NET cancer as murderer
Imagine someone murdered your beloved wife or husband. Imagine spending all day, every day, in close and continuous personal contact with that killer. That is the relationship I have with NET cancer. I can’t put it behind bars. I can’t put it behind me. I live with it every waking hour of every day.
I can’t move on…
And at night, I sleep with it. It haunts my dreams. It is in the bed with me as palpably as Jane ever was. Sometimes it even seems to reach out for me in the night. But there is no love in its embrace–only the memory of death.
NET cancer touches everything I do
I spent yesterday working on American Cancer Society projects. I met with people at Bishop Connolly to go over logistics issues for the Relay for Life of Greater Fall River. Then I went to get my teeth cleaned. While I was there I checked to make sure the people there were joining us again this year for Relay. Then I drove to Boston to lobby for an increase in the tobacco tax so that fewer young people will get hooked on cigarettes—and fewer will die of lung cancer and heart disease.
NET cancer is so far down the totem pole that even $10 matters…
But every conversation—every meeting—took place with Jane’s NET cancer as the backdrop. These were all things we would have done together had she lived. I do them alone—even in a crowd of people—since she died.
My NET cancer breaking point
On the drive back from Boston I wished Jane had died of some other, more well-known, form of cancer—one with large foundations in place that raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each year dedicated to curing that cancer. There I could be a small cog in someone else’s machine. I would not have to write fundraising letters or plan events knowing that if they fail it will make a significant difference to the bottom line of what we have to fight this disease with.
I spent yesterday working on American Cancer Society projects.
NET cancer is so far down the totem pole that even $10 matters, $10,000 is more than pocket change, and $100,000 has a huge impact on what researchers can and can’t do. I sweat our expenses down to the dime: the difference of less than $5 between two printers for posters, tickets and stationary determines which one we use. We pay return postage for donations because the research says more people will donate more money if we do.
The killer is out there
But the struggle wears on me. This winter has been particularly tough. At a point when many widows and widowers have been able to move beyond the memory of death into the memories of the life they shared, I remain stuck in the last four months of Jane’s life—the time we fought daily against her onrushing death, the time her world was shrinking to the size of a diarrhea-soaked hospital bed, the time I could do nothing but hold her hand and remind her who she was, the time we had to say good-bye.
…at night, I sleep with it.
Jane said to me before she went into the hospital for heart surgery that if she did not make it she wanted me to move on. But so long as her killer is out there, so long as that killer is not pursued as aggressively as we pursue breast cancer or lung cancer or prostate cancer or colon cancer, I can’t move on any more than any man can move on while his wife’s murderer runs free.
