10th Post. Brain Tumor Telethon

That is what the scene looked like at our house…or at least it felt that way.

Will and I were literally dialing for dollars…he called his siblings and I called mine.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal really.  It is.  They are not short calls.  They are very long, emotional calls.  Before a question is answered the next one is firing at you.  I remember this as if it were yesterday when my dad was diagnosed.  I was THAT child…the one of five who needed to know absolutely everything.  I had questions about my questions and then questions about the answers to those questions.

So, it was completely expected that when you tell your sibling who you have always been so close to, that you’ve been diagnosed with Brain Cancer…that there will be tears, crying, hysterics, anger, frustration, fear…just a whole load of poop.  But making the calls to my brothers took well over an hour of me nonstop talking.  Telling the same story over and over and over.  Three times.  As you know, I had already told my sister and my mom.  It didn’t get easier by the way, it got harder.  I was actively, knowingly hurting people, scaring people, making them inconsolable.  It is an awful way to feel.

Then we called a few friends.  For me it was easy because Kristin, Christy and Caren already knew…but Julie didn’t know.  Hannah didn’t know.  Jenny didn’t know.  The list goes on…

I texted all of them (thinking I could kill a bunch of birds with one stone) asking if anyone wanted to go for a walk after drop off the next day.

If there are a few truths I can say about our kids school community it is the following:

1.  The moms love their tennis

2.  The moms love their Barre classes, yoga classes, meditation classes, pilates classes

3.  The moms love to do group walks after drop off.

No one was available.  Literally NO ONE.  How the hell is this possible.

So I have to see Julie in person, that night. (My husband Will had been away with Julie and her husband Ahmed, and their son Ramsey at Whistler skiing with our kids).

Will didn’t share with them what was going on the entire weekend.  I can’t blame him.  I was away with seven girlfriends and said nothing….until the last night, I told three of the girls: Alicia, Sally and Meredith.  They are close friends from our daughter Sally’s class.  Again, it was that gut wrenching moment.  You just feel like it is all happening in slow motion and you just want to fast forward thru it and you can’t.  There are too many questions to be asked and to many answers that lead to another question.  AND we didn’t know at the time that it was going to be called Brain Cancer by our neurosurgeon…that happened the next day.

Well Julie and Ahmed decided to stay on the mountain at Whistler, longer than my family.  And then they got stuck in horrible traffic and didn’t arrive home til late.  But still, I HAD to tell Julie.  I wanted to drive over to her house but they had literally just walked in the door, bags everywhere and needing to get their son to bed.  I asked her to call me when he was asleep and they were a bit more settled.  So we talked, later than we normally would.

Julie needed to know first. That is who she is to me.  She is my go to friend, she is NO drama, hates it, and is very pragmatic.  She is a realist.  She makes shit happen.  She is also hilarious,  beautiful and so kind you can hardly believe her huge heart fits into that small body of hers.

It was so sad.  She is so awesome, she is so kind and always so positive, and again, I broke another heart of someone I love, who is my lifeline…my rock.  It was awful.  God I wished this tumor would go away for no other reason than I can not bare to tell another person I care for and love so much, our wretched ridiculous news.

So the next day, I finagle a way to see Jenny.  I ask her in a text after drop off if she could come by my house really quickly as I know she has to go with her son Kaan to a school event.  I tell her I have a surprise.  I do this because I need for her to shift her priority and for sure come over so I can tell her…she needs to hear it from me.  So, thinking surprise means something super positive…she comes to the door with Kaan in her arms and the biggest Jenny smile you’ve ever seen.  I realize right then and there “oh shit, this was a bad ruse…I think I’ve made this already bad situation worse”.

She comes in smiling and says “hi hon…what it is the surprise news??”….I look at her and say “I am so sorry…its not good.” I tell her.  I say the words.  I say I’ve been diagnosed with brain cancer and that they found the tumor last week.  I am being operated on in a few weeks time”.  She has her little one in her arms, she is crestfallen…she puts Kaan down and she just starts crying totally and completely.  I mean crying like me crying.  It was so sad.  But there was so much love, so much support in those few minutes.  And again I felt like shit.  Ugh.

Breaking hearts left and right…its almost becoming a joke…so now I have to drive to Bellevue because my friend decided to leave Seattle because she found this kick butt house and gets to ditch our ridiculous Seattle City Council…and live the good life.

I bring our dog Margie with me to Hannah’s.  She is BY ALL ACCOUNTS…even my sister who does NOT like dogs, adorable.  Sweet, well behaved and super chill.  We walk into Hannah’s brand new house.  She has this amazing white/grey pony skin rug in her living room with all her gorgeous white furniture. I say “I really need to talk to you about something and I am just going to say right now I am so so sorry because this is going to be a huge shock”…Hannah, now prepared – at least more so than Jenny who I totally screwed by saying “I have a surprise to tell you!! happy face happy face etc…

I start to tell her and then it happens.  Margie, our perfect little coton puppy, decides she too agrees this news is a bunch of shit, so she poops on Hannahs brand new rug.  I SCREAM at the top of my lungs. I am so freaked out (Hannah is calm by the way) I pick it up with my bare hands, run to her bathroom flush it down the toilet, scrub my hands in boiling water with every soap in the house…and sit back down and apologize profusely for about ten minutes.  And then I tell her.  And again, it’s not even 10:30am and I am bawling my eyes out, wrapped in the embrace of probably the most thoughtful, creative woman I know…breaking hearts again.

I get back home and decide I literally can not talk to anyone anymore.  It is too much to bear, and i can not handle it.  I am going to have a breakdown.  NOT because I have a brain tumor, but because I can not bare to see the people I love crying worried and panicked over my news.

So we stop the telethon, and start to craft a few emails.  One to family – with the intention that they would send it out to all cousins, aunts, uncles etc…between us there are conservatively 150 people needing to know.  I can’t blame it on the Irish Catholic that is my family….Will’s family are WASP’s.  But they act like Catholics…lots of kids and a really close family.

We create a very similar version for our friends…with all the information we know (which at the time isn’t much).  We tell everyone three things:

1   Do not share with your children and do not talk about it.  We are telling the kids tonight.

2  We have decided to eliminate the word tumor, we are naming the “bump” on my head Polly.  So      please when it is appropriate to share with your kids, refer to the bump on my head as Polly.  Again, no “T” word

3.  Do not set up a meal train, drop off casseroles or send flowers.  We don’t want our kids to get nervous and think something is wrong.  We can’t have 15 flower arrangements arrive and then food delivered all day long.  We need our home to be as normal as possible.

Can I just stop for a moment and say the above three things, I am going to brag a little bit here, were brilliant.  Just ask our friends Matt and Sarah.

We quickly, thanks to our friend Vivien, got in touch with a woman chef who cooks out of a commissary and she sends a menu of different items she is making that week.  You select what you want and how many portions of each and then delivers the whole week of meals to your house on Tuesday.

Perfect…we will be fed while mom is recovering from getting her skull cracked open.  And our son will not need double shots of allergy meds from a house filled with pollen from beautiful flowers.  Things are looking up.