A few weeks ago Cassie got really sick. We will spare you the gory details of what was probably a bad flu but suffice it to say, it was as sick as Cassie has ever felt or as Dan has ever seen her. Not good.
That first night we were probably 30 minutes away from calling 911 for an ambulance and an ER run as Cassie was at risk of being dehydrated and too weak to walk. We avoided having to make that call but it was a hard night. When Dan – all masked up (maybe something good actually did come out of Covid as we had a LOT of masks laying around) – put Cassie to bed he was in “deal” mode. Fifteen minutes later though his mind began to wander. “Is this what the end will feel like,” he started to ponder. He immediately banished those thoughts from his head in favor of trying to stay present. Turns out though the present was equally, if not more, scary. Dan realized that we both knew of women with MBC who had died from an infection that their immune systems were too weakened to fend off, and it was that thought that caused him genuine terror.
What if he had just said goodnight to Cassie for the last time? What if she wasn’t alive in the morning? What if this was it? He thought about going in to check on her but didn’t want to wake her up and was pretty sure that what she would have said to him was: “If this is it, then this is it and you are going to need your rest tomorrow so try and get some sleep.” So that’s what he did (and what Cassie later confirmed was exactly what she would have said so at least he got that one right. 🙂). He slept – kind of – and was incredibly relieved when Cassie called him in the guest room at 5:00 a.m. for some water and another blanket. Whew.
A couple of days later when Dan shared all this he said that he had thought there might be like a 20% chance that Cassie could have died that night. To which she responded: “Oh is that all? I thought it was a lot higher than that – I was pretty worried.” So we had both been thinking the same things. The same scary and unsettling but very real thoughts.
Cassie is “healthy” again and thankfully it was just a bad flu. This whole experience though has made it clear to us that we are living our lives on “thin ice.” Now, on the upside, we have gotten a lot better at living this way. We know how to be more careful, slow down, ask for help, change plans, and so on. We can see the ice, recognize it and are more confident navigating it. Often we can even fool ourselves into thinking that our foundation is thicker and stronger than it actually is, and it might appear that way to our friends and family as well.
However, absolutely none of this changes the fact that, thanks to MBC, the ice upon which our lives currently rest is exceptionally thin and that we could unexpectedly fall through at any time. We have known that too of course – intellectually – but this recent run in with the flu was the most vivid example to date of the thin ice upon which our lives rest. It’s sobering, disorienting, and kind of scary but it is also a good reminder of the importance of living and loving as fully as we can every day. It’s also true that while there is nothing that we can do about the ice itself, we can continually get better at skating on it and that’s exactly what we are going to do!
Whew!