Decisions have been made.

The Chief Surgeon saw me the other day and said, “You need to do the chemo now, you know.” I was surprised, because that wasn’t the message I’d gotten from him just a few days earlier. “The stoma, that’s about quality of life,” he said. “But the chemo, that’s about the CORE of life.”

Three other surgeons told me the same thing yesterday, over the course of the morning. One of them grabbed my arm. “You need to agree to the chemo,” he said.

“Well I was never planning to refuse--” I started to say.

“You need to agree to the chemo now, because otherwise he’ll die,” said the surgeon, which was a little blunt, if not inaccurate.

“So, the surgeons seems to think we need to have chemo,” I said to Guy. And that’s when Guy told me that he told our oncologist that “they” -- the collective doctors of the hospital -- had destroyed our faith in the system what with everyone presenting a different opinion and seeming to have no sense of the big picture. Apparently, after that happened, the oncology team sat the surgical team down and gave them a lecture on NO CHEMO = DEATH.

So. We are restarting chemotherapy on Sunday, with a little cytoxan followed by several days of cytosars.

In the meantime, the inverted stoma continues to make us miserable. We’re tired (none of us is sleeping well) and cranky, the stoma leaks constantly and requires round-the-clock care, and it makes for a lot of laundry. Adi is stuck lying down on the couch with chux pads spread beneath him to catch any leaks. He’s not thrilled about this, and spends most of his deay demanding that we bring him things. We, of course, handle this by picking fights with each other, because loss of control + fear + lack of sleep = marital bliss, of course. Another side effect no one tells you about….