Some of you know this handsome couple and some of you don’t.
This is my cute little redheaded brother Richard and his beautiful wife Cindy.
Rick and Cindy have been together for twenty-eight years and married for twenty-four of those years.
On a Friday Cindy got a headache. This headache progressed all weekend long becoming unbearable and causing her to vomit. Now you know the pain is really bad if it makes you vomit. You can’t even imagine what that’s like until you’ve experienced it.
A trip to the doctor on Monday diagnosed Cindy with a migraine. The doctor gave her a “migraine cocktail” which is a mixture of medicines that is supposed to lessen the severity of the attack but it didn’t help and that night found Rick and Cindy at the emergency room of the hospital.
The hospital agreed with the original diagnoses, it was a migraine. They sent her home.
The headache persisted and Cindy, unhappy with the first doctor, went to a different doctor. This doctor couldn’t understand why no one had yet ordered a CT scan. He did so and Cindy went for the scan. That was when they discovered it wasn’t just a migraine, it was a “dark mass” and it was pressing on the left side of the cerebellum.
The cerebellum is in the rear part of the brain and typically consists of two hemispheres connected by a thin central region. Its main function is to control and coordinate muscular activity and maintain balance.
They decided it was a cyst and they drained it to relieve the pressure and they did a biopsy.
It wasn’t just a cyst. It was cancer.
A full body scan was ordered and they found two more dark masses in her right lung.
Cindy had stage four lung cancer.
Stage four means the cancer has spread outside the lung to other parts of the body.
I can only imagine that at this point Rick and Cindy had a lot of talking to do.
What would you do if you were diagnosed with cancer? We can all speculate but until you are actually in that position, you don’t really know what you would do.
“Cannabis oil,” my niece Bambi and Richard’s daughter has suggested. “I’ve been reading really good things on it’s use with stage four lung cancer.”
Cannabis oil does not make you “high” or “stoned” from what I read on the internet.
In the end Rick and Cindy decided on Cancer Treatment Centers of America and they caught a plane to Chicago. After meeting with the neurosurgeon he recommended surgery to remove the tumor from Cindy’s cerebellum and they didn’t let any moss gather under their feet either, let me tell you! They did the surgery right away.
All went well and Cindy came through the surgery just fine.
Cindy was scheduled to go home today (Monday the first of November) but unfortunately, had a setback.
Hospitals are funny, don’t you know? They want to make sure that all your inner workings are working the way they are supposed to work before they let you go home. One of those things is your pooper.
Cindy really wanted to make that happen and despite giving it a valiant effort, wasn’t having any luck. Rick left her to get some coffee and Metamucil and returned a half hour later only to find that Cindy’s head was hurting again.
Cindy had pushed a little too hard and caused a bleed at the surgery site. Back into surgery she goes and they repair the bleeders. I think there were two. Cindy did well and after the surgery they kept her asleep for a couple of days.
I talked to Richard today (Monday).
“They woke her up yesterday to check her responses and she did fine. She followed commands; squeeze my hand, open your eyes -- that kind of stuff.”
I guess they put her back to sleep because Richard went on to say that they would wake her again today and if all goes well, they could go home in a week,
“Currently Cindy is stable,” Rick concluded.
“Can I write the story and share it with everyone?” I asked.
“Yeah. I don’t like having to tell the same story over and over again. I like to just tell one person and they can relay it on to everyone else.”
This statement made me doubly glad that I haven’t been calling and bothering him in this time of crisis. Instead I had been getting all of my information from Kayla, Cindy’s granddaughter. But in the case of this phone call I needed to have Richard’s permission to write the story. Not everyone wants their trials and tribulations put out there for the world to see.
I talked to Momma on the phone later Monday and told her about my conversation with Richard. “Did you know that Cindy’s brain bleed was because she strained too hard to have a bowel movement?”
“No,” she answered and that is pretty much what I expected her to say.
“Do I put that part in my story?”
“I don’t know.”
“Here’s the thing. I often times write about that kind of stuff so people know. Like when I wrote about Pepto-Bismol causing you to have black poop. If you were an 80 year old women and you were having stomach problems and the doctor told you to take Pepto-Bismol and all of a sudden you had black poop...what would you think?”
“She would think there is blood in her stool,” Momma said. She knew. She knew that black stool is often a sign of bleeding in the upper intestinal tract.
“Exactly and that’s what happened with an elderly lady that I was taking care of. She panicked and went back to the doctor only to find out it was because of the Pepto-Bismol. Now the people who read my letters will know this and that’s why I write about that kind of stuff. I opt for the truth.”
“Okay then, that’s what you should do.”
There was also another reason that Cindy had tried so hard to have a bowel movement and I can’t tell you what that is.
“Oh yeah, Peg, now all of a sudden you’re going to be tactful?” you ask.
Well, no. That isn’t the reason. I confess that I didn’t hear it. Richard and I were talking and I must have been thinking about my next question and not listening because the next thing I hear is Richard saying with a laugh, “…and she doesn’t want to go through that again!”
I breezed on to my next question without having what he said register with me and it wasn’t until later that I realized I missed something.
I don’t know the journey these two have in front of them. I have no experience with lung cancer and I can’t guess what problems or stumbling blocks they may encounter along the way.
I can offer no advice.
The only thing I can do is to ask you to pray for Cindy and her family in this terribly hard time they are facing. We all know the power of prayer.
I am also going to ask you to help me send her a little encouragement, a hug in a card, a glimmer of hope or in the very least a ray of sunshine.
Even though no one deserves such hardships in life, I want to tell you that this is a fine family. Good people. And we must all remember...
God is good.
God loves us and only wants the best for us. We don’t always understand His reasons for putting us through the fire, but ultimately, His will will be done.
Amen.
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