After no contact I got a text from her yesterday (exactly two weeks later) asking if we’d be available for a family dinner on Friday. So going dark on this MLC did help so far. I looked at the calendar before I responded and it was August the 7th the day before our daughter’s birthday that died of brain cancer at the age of 3.5 years. I’ve never told anyone about this as I never wanted to see that look of horror or sorrow from people looking back at me. Since I can’t see you I can tell you a little bit about it. Brain cancer in a child is much different than in an adult it is very aggressive and since a child’s skull is pliable it can expand quite a bit before it’s noticed.
She was dying in the hospital and they couldn’t figure it out until they did a brain scan. When they told me what it was I did not want them to operate as I knew it would not end well and it would just grow back. My distraught wife wanted to do it so I was overruled. I’ve never complained and I supported her decision, she was the mother it was hers to make. It was so traumatic we don’t talk about it much to this day. Cancer does not run in either side of our family they think it might have been something in the environment she was exposed to. She survives the first surgery and now they want to do a second one. By this time I have looked what she has up on the internet and there is no cure or treatment for it.
This time I try and convince my wife not to let them do it but the doctors convince her otherwise. I tell the chief surgeon I know what this is and there is no treatment or cure, he tells me she can live till she’s 14. I don’t know why he’s lying but he is. At one point I think it’s for the tissue samples they take and send to a Palo Alto university that they were kind enough to send a bill for. They do the second one and the surgeon has a big smile on his face as he tells me they remove so much of it the whole brain moves forward. This surgery leaves her blind, unable to speak, walk and basically in a coma and has to feed through a tube in her stomach and tubes in her chest for some sort of medicine. So she’s sent home to die and I have to wait for the tumor to grow back and kill her. Takes about a couple of months or so, could have been six I don’t remember. That’s all I want to say about it except next time you meet a lottery winner don’t be so sure they are leading a charmed life. The odds of getting this may be the same as the lottery. Please don’t feel sorry for me as it wasn’t anybody’s fault and I don’t want this to define who I am. It was 21 years ago. So while an MLC wife is bad it’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. I guess that’s a positive that’s taken 21 years to appear.
This is the one reason why I’ve been so patient with my wife, not that we had a child that died but that I was not there for her, I fell to pieces watching this play out. I drank and took valium every day as I watched her slowly die, I could not handle it. She was stronger than I was at that time. So I feel I owe her but at some point I have to draw the line. Either you want to be with me or you don’t. We have to move forward or call it quits.
