In honor of Mark reaching this important benchmark, I want to share with you my journal entry from March 20, 2005, two days after I found out he had been diagnosed with Stage IV Melanoma Skin Cancer.
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March 20, 2005
I am so scared right now that the only thing I know to do is write. My mom called me on Friday with the news that my step-dad Mark has Melanoma skin cancer. It hit me like a freight train because I had no idea there was even the slight chance - I didn't even know anything was wrong.
The dermatologist - after being probed by my parents - gave Mark an estimated 1 to 2 years to live. I can't imagine in 2 years him being gone from our lives. I try to think positive and be glad that I even have 2 years left with him, because I could have received a call saying that he was dead. But this finds me little to no comfort. Two years isn't enough. We need him around much longer. I am grateful that I am given the chance now to tell him everything I want him to know - things I've never said to him before. But I'm very angry that such a wonderful person is even faced with the battle he's about to face. He has done nothing to deserve it.
Even as I'm writing this, my emotions are numb. From Friday until Saturday night, I couldn't stop crying. And now, I couldn't cry even if I wanted to. It doesn't feel real to me right now. I honestly feel like I'm in a dream. I wish more than anything I was. He goes to an actual cancer specialist this week and I am hoping and praying that maybe they will give him good news and they will be able to remove the tumor and that it hasn't spread to his lymph nodes as the dermatologist had suspected. I would give anything for that to be true. I can only hope that the next time I am reading this journal, I will be thinking to myself "Wow. What a scare that was! I'm so grateful that he's going to be okay."
I don't want this to be the first entry to an ongoing journal that I track his chemo processes and progress in. I want this to be the only entry needed - besides the follow up in which I explain that everything is going to be okay. Until then....
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As many of us know all too well, that journal entry was in fact the first of many. Mark did meet with a "cancer specialist" (I now know that the specific name is an oncologist, one of the many terms I'm much more familiar with now, five years later) and he found out that the cancer had in fact spread to his lymph nodes and that his diagnosis was actually much more grim than one to two years. It was actually only six months. We know now that he had a very long journey ahead of him with an excruciating clinical trial, chemo, radiation, bolts in his head, pills that made him sick, tumors in his brain that kept appearing, a major surgery in his abdomen with a wound that would take months to heal. The list could go on and on.
In spite of the fact that things did get worse after this initial journal entry, much worse actually, there is one thing I want to focus on. Five years ago, I wrote
"I can only hope that the next time I am reading this journal, I will be thinking to myself 'Wow. What a scare that was! I'm so grateful that he's going to be okay'."
The odds were stacked against us and Mark fought like hell to be where he is today. I'm not a fortune teller and I have no idea what the future holds but today, after reading my journal entry from five years ago, I can honestly say, Wow. What a scare that was! I'm so grateful my step-dad is okay.
What a miracle that is!
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