Another World Lung Cancer Day, Another Year Without My Husband

As I sit here, it seems almost impossible that tomorrow, August 1, will be the fourth World Lung Cancer Day following my husband’s diagnosis and subsequent death after valiantly fighting stage IV adenocarcinoma.

Bill was never sick in the 10 and a half years we were together before our world fell apart. I was the sick one, always in pain, never having an answer. In fact, his first gift to me was a softball he left on my computer keyboard before he went to work at 2:30 a.m. A softball, as I used to forget to bring one of mine from my house to use as a trigger-point massager for my fibromyalgia. I would later progress to granite rocks, but that is a story for another time.

Our nightmare began, perhaps, on April 30, 2008, when he received a call from his job of 25 years. He had been in the printing business and had advanced up to a press operator. He loved his job even though for the last four years of it he had to commute for three days from our newly built house in the Wisconsin Northwoods.

See, Bill was a fisherman. It defined him and was his passion. Up north we were five boat-towing minutes away from an awesome musky lake, and he took advantage of that every time he could.

So the call that day was from the owner of the business who told him his services were no longer needed. A phone call. Simply said, it destroyed him.

I can look back now and question if it was really because of the “mistakes” he had been making or if, at the beginning of the recession, his employer saw he could hire two guys for the price of the highest-paid guy on the floor. I guess I will never really know the answer to that question.

When he was diagnosed on October 30, 2012, Bill had four brain metastasis, as well as a large tumor attached to his trachea and aorta. Were those metastasis what caused his “mistakes?” Or was his cancer, in fact, “turned on” because of the grief, anger and confusion caused by an employer callously discarding him after 25 years of stellar employment?

Some say we all have cancer in our bodies at any given time. Some say all it takes is a negative, traumatic experience to turn those benign cancer cells into a living, breathing monster that destroys lives and destroys futures. I do know that months, or perhaps even a year, before his diagnosis, a formerly mild-mannered, laid-back guy had turned into a mean, short-tempered stranger who blew up at the slightest provocation.

Brain metastasis at its most destructive.

For two and a half years, Bill fought the good fight. We started out at diagnosis with no health insurance. Thankfully, with the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, Bill was able to eventually, in 2014, be treated at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas — a phenomenal, ground-breaking institution.

But I believe by then it was simply too late to eradicate the monster effectively. I will never know for sure if, upon diagnosis and with first-class treatment for stage IV lung cancer, Bill would have been able to beat it and go on to live a full life. Because 56 years is simply not enough. Not today. Not in this country.

So on August 1, 2017, please take a moment to think about those of us who have been affected terribly by lung cancer. By all cancers. I hope and pray none of you reading this ever have to go through what Bill did. What I did.

We are better than this. We are compassionate. We are the greatest country this world has ever seen. We can make healthcare affordable and available to everyone who is faced with such a diagnosis, such a fight for their lives. Our loved ones do not deserve this.

We do not deserve this.

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Thinkstock photo by Elenathewise