And then...

Friday, they finally received word of an open bed at MGH and off I went in the ambulance with my sister. I didn’t even remember she had been with me until she reminded me. She held my hand and I squeezed each time we went over a bump because each bump hurt so much.

I barely remember meeting the doctor or even the discussions I had with him. The word “cancer” was mentioned, but it still seems surreal to me. I don’t think I really understood what was happening. Laurie, my sister, says I was talking about all my investments and my will and trying to figure out if everything was in order, but I don’t remember doing that. She said I was really scaring her by talking like that, but I honestly only maybe vaguely remember it.

Because there was some sort of cancer diagnosis in the works, the doctor couldn’t operate on my leg immediately. Putting a rod through the bone of someone with cancer in their leg would spread the cancer so there would be no fixing of the bone until an official diagnosis was handed down. In the meantime, he put an external fixator on my leg so I wouldn’t have to be in traction anymore.

It’s a type of traction, but it’s fixed so no one can knock it. It’s an external rod that is attached to my bone at the top and the bottom and set to a fixed length so my leg is fixed. The doctor did that on Sunday night, I believe. It might have been a little better, but it still wasn’t great and I was still on lots of pain killers and I still have memory gaps from that time.

I remember I missed my kids and I was worried about them tremendously. They didn’t want to come to the hospital and it wouldn’t have been good for them to see me in that kind of pain so they did not visit. It was very hard for all three of us.

Since my ex-husband and I split up, the girls and I have been a team especially because their dad is so far away. Besides that, they were still little. When this all started, they were 5 ½ and almost 7; kindergarten and second grade. And, even when they were babies and Jeff and I were still together, I was a stay-at-home Mom so they were always with me. Now they had to get used to a new house, new schools, new friends, no Mom and Duncan’s rules. It was just as hard, if not harder, for Duncan, too.

Next

Duncan picked the girls up that afternoon from daycare and told them what had happened. Since the girls’ father lives in Oregon, Duncan had to immediately kick in as full-time care giver getting them to bed at night and off to school in the morning. There were many things dumped on both of us with no notice. For some reason that I still don’t understand, I initially didn’t want Jeff, the girls’ dad, to know. I refused to call him and I wouldn’t let anyone else call him either. Maybe it was the embarrassment….I’m really not sure.

On the morning of the surgery, the surgeon came to my room and told me that a healthy woman of my age shouldn’t have snapped her femur and that there had to be something more going on. He said that it was beyond his scope of expertise and he was sending me to Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to be seen by an orthopedic oncologist. This was a Wednesday, I think.

The problem with MGH is that it tends to be full. I lay in my bed in New Hampshire in traction, in a lot of pain and loaded up with narcotics which I don’t recall doing much good, while we waited for an open bed at MGH. There is a lot of those three days that I don’t recall. I don’t know if the drugs have made me block it out or I’ve just blocked it out for my sanity or a combination of both, but my sister, Dad and Duncan have all told me things that I don’t remember saying or doing.

I do remember a lot of pain. Each time a nurse needed to move me, for an X-ray or some other thing, it was just awful. It was almost beyond tolerance. I have never experienced such tremendous pain in my entire life. Having a baby was pretty bad, but it ended and then there was a beautiful baby. This was not ending and there wasn’t anything beautiful waiting for me at the other end.

The Fun Continues

The first thing I remember thinking when this happened was that I was worried about my daughter. I wanted her to be safely on the bus and not worrying about me on her first day in a new school. The neighbors had done a wonderful job of telling her that I was okay (although I really wasn’t) and getting her on the bus.

After that, I remember being highly embarrassed by the whole thing. We had only moved into the neighborhood in May and really just barely knew people. Now it was the beginning of September and I was lying in the street with a broken leg, an ambulance and a fire truck around me…..how mortifying! I was also embarrassed at the thought of Duncan seeing me like that. We had been active and happy and always doing something or going somewhere and I didn’t want him to see me like that. What if he didn’t like me anymore? I had always done my best to make him think I was perfect and could do anything and keep up with him…now I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. What would he think of me if I wasn’t perfect?

We had been together for a year and only living together for a couple of months. Was the whole thing blown now? I didn’t really think he’d leave me, but at the same time, I was so afraid that he’d be disappointed in me and everything would change between us.

Duncan met me at the hospital, the X-rays confirmed a snapped right femur and I was scheduled for surgery which would be a rod through my bone (the standard fix for a broken femur).

The Fun Begins

While waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I called Duncan from one of the neighbor’s cell phones. I think he was as incredulous as I was, but he headed up from Boston to meet me at the hospital. The ambulance drivers kept asking me if I had osteoporosis as they tried to figure out why a relatively healthy 39-year-old woman would snap her femur running down the street. Being the largest bone in the human body, it doesn’t just snap running down the street without some underlying reason.

One of the ambulance staff cut my pant leg and confirmed that the bone had not broken through the skin. There was just a big lump in the middle of my leg where the bone was lying on itself. And, man did it hurt! The ambulance person said he was going to pull on my ankle to stretch my leg back out and promised me that it would feel much better after he did. He was right. The pain was from the muscle spasms because they weren’t taut and stretching my leg out put them back in a normal position. The next thing was that they had to lift me on the stretcher and get me in the ambulance. This was not easily done without excruciating pain and so they called the fire department to get some extra paramedics to help.

The Fall of 2004 (pun intended)

Anyway, back to the summer of 2004, Duncan and I had a great time whitewater rafting although I admit that I found myself sighing from exhaustion every once in a while. But, I was raised to just suck it up and push on so that’s what I did. Besides the rafting, we ate some good food, were able to practice our French with the locals when they’d indulge us, visited a beautiful cathedral and even browsed through the Montreal Museum of Art before we headed back home.

The Sunday after the rafting trip, I woke up with a sore right leg that felt like I had pulled a muscle. It stayed sore off and on for the next couple of weeks, but it just felt like a muscle pull and definitely was not the type of thing you’d go see a doctor about. At the end of August, a few days after we came home from Montreal, the girls came home from Montana, we celebrated Cassie’s 7^th birthday with a surprise party and I received a phone call with a job offer.

I had applied for and interviewed for the job as a Serials Librarian at a local college back in June and they had wanted me to start right away. However, I had already planned to take the summer off, stay home with my kids, get us settled into our new home with Duncan and take three classes toward my master’s degree which I was on target to finish in December.

So, at that time I told my potential employer that I would not be able to start until September 1^st. They, of course, continued their job search, but called me in mid-August to offer me the job starting September 1^st. This was yet another piece of good luck in our long string of wonderful things that had happened since Duncan and I had met the previous August.

With daycare all arranged for the few days I would need it before the girls went to school for the fall, I happily and eagerly started the job on September 1^st which I believe was a Wednesday. I worked for the three days that week and then the following Monday was a day off for Labor Day.

Tuesday, September 7^{th (five years ago today)} was both my girls first day of school; one for full-day private kindergarten and the other for second grade in the public school system. I drove one over to her kindergarten, got her settled and then we came back home to get my older one ready and over to her bus stop.

All the neighborhood parents were at the bus stop with their kids; cameras in hand, dressed in their work clothes to dash off to their respective jobs after the bus picked the kids up. I was one of them. Being new to the area, we didn’t realize that she needed to carry her bus pass with her until one of the parents told us so.

I started running back toward the house to grab the bus pass and noticed that I felt a pull in the groin area of my right leg. So, I slowed down, but I was still jogging a little when, all of a sudden I heard a snap that sounded like a tree branch had broken. The next thing I knew, I was falling and, at the same time, realized that what I thought was a tree branch breaking was actually my right leg.

I had stopped my fall with my left hand which was now bleeding because I had skinned the palm. I looked down to see a big lump in the middle of my right femur under my pant leg. I think I was in shock in a way, but I started yelling for help. I also remember feeling my leg for blood because I was afraid the bone had broken through my skin, but I didn’t feel any. All the parents and kids were standing just over a little hill and down the street a little way so no one saw me go down and it took a minute or so for them to realize that it was me yelling for help.

A couple of the parents came running and I told them that I thought I’d broken my leg.

One of them had the good sense to keep the kids at the bus stop, tell them that I was okay and also to tell the bus driver, who had just arrived, to back out because I was in the middle of the road and she wouldn’t be able to get by me. I am especially grateful to the parents for keeping my daughter from seeing me like that although she has repeatedly told me since then that she knew it was me yelling and she was worried about me all day.

The Prelude - Summer 2004

It’s hard to know how to begin or even what I want to say. All was moving along swimmingly that summer. Duncan and I had had a string of good luck; cruises to the Eastern Caribbean, a winter ski trip to Vermont with my kids, and now we were getting ready for a whitewater rafting weekend in Montreal while my kids were in Montana with their Dad.

Looking back, I had been more tired than usual, but having lived with tiredness for so long, I didn’t really think much of it. Mothers are tired most of the time, aren’t they? I also hadn’t been gaining any weight no matter what I was eating which I thought was pretty cool given that I was approaching 40 and my sisters and Mom are always struggling with weight. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that that should have been a red flag for me especially since I had always struggled with weight, too. But, ever since my now ex-husband told me that he was leaving me way back in September of 2002, I hadn’t had a weight problem. As a matter of fact, that was the first time that stress didn’t make me eat. Instead, I had no appetite whatsoever during that time and dropped 10 pounds by the Christmas of that year. It was an extra 10 pounds granted and I had been struggling to get rid of it for years so it didn’t make me too thin, it just put me where I had wanted to be. It shouldn’t have been that easy, though.

I was raised in a family that didn’t complain about minor aches and pains. Unless I was running a raging fever, I always went to school. I gave birth to a baby girl without any pain medication. I had been living with lupus (SLE) since 1989 and usually had some ache or pain somewhere in my body; big deal, life goes on...right?