Daddy -O

It’s been my experience that cancer dawns slowly, first you notice the lump, ignore it for awhile, forget about it maybe and then some time later you realize it’s still resolutely there. In the doctor’s waiting room you’re nervous but certain she’ll say it’s nothing, a lipoma, a cyst and you’ll leave feeling reprieved. She doesn’t though, she says it could be something, probably not but let’s do a scan, a blood test, a biopsy. Still, you wait nervously for the results certain it’s nothing more than the closest call you’ve ever had. When the cancer call comes you’ve done enough research on the web to know what your options are and so you hope for the most benign cancer. So anyway, what I’m trying to say is that when the say it’s metastatic pancreatic cancer you aren’t as freaked out as you ought to be.

My father called me one evening and I ignored the call. The next morning on my way home from and a meeting I remembered he called and listened to his message, “I’m having trouble breathing so I’m going to the ER tomorrow”. I don’t care how sexist I sound, women just KNOW, and I knew that day. He had a chest xray, then a CT scan, then a biopsy, this took weeks, a crawl to diagnosis. He called me every day speculating on the biopsy, ‘it can’t be too bad if they haven’t called me back right away’, and more stuff like that. Oh Daddy. Daddy O.