FathersStory's Blog

The next day (Saturday) I was doing some yardwork when I started talking over the fence with our next door neighbor.  My wife had told her about our son, so that’s two families in the neighborhood who now know.  She also was very supportive, but we still were keeping low with the news.

 

My son has a CT scan scheduled for today.  The preparation is to drink a barium concoction.  They give you flavoring to put in it, but he said it still tasted awful.

 

Good thing I did the yardwork early because it started snowing shortly before we left for the hospital.  We registered, and went back to the testing area.  He was taken right away, so all we could do was wait.  The test didn’t take long, and we went home.  We’d find out the results on Monday, one week after the initial doctor visit.  It had been an eventful week, to say the least.

 

Monday came, and it was the first day our son went back to school since the surgery.  My wife asked him if anyone at school asked him about it.  He said, "If they asked I told."  A statement that would manifest itself later this day.

 

I took the day off work for his doctor’s appointment.  And the day off work, the day just went slowly.  That made the waiting until the appointment, which was after school that day, even more anxious.  Having heard the phone call last week from the doctor who gave us the second opinion saying he would recommend chemotherapy, I had an idea what would be said.  But I still held out hope.

 

That hope was shattered.  We met with the urologist who did the surgery, and he said there was evidence that the cancer may have spread.  There were two enlarged lymph nodes in my son’s abdomen.  Not by much but they were enlarged.  Also, there was a nodule on his lung.  All evidence that the tumor was a non-seminoma, which is the more aggressive kind of tumor.  He recommended chemotherapy and gave us the name of a local oncologist.  We left, knowing the road ahead would be bumpy.

 

We got home and had dinner.  As we were cleaning up, the doorbell rang.  It was another neighbor.  She asked to see my wife.  I led her into the kitchen.  As soon as she saw my wife, she started crying.  So did my wife, and they hugged.  I’m watching this and I said, “Sandy (the mom of my son’s best friend) told you, didn’t she?”  No, she said, she heard it from her daughter.

 

So our son had started telling some of his friends.  That showed us he was coming to grips with this, which was a good thing.

 

Our neighbor offered to make us dinner, get additional doctors, do whatever she and her family could.  She also gave our son a cross from her mother.  The cross, she said, contained part of the cross that was used in Jesus’ crucifixion.  She also gave us a small bottle of holy oil, encouraging us to anoint our son with it.

 

A very special gift.  She also knew a neurologist at a north suburban hospital and offered to call her to find somebody we could talk to about this.  We asked her to do it, figuring more information is better than less.  Her concern touched us deeply.  But we still were hesitant to tell people about our son’s condition.  We figured it eventually would come out.  But we didn’t want to accelerate the process.  Heck, even our parents still don’t know at this point.

 

Next… meeting with oncologists to discuss what treatment awaits our son. And we all have our LIVESTRONG bracelets now.