This Machine Killed Cancer

This past week Shayne and I went out on a limb. Monday morning before Shayne went back into the hospital, we decided to take a quick walk through a house for sale. It started out as a distraction and then ended up hurtling us back to reality fast than we were ready for.

We’d been looking for a house in Durham for over a year and this one was perfect. It wasn’t too big but had enough space for Shayne to play music as loud as he wanted in the basement without me hearing it from my office in the attic. There was just enough green space, a tangled forest behind it and our favorite taco stand down the street. There was a sweet little porch swing, a glassed in back porch to grow plants, and enough room for our family to grow (great danes and toddlers, alike).

As soon as we walked through the house, it seemed like home. For the first time in over 8 months, we could see a future. One that had us reading the newspaper on the front porch, coffee in hand. Where we take naps in the afternoon because we spent the morning biking around town, not because Shayne is tired from chemo. The kind where I spend my weekends trying to figure out where take our kids, not cataloging and cross-referencing side effects of Shayne’s treatment and tracking down lawyers.

So despite the fact that it seemed like a rash decision, we put an offer in on the house, wrote a letter to the young couple selling it, and crossed our fingers. After two days of no sleep, we finally heard back. We’d been outbid, by less than $4,000 and we didn’t get to put in a second offer. They said “sorry, we know that you’re going through a lot, but we couldn’t budge.”

I wanted to call and tell them that it wasn’t just a house, it wasn’t just a business deal to us, it was the possibility that at some point all of this is going to be okay. But I couldn’t, that’s our deal, not theirs.

When we found out we weren’t going to get the house, Shayne was still in the hospital. This week his stay wasn’t that bad, he said he felt pretty good over all, but his kidneys were unhappy with the amount of toxins they had to work against and the side effects from his chemo have kicked into full force. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that we didn’t get the house because something bad was going to happen, or is happening. It was the first day that I felt like glass was half empty, instead of half full.

Shayne says that the reason we’ve been going through a rough patch lately is because we used up all of our good karma points on our amazing+strong relationship, which is an understatement.  That night when I curled up next to him in the hospital bed before I moved to the couch for the rest of the night. We watched TV for a bit, his arm resting on the back of my neck. It was then I finally realized that we don’t need a house.

I was already home.