Remembering Jane’s NET cancer death

Bloody awful. That’s the only way I can describe yesterday. Yesterday was the second anniversary of my wife’s death from NET cancer and, despite the stellar efforts of many friends and former students, it was a day long on misery and short on productive work–or a positive mental state.

I remembered her laugh…

To be honest, I have been in a funk for several weeks. Whenpeople try to tell me that mourning lasts a single year, I want to slap them. Mourning is an individual thing. It lasts as long as it lasts. There is no magical day or moment that it ends. Life is not a TV show. Life is simply life. And when the life of those you love ends you have to live through what comes after at your own pace and not at someone else’s.

Yesterday’s rain suited my mood. As I stood at Jane’s grave, with the rain pelting down and soaking me through to the skin, I thought about a lot of different things.

NET cancer: the horse disguised as a zebra

I thought first about the day she was finally diagnosed correctly. It made me angry. She had suffered for so long with the painful bloating and gas and diarrhea and flushing–and it was only when her heart began to go that we finally found out what had been wrong with her all those years.

…we were willing to try…

It was not her doctors’ fault. They had been trained on the idea that when you hear hoofbeats you do not go looking for zebras. And NET cancer has been called a zebra for so long that its cancer ribbon is a zebra-stripe print. We are only beginning to understand how prevalent this disease may actually be.

We are doing a better job of training doctors in medical school about NET cancer and carcinoid syndrome, but we need to do more in-service training of those who finished medical school before the recent emphasis on the disease. And we need to develop new and better ways of detecting the disease earlier.

The kindness of strangers who became friends

I also thought back to those final days in the hospital and the incredible kindness of Jane’s doctors and nurses–and all the other staff and technicians who worked with her as she tried to beat her cancer into submission.

It was not her doctors’ fault.

And I remembered the “family meeting” I had with her doctors and members of the nursing staff when Jane was still in her first coma. I remember telling them we would do everything we could to help them find answers to NET cancer, regardless of the outcome of Jane’s case. It was something Jane and I had talked about many times in the weeks leading up to her heart surgery. We did not care how experimental something was, if that approach made sense we were willing to try it–up to the point that there no longer was a fighting chance for her recovery.

Life before NET cancer

But I also remembered the person she was before the diagnosis. I remembered her laugh and the smile she got when she was really delighted with something. I thought about our first dates, our wedding, and the long years of our marriage. I remembered her strengths, but I also remembered the weaknesses and the arguments we sometimes had–and how no matter the argument, we always woke up the next morning happy in each other’s company–the anger vanished in the night like a bad dream.

…it was a day long on misery…

I talked to her yesterday about the work I have been doing–and swore to her again that we would beat this disease, just as we had promised each other on the day of her first diagnosis.

That promise will take time and money and huge amounts of effort. But we will get there.

In the end, NET cancer will die.