Day 15

Art is home. Funny though, I find myself less excited than I thought I would be. His arrival home simply signifies that another phase in this journey is beginning. I imagined him home and well. Instead he is home and sick. Nothing is like I expect and I didn't know I expected something different till it didn't happen. The dampened excitement about having him back forces me to acknowledge, again, this is a scary roller coaster ride. I don't know when the ups, downs and corners are coming. All I can do is hang on and hope the person next to me doesn't mind my leaning into them or my screams.

I don't know! In my completely useless and highly inaccurate view of cancer, I just thought you get diagnosed, you get chemo, you get better. That was it. I had heard about the side effects of chemo but ya know, well, I had just heard about them. I had never seen them

The medical profession is not perfect. Chemo could kill him, an infection could kill him, the lymphoma could kill him. We believe it's all 100% fool proof. We believe it's an exact science. It's not. We know so little about the human body. We think we know so much. In 30 years, I have not doubt that we will look back on chemo and think it barbaric. I look at it in Art, rimming his eyes with red, evaporating all his energy to the point where he can't finish a complete full sentence before he drifts off into a chemo-induced sleep and I see the grossness of the drugs. Intellectually, I know it's making him better. Emotionally, it is killing the image of the man I knew. I trust that he will come back. Waiting is the most painful thing I have done in my life.

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