How it started....
The last month has been a whirlwind to say the least. Our lives changed it seems at a moment's notice and here we are living something we never saw coming.
I'm starting from the beginning because I know everyone wants to know, what happened? How did you know?....
It started with what we thought were headaches, then migraines. We started to get a little concerned just because they were so consistent. Adam was in pretty constant pain for about a week.
Adam handles pain pretty well and hardly ever takes pain medication, but at this point, he was describing the pain as someone drilling his head and attempting to vacuum suck one of his eyeballs out of its socket!
He was in so much pain it was hard to watch. I asked my mom to come to sit with the girls and we rushed to Urgency Care. It was a Friday evening and they gave him pain medication and diagnosed him with a "Cluster Headache" and sent him home.
The following Tuesday we found ourselves back in Urgency Care with intense pain. The doctor was sending us home again, we discussed a scan being done at this time.
He said he would put in a request for an MRI (instead of a CT scan to avoid radiation) and someone should call us in the next couple of days.
Adam had nausea at this point and they gave him a prescription to help with the nausea and also said it should help him sleep (he hadn't been sleeping or eating).
We got home, and sleep didn't come easy. We went back up to the hospital about 3:30 am Wednesday morning, and told them we wanted a CT scan.
He had to go through Emergency Care and I had to stay in the parking lot. After a while, I went home to change our baby girl, make sure everyone at home was okay. I got a call about 6ish, they told me they had found a mass on the scan and would be sending him to ICU.
*Insert mind-blown emoji*... Mass... ICU....
I was off heading back to the hospital, trying to reach Adam's mom and let her know what was going on. I got there praying and crying, then tried to put on a strong, comforting face.
I ended up needing the strong, comforting face for a lot of days.
He was still in Emergency when I arrived and soon they got us a room in ICU, and the next couple of days so much happened.
There were doctors, nurses, multiple MRIs, discussions, and sleepless nights. They told us they couldn't remove it based on the location and size, but wanted to do a biopsy as they still weren't sure what it was.
That Friday, he had the biopsy, and recovery went well. The following day he nailed his physical test and they announced we could go home while we waited for Pathology. At that time we were feeling pretty good, we were told that it was probably not cancerous as the oncologist didn't identify it during the biopsy. They told us that pathology would probably take a week.
We were so happy to go home! Our kiddos were still with family and we left them there the first evening we came home. We got to hang out and just enjoy being home.
Soon kiddos were home and life was semi-normal-- different--but back to our full, fun home.
The Day that life officially changed...
May 6th, we went in to the recommended oncology appointment and there the doctor started talking to us about treatment and we had to stop him and ask, so do we have pathology back already?
He said oh, yes. We asked him to start from scratch as we hadn't heard anything. We then learned that the mass was malignant and aggressive and there wasn't a cure.... Glioblastoma.
My heart still stops when I remember this moment.
We looked at each other, we mentioned our kids; our life. Adam is 35! We have a household of 5 kids. He had just had his own business up and running for a little over a year.
No cure.....
We walked in shock to the next appointment they had for us in radiation, that whole day is hard to relive.
So, here we are with so much to figure out.