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When Cancer Wins: A Surviving Spouse's Story Chapter 1 - Black Friday Friday, March 10, 2006. That date will live on in my memory forever. It was the day on which our world began to unravel. Just over a year earlier, my wife Jan, son Brad, and myself moved into our new home in the country. Nothing elaborate, but it was intended to be Jan’s and my final home - our retirement home - the house where we would happily grow old together once Brad had left the nest. We had no idea that there was so little time left. Jan was the perfect school bus driver. She truly loved her job and she truly loved the kids. She had runs in the morning, at noon, and in the afternoon. The students on her several bus runs ranged from kindergarten to high school. She willingly took on extra runs, charters, and often drove considerable distances to pick up parts for the guys in the garage, or take a bus to another town for repairs that they couldn‘t do on site. On a typical day, she left home just after 6 AM and returned at around 4 PM. She would have driven nearly 300 kilometers in that time. Some days it was much more. Missing a day’s work was not something Jan did. In almost 8 years of driving bus, I can only recall two or three instances when she did. One case involved pneumonia, and I believe she missed a couple of days to attend the funerals of relatives. So when the phone rang around noon on the aforementioned “black Friday”, and Jan said she had arranged coverage for the rest of her runs and was on her way home because she didn’t feel at all well, I knew it had to be serious. I work night shift, so I am home during the day. At around 1 PM, the familiar sound of the bus back up alarm signaled that she was making her way up the driveway toward the house. I met her at the door. She was bent over strangely, unable to stand up properly, and complained of a severe pain in her lower abdomen. I helped her with her coat and led her to the couch where she sat down and explained that the pain had started around mid-morning and gotten worse, to the point that she knew she had to abandon her runs. She thought it was likely the flu or something, and took a couple of Ibuprofen tablets. By late afternoon, the pain had lessened and our 13-year-old son was home to keep an eye on her, so I went off to bed for a few hours sleep before work. When I got up around 9 PM, she said it still hurt a little but seemed much better, and she told me to head off to work. But when I got home about 8 in the morning, she was back on the couch, doubled over with pain. I told her I was taking her to the hospital - something she would normally have fought about, but it seemed that she knew it was necessary and didn’t protest at all. Brad and I helped her into the car and headed off to the Markdale hospital, a half hour drive away. It was obvious that Jan was quite ill. She never complained about pain but she was that day. The doctor that saw us in emergency was Dr. Raj Waghmere. He had no prior knowledge of my wife, and knew us only by virtue of our presence that day. He was unbelievably sharp, and zeroed in on my wife’s pancreas as the source of trouble even before any tests were done. He initially thought (perhaps hoped) that it was pancreatitis, a condition that is usually temporary but causes the sort of symptoms she had - also more common in drinkers, but she never drank a drop so I wasn’t convinced he had fully determined the problem. He ordered X-rays. We’d have to wait for the results and he prescribed Tylenol 3, for pain, until we got them. Jan continued with the Ibuprofen as it gave good results and she didn‘t like anything with codeine in it. We waited. On the following Monday, March 13, the phone rang around 10 in the morning. It was the hospital. There was a large mass on Jan’s pancreas. They wanted to schedule her for a CAT-scan and ultrasound, in Owen Sound because they didn‘t have the facilities in Markdale. We agreed to the earliest times they had. Then we sat and looked at each other. The words “large mass” were more than disturbing. Both of us, at that point, knew that the problem was cancer and that it must be serious. Jan didn’t hesitate. She met my concerned gaze, and said with conviction, “I’m going to fight this and win!”. She carried that attitude right to the end.
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