Rainy Days and Mondays

My week began on Monday, with the Virginia Tech shootings. On Monday I was shaken, shocked, depressed, disgusted, and yet still thankful everyone I knew was OK after the episode.

Then Tuesday I found out I wasn't so untouched.

Now, let me get this out of the way immediately. It wasn't anyone I knew. It wasn't even so much anyone I knew of. But the mother of one of Mr M's former clarinet students was a victim. His student, who I also never met, but I heard much about from Mr M, was a slight snip of a girl, a middle-schooler. He always joked that her clarinet was as big as she was. And now, thanks to all this, she's a mother shy.

I also learned one of the victims was from Narrows. N'rows, I always call it here, a miniscule bump of a town between B'field and B'burg. It's where Mamaw Bowles lived, and my dad graduated from high school. I spent every summer of my life there, playing with my sister and my cousin Jacob, who still lives about a mile out of town. The deceased kid was a four-sport letterman, band member, and valedictorian of his class.

Then yesterday the news broke of Mr Cho's (I call him "Mr" even though that's a term of respect and he deserves none) package sent to NBC, and the news services jumping on it like the proverbial rooster on a junebug. Up until Wednesday I'd already seen and learned more about this guy than I ever cared to know, and now I know just enough to make me want to vomit. I know it's newsworthy that he made some sort of maniacal decision to spill his guts after the fact, but that doesn't mean we have to see the results of it. It adds nothing to the story, to him, and certainly not the victims. Nor his family, who are victims as well, and to whom this whole little foray into the surreal must be incredibly painful.

I found out last night that the mental health facility Cho was sent to after his first run-in with police was the facility Mr M was working at while getting his master's degree in psychology. He had no dealings with him at all, but it goes a little to show all you big-city folks out there how everything in a small town is so insular. (One more time, all together, with feeling - How can a man with that many past run-ins with mental health and the police buy a gun so easily? My mind will never unboggle.)

The videos and pictures are still showing today. Today is Thursday. It's raining here, a hard, steady, soaking rain that ruined my hairdo and washed out my clothes as I was running around getting groceries.

And today I learned that my father has "a cancer."

When I began my blog of Monday, I mentioned "family members and medical procedures." My dad had a biopsy and scope of his bronchial regions on Monday. He's known about this for approximately a month. He had a chest x-ray that showed something it wasn't supposed to show. They told my dad a cat scan was in order, which he had, and which showed a mass. Then he promptly hauled ass to Florida for three weeks, taking a worried wife with him and leaving two worried daughters behind. But hey, that's my dad. God love him. If he wanted to escape for a while, who were we to chain him to the house?

Finally, he called me from Florida, saying they were hauling ass back here, because he knew he had to get the tests done they wanted. And he had the biopsy and scope, and since Monday I've been living with, "Tests aren't in, but it looks suspicious."

I knew that today at 1:30 he had his appointment with the doctor. I had the afternoon off, and came back here to wait. And wait I did. It got to be 3:00, then 3:30, and 3:45. I knew the longer they were gone, the better the chances were of the news being bad. Finally they arrived at my house, shielding themselves from the pouring rain, at 4:00.

My dad began with, "Well, the news isn't good, but it isn't horrible." And he told me that yes, there was a malignancy in his mass. The mass was near his lung, but yet everything so far had showed his lungs were clear, and it was possible that the cancer wasn't coming from there. However, that wasn't a 100% certainty, as nothing seems to be a certainty in the world of cancer, other than it's a sucky world.

No surgery, no radiation. They're going chemo. And more tests. He's being referred to oncologists here in B'field to begin with, who'll give him their opinions and strategies, then it'll be up to him to decide if he wants second opinions, or to go to a larger town or hospital for the same or different treatment.

Dad said that while the doctor was concerned, that he was also optimistic. He said he'd had cancer patients who'd managed their tumors for as many as 10 years or more. He also gave my dad a long talk about attitude, which was good, because Dad needed that.

I've been on pins and needles for more than a month. The past week, the worry, the sadness, the dread - I've been near explosion. Or implosion. Some kind of plosion. I've been going through the motions of work, home, laundry, cleaning, but not giving any of it much attention. This afternoon, waiting for my folks to come by the Pod, I was a wreck.

And now I know. And it's sad. It's scary. But I feel like a weight's been lifted off my shoulders. When my friend Tina called Monday, after the shootings, we talked about my dad. She went through the same thing, losing her mother to this disease. She told me it would happen. "The waiting's the worst," she said. "Once you know, you start deciding what to do next." She was right.

It's not like I'm in Happyland here, though. I know it's not going to be easy. It may be worse than they first thought, chemo will be tough, and we'll all have to learn to live with the fact that Dad's a cancer patient. There will be worse days ahead, but hopefully we'll deal with those.

Stennie and I are the founding members of the "Let's Kick Cancer's Ass" campaign. Have been for several years. I hope my dad's wearing his pointy boots.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* I'll of course keep you posted as I know things. And will get back to the business of living, and blogging. Have two ideas written on paper, but not fleshed out. Maybe they'll show next week.