Moonspun Spins

I don’t think about it everyday, as I am sure he doesn’t either. But sometimes I’ll get a glimpse of the 10 inch scar that graces the side of his left thigh. And I’ll think idly “what if he hadn’t survived?”

You see, while I have mentioned it a time or two in relation to our work with the Relay for Life committee on campus, my handsome and loving husband is a cancer survivor. Of twenty years.

When he was 21 the summer before he was a senior in college, he came back from a semester living abroad in Africa and went to a doctor because his left leg was sore. That’s when they found the large tumor that was attacking the muscle in  his leg. That’s when he was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. That’s when he went into surgery not knowing whether or not he’d wake up and have that leg or not. That’s when, after the surgery and recovery he ran even harder than ever before and two months after “earning” that foot long scar he ran in his first marathon. And hasn’t looked  back since.

RP in some ways is not your typical cancer survivor because, by his own admission, he was young and felt invincible and since the surgery took care of most of it, he went about his business. It took him years to process the magnitude of what he had gone through as well as to be comfortable talking to people about it.

Not long after I’d met RP, I was chatting with him online and was telling him about going to my first boobsquishing mammogram which was just routine. “Are you ok?” the words flashed across my screen and with them I could feel his palpable concern. After I assured him I was fine, he told me about being a cancer survivor. A couple months later he showed me the pile of his medical records from the diagnosis and surgery that he’d kept and never showed anyone else.

I’ll never forget the first Relay for Life that we participated in with the girls before the lrps had moved back to Kentucky. I have never been to one and it was a great experience. The first lap of every Relay is a survivor lap. RP had donned his purple survivor shirt and I stood with the girls on the edge of the track near our tent. I watched him come around the corner with the other survivors and was completely overwhelmed with emotion and got choked up. I mean very choked up.

Since then I’ve seen him speak at several Relay for Life events as the students ask him to be a guest speaker. As is his personality, he is warm, genuine and inspiring. And I always get choked up watching him walk that first lap, because that first time floods back to me. And there continue to be those odd moments when I wonder “what if he hadn’t survived?” My world would be so different now and I’d not even know why. But that’s not what was meant to be. He was meant to run 40+ marathons and ultra-marathons and hundreds of small races on a leg he almost lost. He was meant to become a professor and an inspiration to students. He was meant to be a great dad and step-dad. He was meant to be the one person whom can imitate me and make me belly laugh when he does it. He was meant to be the person who is my hero. He was meant to love me.

Yesterday at the hockey game RP and I volunteered with the Relay for Life committee and RP wore his purple survivor shirt. We walked around selling 50/50 tickets, RP being the front man because of his outgoing personality.  We had fun and did well. But it was the subtle parts that really got me. The older woman who told RP confidentially that she’d been in remission for 6 months, the man who said he was a fellow survivor, the co-worker who told us about her husband who was in NJ helping his brother whose wife was just diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer. It was the spoken and unspoken thread that cancer is a disease that touches all of us that strucke me this time.

And later as we watched the game and yelled loudly for the team (who kickass…they are still undefeated) I thought again how grateful I am that RP is a survivor. And I watched the statistic scroll across the message board that one American dies of cancer every single minute I felt stunned. I am so glad that my husband is a statistic on the positive side, because so many aren’t.

After the game we went out to a local pizza places (despite our small town we do have several restaurant choices!) and ate awesome calzones. We talked about a range of topics including history and my final project (yes we are geeks) and when we came home it had been a very good day.

A very good day indeed with my husband, my survivor.

(This is a picture of us back in November at the 1/2 marathon in York that my cousin, EightofNine ran. RP had just run a 50 mile race before and this was before the 5k walk that I did with JB and her kids and my aunt and cousins.)