no supplies and everything would be fine. We would figure it out and overcome it all. This is similar to where we are now. We are about to embark on the road, we do not know what we need to prepare, or if we are prepared, but I do not care. I know that we will overcome it together.

Q

P.S. Posting schedule changes depending on my mood to write.