collapse in a pool of relief and happiness
After I got her phone call, I started whooping and yelling in the company bathroom (thus ensuring that everyone on the first floor was positive either wild sex was going on in the stalls or painful masturbation).
The hell of the last few weeks was over.
You see, we'd taken a trip to Bakersfield to visit the folks (there will be a couple hilarious pictures of this posted later); the drive back was fairly uneventful.
On what seemed like the next day, my son shut down. Where he'd previously laughed and smiled, there were only dull looks and withdrawn stares. He'd smile at his toys, but where there was previously babbling and cooing was only silence.
My wife has too much of a flair for the negative, but she even had me convinced our son had autism. I was mentally preparing myself for the therapy sessions we'd have to go to, and clinging to the hope that his case was mild and that with therapy he'd live a basically normal life.
I was trying not to think of one thing -- that not being able to read Lord of the Rings to him, as my father had done with us, or not being able to play board games with him, would kill me.
But he brightened up, and started laughing, and playing, and being the happy kid who can't friggin' shut up -- just like I'd always hoped he'd be. Neither of us are very worried about autism now, although we're still getting a specialist appointment for him. (Correction: one of us is not very worried about autism. Sigh.)
Then the bottom fell out.
Mer had a very hard pregnancy; during the course of it, she had a fibroid that twisted around on itself, causing no end of pain. It eventually died and shrunk away after our son was born, but it meant that she would have to have a checkup after a certain amount of time to make sure the fibroid hadn't affected anything else.
They discovered a mass on her liver. The initial checkup couldn't establish whether it was cancerous or benign. Mer showed me the results online, and they started to look bleaker and bleaker the more I read. I'm a person who has to cling to some shred of hope, and it was ebbing and ebbing away, while the abyss grew in the back of my head.
As I went to sleep one night -- what am I saying, I never slept that well -- I was forced to think of things I never thought I would have to think about at all: what would I do? How could I ever cope? The love of my life, gone? Could I even afford to live anywhere?
A CT scan; more inconclusive results... the outlook, bleaker.
A final checkup; preparing for the phone call that will end life as you know it.
No results the next morning; concentrating on just getting through the morning without breaking down, and concentrating on the little things that bring happiness, such as playing with your son.
I went to stupid work, trudged through the stupid parking lot, saw the stupid blood truck, where at least lying on my back and eating cookies with a needle in my arm seemed like a better use of my time that actually doing work, and gave blood...
...desperately had to pee when i got out, went inside the first floor bathroom, and had myself in my hands when the phone rang...
...and the next moments I'll always remember -- because i felt like running around the entire building with my pants around my ankles, crying with the sheer joy of it.
Benign. Benign. Benign. Benignbenignbenignbenignbenign...
On the way home that day, I bought a lottery ticket as Beethoven's 9th was playing in my head.
Needless to say, there are a few things to take from all this:
1) Love. Don't take it for granted.
2) Life.
3) Fighting with your spouse over almost any number of things that people fight about is really fucking stupid. It may be trite, but you just don't know how much time you've got, and you better not goddamn waste it.
4) We're having a giant fucking party. For all intents and purposes it will be another board game party, but it might as well be called the "We Don't Have Autism and Cancer Blowout, 2005". I will personally be a drunken fool.