(Please note: This is Adam writing.)
Megan had been talking about starting a blog for at least a
year. She always enjoyed reading the
blogs of her friends and coworkers, and thought that she had enough interesting
things to say that she should share them with others. But she got stuck on one thing – a name. She couldn’t decide what to call the
blog. Since it was just going to include
general thoughts and wasn’t going to be about one thing in particular, she had
a hard time trying to pick a word or phrase that could sum it all up. (I recently had a hard time summing up her
life into 4 pages, so I can sympathize with her attempt to find the perfect
title.) For months, she threw out ideas,
some of which I liked, and some of which I didn’t. I tried to help, but we could never come up
with the home run, the one that said, “THIS is it!” After a few months of trying, life got in the
way, and the blog fell to the backburner.
For most of 2012, Meg didn’t talk about starting a blog
anymore. Then in December, she hinted
that she might be ready to finally do it, for real this time. She said that she had a lot of thoughts in
her head that she needed to get out, things that were too tough to talk about
in person, even with me. I thought this
was a great idea. I knew she was having
a tough time mentally, but she didn’t want to go to support groups or talk to
someone, because those groups would make it harder to remain positive and to not
break down emotionally. She spent a few
days setting it up without really telling me, loaded all the pictures on, and
wrote the first two entries. One day she
emailed me a link and asked me to review it.
She never had to ask if I thought the title was a good idea. She took something that I said to her one
night when I was struggling to keep her spirits up, and she modified it to
include both of us. She told me that she
made me an author and that I could contribute if I wanted to. I fully intended to, but then her posts
started getting so emotional, and I didn’t want to break her stride.
Megan’s last post was on March 10, 2013. Her liver, covered with metastatic tumors
from gastro-esophageal cancer, was already on a downward spiral, and we were
running out of options. It quickly got
worse, and Megan passed during the first hour of March 21. I am so glad that she was able to leave us
with two months worth of blog entries.
We had so many tough conversations over her last year. Some of the things she said are burned into
my head, but many of those conversations I won’t remember as time passes. So to have a short record of Meg, in her own
words, is a gift she left for us.
But the story can’t end there. Last summer, I scoured the internet looking
for information about stomach cancer. I
found a few blogs that had some good information, info that I wasn’t finding
anywhere else. But many of those blogs
had one common feature – the entries ended suddenly, without any warning. There was usually a post about how everything
was going well, then one about some sort of minor complication, and then that
would be it. I don’t want Megan’s story
to end that way. She could have named
her blog “This is My Fight”, but she didn’t.
It’s our fight, and my end of that deal isn’t over. I’ve only just started to figure out exactly
what I can personally do to make a difference in the fight against stomach
cancer; you will hear more about that in the coming months. But what I do know I can do is at least try
to finish the story on this blog, so that others can learn from our
experience. I’m an engineer, not a
writer, so I’m not sure how easy this will be or how often I will post. But I also have thoughts in my head that I
need to get out, and I will try to do it here, openly and honestly. I am hoping to write about the following
things:
- What we learned about cancer during Meg's battle
- Info about stomach / esophageal cancer
- Things to be aware of as a caregiver
- My life as I try to deal with the aftermath of Meg's cancer
- Megan
I can’t promise that this is going to always be a positive
blog, full of uplifting stories and memories.
I’m not really sure how I’m going to be feeling weeks or months from
now. But one of the things I’m most
scared of is forgetting. I don’t want my
memories to become cloudy as the years pass by.
So I’m writing this for myself, but also hoping that some of you will
continue to read it. And I hope that at
least one person scrambling for answers after hearing a stomach cancer
diagnosis will be able to find this blog and quickly get up to speed on the
things it took me 9 months to figure out.
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