The Horror of the C Word

My wife Kathy went in for what we thought was going to be just a routine mammogram.

It was anything but routine.

The radiologist called two days before we were going to leave on our trip of a lifetime to Walt Disney World to say you have cancer.

Wow. The dreaded C word. It was delivered like you would deliver the evening news with no emotion at all.

When Kathy asked if she could get any more information she was told:

“I just gave you the information it’s positive you have cancer.”

So much for empathy.

We had already paid for our trip to Disney World and we were scheduled to fly out of Reno in two days

Now this.

We had waited forty years to go on this trip.

I thought of what the late, great Gilda Radner used to say on Saturday Night Live.

“It’s always something.”

We made a frantic call to our family Doctor. He squeezed us in the next day and gave us what information he could. We told him about the trip and he said we should go and try to have fun. He gave Kathy a referral to the best cancer surgeon in the state. He hugged her and told her if he had cancer she was the surgeon he would trust to do his surgery.

So two days later our daughter Jenni drove us to the Reno airport. We got on our plane to make our first coast to coast flight across the USA.