Consequences

There are consequences to hearing a diagnoses of cancer. While many aspects of a persons life will stay the same, many will also change. For us there were two very immediate consequences: the first being financial and the second stemming from the first, the reversal of my "empty nest syndrome." Let it be said here that I never had empty nest syndrome in the first place but more about that later.

That last day that Papa came home from work was supposed to be the start of a week of vacation. In much of our country the first week of June is "Blitz" week for semi-truck drivers. The various DOT's are on the lookout for any infraction they can find. Trucks are a cash cow for many municipalities, especially when the economy is bad. They stop trucks and do safety inspections, they inspect log books, they do more random drug testing than usual. This means more waiting and down time for drivers. There is a saying in trucking that if the wheels are not rolling, they ain't making money and remember?.. Papa hates to wait. So he always saved this week for vacation and we were planning a trip to #1 son's place. Instead of vacationing, we had to go doctoring.

What happened, when we were told he had cancer, is that we lost the largest part of our income that very second. First of all, his company does not offer sick pay, not many trucking companies do. They also do not offer short term disability. We could have paid extra for short term disability but it was a substantial chunk of money that we could not afford. Papa had two weeks of vacation pay due him and one week of pay then nothing.

For much of our marriage we have lived on a precipice. Money has always been in short supply, sometimes shorter than others. We lost our home once to foreclosure, long before it was common like today. That was what drove Papa to trucking in the first place. At first he made fairly good money and I was working as a nurse too so we were fairly comfortable. I was even able to stop working for four years to take care of Papa's brother when he was sick and dying from Muscular Dystrophy. Then a few years ago I had to quit nursing because of severe arthritis in my knee, which developed because I broke my knee in that car accident in 1988. Papa had been driving for a company that shipped automotive parts and he worked 80 hours a week driving from here to Wisconsin and back. The hours were grueling for a man in his late 50's and he often got only four hours of sleep a night. Then he quit that company and took a huge cut in pay to drive for a local company. He was home more often, got better sleep, was able to enjoy life a bit more. But gradually we started to lose ground and his pay could not keep up with our economy. I receive Social Security Disability but it only managed to help keep our heads barely above water. We had no credit cards, our only loans were an auto loan, our mortgage and a home equity loan. We had a little bit in an old 401K and took that to pay off the van loan and do repairs on our van and the house and we had a few thousand left... not even six months worth of living money.

When Papa got sick he did not want me to tell his employer what was wrong with him... he was afraid of losing options that in reality were not even there. When he had his heart attack back in '07, he was off work for two months and his employer paid for his medical insurance: he was hoping that would happen again. But I knew I had to be honest with his boss. First of all, our doctor told me that Papa would never be able to work again, even if this cancer does not kill him. I knew the employer could not and would not, pay for his insurance indifinitely.

So this is where we stood in that fourth week of June, when I went to see boss man and told him: Papa has cancer, Papa had to have surgery, will have to have radiation and chemotherapy, Papa may die, we don't know yet but for sure he can not work ever again, we have basically no income, we have no money in the bank to speak of, we have a mortgage and home eq loan, we owe big time to the IRS, we will have no medical insurance unless we get help from you.

Boss guy told me that insurance was paid in full to June 17th. Well crap!!! That was a couple weeks ago already, dammit! He said that if this was a couple years ago, he would pay the premiums for us but because of the economy, he was doing his level best just to keep his trucks on the road for one more week. I knew this to be true, this is Michigan after all and we are on the fast track to oblivion here. But he did say that if I could come up with the money for the premiums, he would pay them and keep us on his company plan. I took the money out of the savings and paid him through the middle of July, so we were covered thru the surgery and post-op visits. I didn't know if this was even legal, still don't know. All I knew is that Papa would have one more month of medical insurance and I would cross any other bridges when I came to them.

Thus began my weeks of nightmare living. Oh my God, I was so scared. I would lay in bed at night and my heart would start to race and I would become short of breath. I began to have panic attacks as the questions raced through my head: Was he going to actually die? Would he be terribly sick and in what way? Would he be in a lot of pain? How was I going to take care of him? What would chemo and radiation do to him? What would happen to our home? Would we lose our place to live again? If yes, where would we go? Where could I go if he died? Could I live with one of my kids... would I want to? How was I going to pay the bills? How could I pay the IRS and the property taxes? Where would I come up with more money forthe next month of insurance and still have a bit to live on?

These questions and more like them were another reason the camping trip was a nightmare for me. I was on the edge and I was having a hard time hiding it. One minute I felt as if I would fly apart, the next I felt like a Slinky toy, an old one that had been played with roughly and was now stretched out and tied in knots as only a Slinky can be. It's hard to cook a damn hotdog over a campfire when you feel like that, and not ram the hotdog fork into your heart. It felt as if there was one there anyway, or at least ground glass.