It is truly amazing how crazy life is. I mean, when I look at what I've been through, it's amazing to see that I'm right here. I haven't given up. The truth is, my dad has cancer. Not only that, but he will die of it as well. I'm a freshman in high school and I don't even know if he'll be standing, watching me graduate high school. But what i do know is that he's here now. He may not be there to walk me down the isle, but he is there to drive me to school, to help me with my math homework, to play taxi on occasion. I don't know what the future will bring. Everyone always imagines how it would be so amazing to be able to see the future. Personally, I wouldn't want to. Imagine if someone always knew what was coming. It would loom in front of them and cause more pain than the unexpected. Life isn't meant to be predictable. If it was predictable it would be kind of boring. What makes life truly beautiful is the ability to fall, but then be able to stand back up again.
Things occur in mysterious ways. Wondering how my dad was diagnosed? He was laid off from work at Intel when the dot com industry fell. He had had a cist on the side of his jaw and my mom had been trying to convince him to go to the doctor but he was too busy with work. But because he was laid off, he had all the time in the world to go to the doctor. Well, it turns out the cist was cancerous. It was a type of cancer called Adenoid-Cystic Carcinoma, or ACC. It travels through the veins and eventually reaches the lungs and can spread to the organs. But we caught it when it was in the saliva glands. We thought it was gone. We were wrong.
They barely caught it the second time. This time, it was truly in his lungs. My dad went through the radiation in his face, and even now you can see his face is lopsided a bit. But he had to go back for radiation every six months to make sure it wasn't coming back. The scanner, however, only covered from his shoulders up. But one of the small tumors was at the very top of the lung, and it showed up at the very bottom of the scan and the doctors saw it. I remember that day I got home from school. I was supposed to be staying after school for some reason. The reason isn't important anymore. But it was canceled and I went home as normal. I rang the doorbell and I waited. It was odd, because Mom wasn't coming to the door. Dad was. Why wasn't Dad at work? And then I saw Mom come around the corner and follow Dad to the door. She had been crying, I could tell. Dad opened the door and I walked in and the first think I said is, "Dad, why aren't you at work?" Mom looked at Dad and had to turn around to hide her tears. I started crying. I had no idea why, but I knew something was happening. Something I knew I wouldn't like. "Honey," Dad said, his eyes watering, "It came back. It's in my lungs. It came back." I had never before in my life seen my dad cry. That day was the first. I could see the fear in his eyes as plain as I can today. He was trying so hard to not cry, to be strong for us. But he just wasn't strong enough that day. We all cried. We all knew the truth. This would kill my dad.
My parents were not going to give up on this. They did tons of research on ACC and found that it's so rare that only a small amount of people have it in the world. It's slow growing and it is resistant to Chemo-therapy. They researched and they researched and they finally found the doctor that they wished to see and the treatment that they were going to try. And the more we researched, the more hope we had. My dad's doctor works at the University of Maryland Medical Research Facility. And we chose surgery as the best option. So my dad went through with it. The first surgery was successful and they removed all 4 of the tiny little tumors in his one lung. Everything went according to plan. The next one made my hair turn to gray and just fall out onto the floor. He was in surgery for over six hours. Six hours of sitting and waiting. And waiting. And waiting. I was staying with a friend but I was waiting next to the phone, just waiting for my mom to call. The phone actually rang once with a wrong number. I picked up and someone was trying to place an order for carry-out Chinese. I almost threw my phone at the wall after that. My mom told me afterwards that every doctor that came out she asked if they knew where my dad was and she kept getting the same reply, "He's in surgery Mrs. Weyman." Well, for lack of a better word, duh. Where else would he be, frolicking through a field of flowers? Of course he's in surgery, but what is taking so long? Why doesn't anyone tell me where my husband is? And so I sat by my phone, my heart being wrenched out and thrown against the wall every time the phone didn't ring. Turns out one of the tumors was on one of the major arteries that travels through the lung. They managed to remove it, but it was time consuming. But now, it was obviously gone for good.
Wrong. It came back this last summer. Again. And now it’s even worse than it was before. They estimated four in the first lung they operated on. They found 20. 20. That's almost five times as many. And they had estimated more in the other lung anyways and so now, they have decided to just not operate and wait and see because they know that it’s going to be really hard on my dad to remove all that lung tissue. So here I am again, waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for the phone call that will tell me that they found a cure for ACC. A phone call from someone telling me there's still hope. But I'm waiting still and I still haven't received that phone call, no matter how hard I pray. And I hate this waiting. Why can't they do something? Anything? Why did this have to happen in the first place? Was it something I did? When I'm waiting, my brain tends to think too much. I get impatient and I start to believe something even though I know it's false because it gives me the reason I have been waiting to hear for a very long time. But here i am, waiting. And I will wait for as long as it takes. I don't know when I’ll have to stop waiting, or when I won't have to wait anymore, but I'll keep running until my legs fall off.
My dad may not be there for the times that I want him to be. He may not be at my wedding, or get to see his grandkids and be the best grandfather in the world, but I know my kids will know about the grandpa they may never know. About the boy that grew up in Kentucky, the first of nine children living in a three bedroom house. The boy that was the only one in the family to get a full college education. The man who was in the army for 22 years of his life and fell in love with a beautiful woman, and had me. The man who was taken from this earth and robbing those who never got to meet him. Believe me, he will never be forgotten. I am not giving up on him now. But I do know he will die from this. I don't know when, but I know now, together we'll make it through somehow.
Dad? I hope I've made you proud. Because I couldn't have asked for a better dad. I don't want you to go. But I know you have to. I don't know why, and I know I won't know until it happens. But until then, I'm going to make sure that the life you live, no matter how long, is the best one you could ever hope for. I love you.