by Hope Tarr
I ran with my bouncy rescue dog, worked in sit-ups and played soccer with Braden. It took a week before I noticed the pain on my right side, an ovulation-type pain that pinched more when I sat down than when I stood. So I just stood more. Who had time to sit with three kids anyway?
“Something doesn’t feel right down here,” I told my friend as I ran a hand over my abdomen. “I think I’m getting a bladder infection.”
“Go to the doctor.”
“When I have time,” I answered, knowing that I never had time.
During the soccer playoffs, a big guy, nearly as tall and broad as Braden, kicked the ball toward my face. I managed to deflect it with my hand, and we thought I’d broken my wrist. I had no choice. I had to go to the doctor.
I sat on the crinkly, papered exam table while the nurse practitioner gently moved my sore wrist. “I don’t think it’s broken, but we should get an X-ray to rule out a fracture.”
“Oh, and while I’m here,” I said while she probed with cool fingers. “I think I’m getting a bladder infection. I’ve been bloated, and I have this twinge of pain on my right side.”
“Let’s take a feel. Lie back.” And her cool fingers moved to my abdomen. “Hmm…” she said, her smile fading. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
My life became a windup toy, wound to the limit and then set down to whirl on a flat surface. An ultrasound the next morning found a five-inch mass on my ovary. Five inches! Five inches that hadn’t been there less than six months before at my GYN visit.
Braden drove me immediately to my GYN. “It looks complex,” the doctor said as he examined my films. “I want you to see a GYN oncology surgeon tomorrow.” Oncologist?!
Braden drove me home. After I gave a quick, teary update to my mom, she continued to watch the kids while Braden and I retreated to sit on the steps of our back deck. It was late March, the world fresh and green. Birds chirped in our Leland pines and swooped down from the tall oak by the play set. My herbs waved in the light breeze, and daffodils bloomed along the fence. We sat there, next to each other on the steps, in silence. His hand found mine, warm and solid, as we stared outward at the world together. How different it suddenly looked.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“So am I,” he answered.
We met the oncologist the next morning. Since I was relatively young and healthy, she helped me hope for the best but also had the expertise to handle the worst. I would have the mass, which I’d named “Chucky,” removed in a week. I was sent home to take it easy so as not to rupture Chucky inside me. Okay?!
Monday morning I drove to a bookstore to write, trying to continue on as if I wasn’t carrying around a grapefruit-size time bomb in my abdomen. I drank a large chai latte, my favorite comfort drink, and proceeded to not write much of anything. Soon, my bladder began to fill. I called Braden fifteen minutes later after a trip to the bathroom.
“I can’t pee,” I whispered into my cell phone.
“What?”
“I can’t pee. I just drank a huge latte and have to go, but I can’t.” Panic had crept into my voice, making it crack.
“Can you drive?”
“I think so.”
“Drive to the doctor. I’ll meet you there if you still can’t go.”
An hour later, I was nearly speechless, except for whimpers, as he drove me to an emergency room. They drained almost two liters of urine from my spasm-racked bladder. For two hours, Braden enticed me to drink foul-tasting contrast juice for a CT scan while I floated on a lovely drug, of which they wouldn’t tell me the name for fear I’d be tempted to find it outside a hospital room. When it was time to go home with a catheter bag strapped to my leg, I couldn’t walk nor could Braden cram me back into my jeans.
“Take the blanket,” the nurse said, and Braden wrapped me like a burrito in a rough hospital blanket. They wheeled me out in a wheelchair, and he drove me home. I don’t remember the drive. I do remember not being able to exit his truck. With my neighbors, mother, and kids flustered in the driveway, Braden lifted me, hero-style, and carried me up all fifteen steps to my bed.
A week later I had my surgery. Chucky had to go! “The surgery should take an hour and a half, unless we find that it is more than a benign mass,” the surgeon told us. I watched her face for signs of concern, but she’d played this game before and gave nothing away. “If it is cancer, I will send a nurse out to tell you, Mr. McCollum, that everything is going well but it will be longer.”
They hooked me up to tubes, me tearing up while Braden cracked jokes to ease the tension, since I was crazy-scared of needles. I floated off to a blissful sleep. Braden had the hard part. He had to stay awake. He had to be the one who nodded and listened while the nurse told him that everything was going well, but the surgery would take longer than anticipated. The hour and a half turned into five hours. When I woke, racked with pain, in a room instead of the recovery area after surgery, I knew something was wrong. “I’m in a room. This isn’t good,” I murmured.
And then Braden shared the worst thing to ever hit us, the before-and-after moment that changed our lives forever. “It’s ovarian cancer,” he said, and squeezed my hand. I stared into his chocolate-brown eyes and felt the waves of pain and terror crash down on me.
All day, he lifted me out and set me back in the hospital bed each time I had to use the bathroom and the three times I had to walk so they’d let me go home. He asked the doctor questions when I was too scared to say more than, “I have a four-year-old. Please. I can’t die.” For days at home, the pain was so fierce that if I tensed up to cry, I couldn’t breathe. Braden set a rule for any and all visitors: “You must smile. No crying or you can’t see her. She can’t breathe when she cries.”
I enrolled in a clinical trial to up my odds of surviving, which included five months of weekly, six-hour chemo treatments and then ten more months of chemo treatments every three weeks. A second surgery placed a port-a-cath in my chest so the meds could be piped directly into my jugular, saving my veins. I started giving myself gold stars every time I was stuck to help me deal with my phobia of needles. It worked for potty training my three kids, so it could work for me. My glorious, long, curly hair began to fall out after the second treatment. Braden and our ten year-old son shaved their heads the same day Braden shaved mine. We celebrated the chemo working to kill cancer cells with a little party of friends in the backyard.
Braden, who had never even liked mowing the lawn, built me a garden around our patio and erected bird feeders where I could sit and watch. He guarded my exposure to negative statistics on ovarian cancer (almost everything about OC is gloom and doom). He fielded questions, kept track of details and encouraged me to blog, because he knew I was happier writing. I found I could write only about how I was going to survive. My fiction writing was put on hold.
And in the dark, at night, after the kids were asleep, when I’d fall apart crying and shaking, he’d pull me into his lap and slowly glue me back together with his words. “We got it in time. You have the best doctors. The chemo is working. You are stronger than the cancer. You are beautiful. I love you.”
“I’m scared,” I cried into his shirt as he gently stroked my sore, bald head through my fuzzy sleeping hat.
“It’s terrifying being on this side of it,” he answered. “I can’t imagine how scary it must be on your side.”
Honest. Real. Always positive. Every time I needed him to put me back together, he did. Every time I needed the words, he gave them, feeding them to me like strength pills to keep me walking through the fire I was enduring. I suffered ulcers through my digestive tract, non-healing cuts in my burning mouth, a six-month sore throat, dizziness, pain through my whole body, fingernails that turned brown and fell off, a forty-pound weight gain from the steroids, bloody noses, and fear that I would leave my three kids without a mom, just like Braden’s mom had done unwillingly to him.
I’ve met numerous cancer warriors during my two years of treatment and rec
overy. Several women suffered further by losing their support in the face of such an ordeal, their husbands being too afraid to face cancer with their wives. Terrible memories of his mother’s death at such a young age could have swamped Braden, but instead he chose to do what he couldn’t as a nine year-old child. He chose to fight—hard, maybe as hard as I was. I realized this as I sat in my garden, watching the birds I’d come to know so well, blogging about how I was fighting to live. And my love for Braden grew.
“For better or for worse.” It is an oath that is rarely thought about during the sparkly happiness of youthful love, when feelings are new and couples spend a lot of time gazing into each other’s eyes.
“For better or for worse.” It is an oath that must be clung to when the giant wave is bearing down. When you can’t tear your eyes away from catastrophic fear and you reach next to you and take hold of that hand that grasps for your own. That is love.
Love, real connection with another soul, does not mean gazing at one another, seeing only the beauty, enduring only the “better” seasons. Real love means looking out at life together, staring at the beautiful and the ugly through even the “worse” seasons and continuing to hold each other’s outstretched hands.
I am thankfully in remission from my cancer. My constant pain has ebbed, and I have regained most of my hair and strength. I lost internal organs along the way but have gained a deeper understanding of what living joyfully really means. I came through the fire with scars but have grown more beautiful in my spirit. I thought when I married Braden nearly two decades ago that I loved him with all my heart, but I’ve realized, after holding his hand through these last two years, that I love him a thousand times more.
Heather McCollum is an award-winning, historical paranormal romance writer. She is a member of Romance Writers of America and was a 2009 Golden Heart Finalist. When she is not creating vibrant characters and magical adventures on the page, she is roaring her own battle cry in the war against ovarian cancer. Heather recently slew the cancer beast and resides with her very own hero and their three kids in the wilds of suburbia on the Mid-Atlantic coast. Visit her online at www.heathermccollum.com.
Soul Mates for a Thousand Lifetimes; or, Diary of Two Cosmic Stalkers
By Nikoo & Jim McGoldrick
The young woman walked along the storm-strewn beach, her chestnut hair lifting gently in the breeze. In the distance, she spotted an old wooden boat that had washed ashore in the storm. Someone was trying to maneuver the aging, salt-encrusted craft back into the water. As she drew closer, the mysterious figure stood and pushed his hair off of his face. A handsome young man returned her gaze.
This is how we first met.
Well, actually, this is the lie we’ve told dozens of times to numerous publications about how we first met.
During a cable interview, another lie surfaced. With a perfectly straight face, Jim told the interviewer that he went online thirty-five years ago to get a mail-order bride through PersianWife.com. There were no dot-coms thirty-five years ago, but that didn’t stop him from telling this whopper, or from going on to say that “when Nikoo arrived, we still had to wait until she turned seven to marry.”
Enough lies.
For the first time, we’re putting the truth in print. The truth is…he and I are soul mates. And we don’t mean this in some trendy, superficial, clichéd way. We’re not like those twenty-first-century fledgling amorists who stumble serendipitously onto a one hundred and forty-character cyber message that is so imbued with profundity that instantaneous and endless love follows…until the “unfriending” comes. No. Ours are the souls that have been skimming through the universe for uncounted lifetimes, pinging off each other and returning to connect again and again.
And we have lots to report. Why else would we be writing romance in this lifetime?
To start with, neither of us believes there are any shortcuts or surefire, winning strategies for a great marriage. I can only share what we practice, what we preach, and what we believe has kept our relationship strong over decades…and all those cosmic lifetimes.
Long ago, Jim and I accepted that magic is not what happens in the first couple of years of marriage. That first stage is just one short hop along an unending journey. So, in no specific order of importance, here are some relevant points about this leg of our cosmic journey. In short, this is how we love.
I know…we both know…it’s the two of us against the world.
Life happens. There’s a Persian saying that goes, “If you think someone’s life is perfect, it only means that you don’t know them.” We’ve been no exception to this rule. In the years that we’ve been together, our family has gone through an infant son’s heart surgery, my cancer, and other tragedies that are too painful to speak of. Any one of these things can easily crumple individuals beneath their weight and tear a couple apart. Conscious commitment to each other is a basic ingredient lacking in many relationships. Unfortunately, it often remains unrecognized until the world falls off its axis.
In our case, we have been able to stand together. Each of us has acted as guardian angel for the other. In the midst of each trial, we remained focused on our love and communication, which was often difficult. Talking is hard when you think you’re the only one feeling pain.
I remember when we were just married, we were driving along a country road in Stonington, Connecticut. The snow was an icy crust on the fields beyond the stone walls that lined the road. We were talking about how our marriage would be, and we decided right then that we would not allow walking away ever to be an option. And from the beginning, we consciously tried to give more to the other than we took. As the early years began to add up, we became stronger, feeling secure and protected, recognizing that our relationship was founded on a solid sense of unity. When we had to go into battle, we had the determination to fight and survive together.
We respect each other.
All relationships have their ups and downs, good and bad days, pleasures and frustrations. It’s easy to be generous with our partner when life is going smoothly. And when we’re upset, it’s easy to lay blame on a partner, to abuse them emotionally and verbally. This extends to public ridicule, too—disrespecting each other, no matter how innocent or humorously intended. Among our family and friends, Jim is known as “perfect,” and I am “flawless.” Mission accomplished…even if the sound of gagging follows us around. We love it.
But that’s not all of it. We’re individuals. Some of us successfully achieve adulthood with relatively high self-esteem, while others do not. Some of us waltz through life with great, healthy egos, while some of us were apparently in the wrong line when that part of the psyche was being handed out. No matter. It’s our job to be a bright mirror for our partner, reflecting all the beauty and talent that we see in them. Regardless of the difference in our level of education, or the fact that one of us is climbing high on the business ladder of success while the other is staying home, we need to hear our partner praise us, give us credit, appreciate us, love us, and voice it every day.
We make a daily habit of talking and listening to each other.
We each did our time working for big corporations. Team meetings, communication seminars, management training. We’re believers in teamwork, be it building nuclear submarines, or teaching a large group of students, or raising our children, or working on our next novel. We’ve worked this team communication into our daily life. Cappuccino time, or tea time, or glass of wine time. Every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, we carve out at least fifteen minutes at the end of our workday to have “our” team meeting. We use this time to unwind, to tell each other about our day, about what lies ahead of us. Sometimes we even use this time to argue, ask questions, voice what has been bothering us. We’re time travelers, not mind readers. It’s unfair to have our partner guess why, all of a sudden, one of us is feeling insecure after a certain event or a certain comment struck us the wrong way. We try to listen. We ask questions to clarify t
hings.
Going back to the “life happens” reference, carving out even fifteen minutes isn’t always easy for families with two working parents and children running from one activity to the next. We’ve been there, done that. For us, those treasured minutes were found during dinnertimes, and during turning-off-the-television times. Yes, you read that correctly. Make no mistake, we love television. There is always something entertaining on. But there were several times when we canceled the cable. Granted, it was usually right after the baseball season ended (I hate to hear Jim cry), but we did it. Today, acting so rashly as to cut the cable could bring a visit from a state agency concerned about your children’s welfare, but it has been known to happen. The precious minutes were there, we just had to dig for them.
It’s okay to be passionate in a disagreement, but we never sleep on it.
Scenarios that include miffed, irked, hurt partners happen in every marriage. We have definitely had our moments. But we battle it out until it’s over. We never sleep on an unsettled disagreement. Unresolved arguments grow roots and branches, and the fruit is poison.
We’ve accepted that a soul-mate relationship can be more intense than many relationships. Add to that the working relationship of writing together—living over the shop, we call it—and there can be fireworks. One of the fiercest battles we ever had in our marriage was over the location of a castle stairway in a story we were writing. In the midst of it, a reporter from The New York Times arrived to do a feature on us. “A conversation with the McGoldricks, in which sentences ricochet back and forth between the two, might be a metaphor for their writing process.” Luckily, the woman didn’t see the non-metaphorically sharp objects we’d put away a minute before she rang the doorbell. After she left, we went back at it…and somehow resolved it before bedtime.
The most important thing we’ve learned is that, even during highly emotional episodes, we can focus on resolving the problem. We can see beyond the bad moment. We refuse to hurt each other to win a point. And we don’t allow troubles to fester and become more than what they are. Jim will tell you that this was a genetic triumph, as well as a personal victory. His Irish roots insist that he carry a grudge for five generations and across three continents, and continuing long after anyone remembers who slighted whom at some funeral in 1873.