I'm almost at my two year anniversary with my FJC. As some of you know, I love my truck and have spent a greater part of the last two years obsessing on it - maybe less so the last six months. You may not know (I've mentioned it here and there) that it was a therapy tool - a great escape from real life. I bought the truck on a whim about three weeks after my wife died on 13 May 2006 (so the truck came along in very early June).
Transformation from this:
to this:
My wife had been diagnosed with a rare sarcoma in April 2004 - a
leiomyosarcoma of the pulmonary artery. It had actually been misdiagnosed from a biopsy one year earlier. From April 2004 until May 2006 our lives were a crazy every-day battle - lung resection, heart rebuild, complications in ICU, a two month battle to get off a ventilator, chemo, brain tumor and brain surgery, radiotherapy, tissue water overload, kidney collapse, more chemo, esophageal blockage, ARDS, suffocation, heart attach, and finally a very peaceful death unconscious on the ventilator. We knew the odds were low starting out, but Naomi (a recent med school grad (Albert Einstein in the Bronx) and then a resident in OB at Kaiser Sunset) had a great fighting spirit, and a "there isn't any disease that someone somewhere hasn't survived." I guess overall it was just a kind of disbelief that we could lose. The last time I saw her was in a non-ICU room at Cedars (we'd DNR'd by now, so no longer in ICU), she was unconscious and I watched a couple of hours of TNT NBA playoff coverage holding her hand. The next day my parents and I were heading over when we got a call from her mum that things didn't look good. I ended up getting a staccato play-by-play of the readings failure via cell phone calls as I drove over the Hollywood hills to Cedars and she was dead and cold by the time I arrived.
She's buried in the same
cemetery in Westwood as Marilyn Monroe, Billy Wilder, and Rodney Dangerfield. She's over by the chapel if you ever go there.
I was so numb and exhausted and empty after two solid years of everyday battle (we had no remission and everyday was battling some new symptom or managing appointments or waiting to see if she'd recover from the latest crazy thing that had happened), I just wanted to do stuff that I'd wanted to do for along time and plunged into a renewed adult childhood. The FJC build up was the more non-self destructive of these activities. Fixating on it helped me day to day until very gradually normal life crept back in.
My lack of activity on the truck in the last 6 months or so has been more a sign of good things: fixing up my home, gaining much more interest in work again, dating again, living a bit again. Why am I saying all this now? Too painful earlier and pretty soon, it'll be ancient history. This is just noting the passage of a few bad and one very good anniversary.
A year before the storm broke, we were married in Palos Verdes on 25 May 2003:
Coming home from the last trip to the UK, a couple of weeks prior to diagnosis.
Naomi with friends a couple of days before the first operation. It turned out she would never be able to hang out and do stuff like this again:
After lung and heart surgery and after the struggle to get off the vent. Now brain surgery:
Hair shaving to keep spirit with Nomi:
In July 2005 we got a small dog for Nomi - she had said that when she had chemo, she wanted to get a dog to keep her company, a "chemo" dog. Hence the dog is called "Kimo" or "Kimo-chan":
We even managed to sneak the doggy into the hospital:
For a long time this felt like a scene from the Christmas Carroll where a ghost shows you a vision of the future that's horrifying as you read the words on the grave. For the longest time I kept wanting to find Naomi and point it out to her: "check this out, weird, eh?"
Linear Mode
