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One more post should just about bring Paul's treatment up-to-date. Frankly, I'm itching to get on with things. So I'll be editing ruthlessly here. The thing about Meso is - it's incurable. We all hate that word. It signifies defeat. It suggests someone is going to die by the end of the story. It's something that, if I'm going to be perfectly honest here, took me some time to wrap my head around.  I definitely didn't process that fact when Paul was first diagnosed. We'll be kind and call it innocence instead of ignorance, but at 25 I still thought everything was fixable. We have science, people! Haven't we made enough advances in medicine to make my otherwise healthy husband tumor-free? But. We haven't. By the fall of 2015, his tumors had diminished slightly in size, but they were still there. They will likely always be there. So, unless we wanted to drive ourselves mad with worry, we had to adopt a new approach to Paul's cancer. Instead of l...

Life after Paul's HIPEC surgery was good. Real good. He was considered 'NED' (no evidence of disease) and required no further treatment beyond quarterly CT scans to make sure things stayed that way. I'm likely romanticizing those first two years of marriage (there I go again), but most of my memories look like this: Super Fantastic Explosion of FUN!!! We camped and took roadtrips in my old Volvo wagon and met interesting hippie folks at festivals and visited vineyards and had lots of bar-b-ques and hiked and watched Dexter . We also made this exquisite creature: Ingrid Philomena Coleman - born July 29, 2014 In August, with a proud, springy gait that is the hallmark of new fathers, Paul went in for his routine scan. That's what his CT scans had become to us: entirely ordinary, unremarkable check-ups. Just part of our routine. At that time I was, for some reason, extremely...I don't know. Naive? Yes. Silly and naive about what we were dealing with here. Mesotheli...