Life B.C. (before cancer), Part One

    Dear Reader, if you already know our back story, you may wish to skip this post altogether.  Do your holiday shopping.  Go walk the dog.  Or check out one of the fine blogs listed in my blog roll to pass the time.

    But, if you've been wondering how we ended up in the queue for proton therapy--read on.

    We have to flip the calendar back to mid-April 2009 to pick up the start of the story.  All of a sudden, in the middle of an ordinary semester, P.'s s, ch, and r speech sounds became slushy, especially those that were part of a consonant cluster in the middle of a word.  As a professor, he wasn't finding it too easy to be in front of a class trying say words like literature and research.  This was seriously ticking him off.
    Since he was in the midst of a whole lot of dental work at the time, we figured that something was going on toothwise, so he went back to his dentist to get things checked out.  But when he returned from the appointment that day, he said, off-handedly, "It was odd at the dentist's.  When he told me to move my tongue over to the left, I couldn't really do it."
    You remember where you were standing when you first heard about the attack on the Twin Towers, don't you?  And where you were when the Challenger blew up?  Or, if you are my age, what was all around you when you heard the news about JFK?
     Well, this was my own private version of that sort of thing.  If you're wondering, I was standing in the kitchen at that moment, with that day's mail in my hand.
     I don't have any idea of what was in the mail, but I do know that P.'s remark about his tongue set in motion a rapid fire flipbook in my mind, one in which the pages snapped from xray, to MRI, to biopsy, and then, brain surgery, chemo, and radiation.
    P., bless his heart, was oblivious to this, and was wondering, I'm sure, why I demanded that he call his primary care physician on the spot to get some testing done.  But he followed through (I didn't really give him a choice), and, sure enough, his PCP was concerned enough to order an MRI.
    So P. went off to get the scan done on a Wednesday, and then we didn't hear anything for a couple of days.  I shut that flipbook in my mind, in the spirit of no news is good news.  
    I was even more reassured when the PCP's physician's assistant called late that Friday and told us that a little something showed up on the scan, but it really wasn't anything at all.
    He told us not to worry.  I didn't worry.  In fact, I think both of us sort of forgot about the scan over the weekend, although P. continued to kvetch about his tiny little articulation problems.
    So I was blindsided on the following Monday morning when his PCP called me in my office on my cell phone.  Good, he said, I found one of you.  I've been trying to track you and P. down all over town.  You need to find him and tell him to go to the emergency department right now.
    How's that for heart-stopping drama?
    I'm going to leave you here, in a Perils of Pauline sort of way. More details about the back story in tomorrow's post (Life B.C., Part Two).  

   But first I have to tell you this: Over the years in our long, long marriage, whenever P. would get a smidge testy about some little thing (read: start freaking out over nothing), my snappy comeback has been: Oh for crying out loud, it's not brain cancer!    
     Now I'm thinking, why couldn't I have said something like Oh for crying out loud, it's not a lottery win!  This wouldn't have made much sense, but could have turned out to be much more useful eventually, don't you think?