Good gracious, it’s been two and a half weeks since our last post. What?!

Okay, so there are two reasons…

Anne and I enjoyed a really sweet holiday break with the kids. She had a “week off” from chemotherapy between Christmas and New Years, which was a gift itself. Feeling better than usual, Anne soaked in more quality time with the family, and vice versa.

Second, you know that phenomenon that occurs when the passage of time begins to pile up between you and a good friend, such that you feel both a tinge of guilt for having not called and the added pressure to carve out a bigger chunk of time to catch up?  And…and then you finally cave to the guilt and pressure?  There’s a little bit of that at work here too.

Yet I’m feeling the need to apologize, as I know many of you have wondered how Anne is faring, what’s the latest, and how the kids are doing. Given our context, prolonged silence can easily be construed negatively.

And then I give this blog post that title, one which immediately makes you think “oh no!” while forcing you to read this far without having given you any indication of what it means.

So now I’ll officially apologize. And do some ‘splainin… 🙂

A quick summary of Anne’s treatment to date:

• Diagnosed with breast cancer in late May last year.
• Started chemotherapy the following month for 18 weeks, receiving an infusion of potent ninja medicine every three weeks.
• Underwent surgery in October to remove both breasts, with a follow-up lymphadenectomy two weeks later to remove remaining infected nodes.
• Because she’s young and healthy, we decided to begin a second course of chemotherapy in November with a different drug called Navelbine, which has been shown to work well with Herceptin, a drug specifically designed to attack Anne’s type of breast cancer. Administered once a week for three weeks, followed by a week off. Then repeat. 

*Van, what is the miscalculation for crying out loud?!*

When Anne and I sat down with her oncologist to review the timetable for her current chemotherapy, he told us that she would receive 12 treatments. Having just finished an 18-week course of treatment in which her chemotherapy drugs were administered once every three weeks, we both concluded that her present course of treatment would last a total of 12 weeks. No math required.

Hence, Anne’s celebration in her (fantastic) last blog post that she was 2/3 of the way through her chemotherapy treatment!

But. A big ole but…

The doctor didn’t mean 12 weeks. He meant 12 treatments, or 12 infusions. Instead of her course of treatment running three months, it spans four months.  {3 infusions + 1 week off} x 4 weeks = 16 weeks.

Yep. Anne is just past the half-way mark, not over 2/3 of the way through as we had previously believed. Tack on another month of feeling icky.

Punch to the gut, right?

Well, you’d think so. Though disappointed, Anne actually handled it in stride. Knowing Anne, most of you probably are thinking, “of course she did.” No doubt, my bride is a strong woman with a deeply-rooted faith, but she’s real. Fear is a constant foe. Sadness always wants to creep in, and sometimes it needs to. There isn’t a day when she doesn’t feel weak. A “feeling-good day” for Anne isn’t any better than having mono and is often closer to exhaustion with a nauseated stomach.

Even still, realizing she had yet another month of chemotherapy didn’t rock Anne’s world. There’s definitely been a shift in her outlook, which I’ll try to touch on in a follow-up post.

I recently had breakfast with a good friend of mine, Andrew Kratz, who was asking about Anne. I explained how our “miscalculation” was such a bummer, likening it to running a marathon and discovering the finish line has moved just as you think you’re across it. No stranger to challenges – Andrew is a Special Forces Marine (I say “is” because Andrew has reminded me that while he isn’t in active service, once a Marine always a Marine) – he shared from his own experience in a way that helped me understand why Anne didn’t crumble under the realization that her chemotherapy would go another month.

“It reminds me of how the Platoon Sergeant would occasionally take us out on a five-mile run – a loop we ran daily  – and as we neared the finish line at the barracks, he’d keep running. You quickly realize this was not a five-mile run. Even the next 200 yards felt impossible. Guys would start dropping out…

“Sure, he wanted to see who was tough. But he was really teaching us that in war, there is no finish line. It’s about seeing things through until the job is done. And you don’t know when or what that looks like, so your mission isn’t about crossing a finish line. It’s a mindset. Fight until the end.”

I’m going to use that in my next blog post, I told Andrew. Too good.

Somewhere along this road, Anne stopped being a marathoner and became a Marine.