Bad Summer, Good Future
As I merge onto the highway, I wonder if I should have called an ambulance.
“I may pass out,” my husband says as he puts his head on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I reply. “We’re just five minutes away. You’re going to be okay.”
He’s holding one of the motion sickness bags we keep in the car for our nine year-old, who gets carsick. It’s still light, almost 9pm on a mid-July Monday, and I imagine another version of the night, where we sip drinks on the deck while the kids play in the backyard. Instead, I fed the girls a frozen pizza while my husband vomited downstairs and our dog sprinted around, worried by the sounds of my husband being sick.
The first week of summer break, my husband noticed a lump in his testicle, and his doctor rushed him in for an ultrasound. I wasn’t worried yet; weren’t testicular lumps fairly common? (Spoiler: they aren’t.) The morning my husband was diagnosed with cancer in early June, I stood in the garden and felt like I had made it. It was finally summer.
Our older daughter had stopped attending school the previous October due to mental health struggles and a neurodivergent brain that just wasn’t built for middle school. We cobbled together a homeschool program that could best be described as “Nintendo in pajamas” school. She did some math tutoring and got really into online Dungeons and Dragons, and gradually, she recovered. But then we got his cancer diagnosis, and my idyllic vision of summer dissolved.
The waves keep coming: first my daughter’s mental health struggles, and now this. In a strange way, it’s a relief to be in the midst of a crisis. I’ve been in fight or flight for so much of the past year, and now there’s an actual emergency. I’ve been training for this.
At the hospital, the triage person asks my husband some questions, and he looks to me to answer. I give the facts, which I can do on autopilot after sharing this information many times over the past seven weeks. I have a tendency to slip into the first person plural. “We decided to do a round of chemo to reduce the chances of recurrence,” I say, but that’s only partly true. I think of my pregnancies, and it irked me when couples would say, “We’re pregnant.” There was no we about my pregnancies. “We” were expecting a baby; “I” was pregnant.
He finished his five-day protocol last week, and hasn’t been able to sit up due to vertigo and nausea for the past four days.
I watch my husband as the nurse pushes the wheelchair into a room. His eyes are closed, his brow furrowed. We are navigating his illness together, but parts of our experience have been unique: his pain and my logistical nightmare. I cancel our summer plans: a writing workshop for me, a vacation, dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. I drive my daughters to camps they didn’t want to do, but which I’ve signed them up for, now that we are home all summer. With no family nearby, I lean on our elementary school community, accepting meals and asking for rides and playdates for my 9 year-old. I pay a neighbor’s teenager to mow our lawn. I take our dog to doggie daycare. It’s humbling to need so much from so many. I hold the disconnect between the supposed ease of testicular cancer in relation to other cancers and the reality of how hard it is.
My relief at finally being in a hospital room fades rapidly. In the room next door, a man screams. “FUCK!” he yells, over and over. “Fuck all of you! Where’s the real fucking doctor?!” I wonder if I should be scared. My husband turns to me, opens his eyes momentarily.
“Someone’s having a worse night than I am,” he jokes. I finally exhale.
The medical assistant charged with starting an IV pricks my husband’s arm, and he cries out, tensing his arms, moving his legs involuntarily. “They’ve had some trouble finding veins during chemo,” I say. “Can you try something else?”
Different nurses and assistants come in and out, each one confident that they’ll be able to place the needle correctly. Each time, I have to tell the story again. Isn’t this in his chart? I wonder. I don’t know what to do; maybe this is how it is to place an IV during chemo? As with all things cancer related, I am completely in the dark. Finally, I ask the charge nurse if they can give him something to relax him a little. The next day, I’ll realize I was thinking of a benzodiazepine—some valium, maybe—but when the nurse says “Like morphine?” I shrug and say, “Sure.”
I go find a bathroom, and when I walk by the room next door, I see that the man screaming obscenities is fully covered in tattoos—arms, face, neck, everything not covered by the black t-shirt on top or the blanket over his legs. He has two people next to him, and I wonder who they are. Friends? Family? At the nurse’s station, I hear a nurse say that security is just down the hall, and that the police are on their way. I imagine a story for him: he’s detoxing from opioids, in deep pain.
The charge nurse returns, jabs a needle full of morphine into my husband’s butt cheek. The next time, she gets the IV needle in on the first try. “I was getting ready to have the guy in the room next door find a vein for you,” my husband quips, and she laughs. Opioid jokes are apparently funny in the ER. The man next door quiets, finally, and I wonder if he is sleeping or if he has been moved to a different part of the hospital.
I text with the babysitter, who was miraculously able to come over last-minute. I’m grateful for this small win—a familiar sitter, texting pictures of the kitten we got shortly after my husband’s diagnosis. As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, get a kitten.
After surgery last month, the oncologist gave my husband a few options for treatment. We could watch and wait, which he recommended, given the 70% chance that the cancer wouldn’t return. We could do surgery to remove the lymph nodes in his back where the cancer would return, if it returned, and leaving a scar from pubic bone to chest. Or we could do a round of chemo, reducing the odds of spread or recurrence to effectively zero. This seemed like the best option, especially since he would need three rounds if the cancer were to return.
My mantra this summer has been “bad summer, good future,” but as I sit in the ER room holding my husband’s hand, I wonder if we chose correctly. Correctly, as if that were a thing. Each of the options came with tremendous downsides, but my husband seems to have experienced every complication possible, and in the coming days, we’ll return to the hospital again and again to address them. I keep track of each appointment in a Google doc titled “Medical,” which has gotten so long that it takes ages to scroll to the bottom to add information.
The fluids drip, and the nurse pushes some anti-nausea meds that they haven’t tried yet. The next day, we’ll talk to a nurse practitioner at the cancer center who will realize that several of the anti-nausea medications he’s been taking are in the same class, therefore causing nausea instead of alleviating it. The nurse will stop most medications, instruct him to move around every hour to recalibrate his equilibrium, tell him to make sure he is getting electrolytes. I will file it all away, the various bits of knowledge and understanding I now have, things I never could have known before going through this.
Over the next several weeks, my husband starts to feel better. As summer turns to fall, and our thirteen year-old starts at a new middle school, my constant vigilance subsides.
I’m working half time at our local elementary school. In my downtime, I take our dog for long walks, write, and snuggle with our kitten on the couch. My husband and I go to lunch on Fridays, reclaiming some of the time we did not have together during the summer.
This summer, I napped any chance I could, putting myself down like an overtired toddler. But now I can feel myself moving beyond the need for constant rest, and finding some space for joy, for wonder. Last month, I attended a writing conference in Monterey Bay. I spent all of my spare time walking along the rocky shore. I watched sea otters playing in the surf, breathed the briny smell of the ocean, and snuggled into my hoodie, feeling the cold breeze on my skin. As my family has recovered from both mental and physical trauma, my own nervous system has recovered, too. I watch the waves, but they do not pull me under.
Cover photo by Mpho Mojapelo on Unsplash
About the Author
Megan Vos is a writer, educator, mom, and native New Hampshirite who lives in Boulder, CO. After many years of writing nonfiction, she is working on a novel, which feels simultaneously freeing and terrifying. Megan loves playing cards with her family, walks with her dog, spring skiing, good books, and strong lattes. A former producer of Boulder’s Listen to Your Mother show, she has also shared her stories in Story Collective shows. Megan’s essays have been published in Motherscope, Kindred, Motherwell, Journal of Expressive Writing, and MUTHA. You can find her on Substack at megansvos.substack.com.
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