5 Rainbow Day

On Tuesday night, James and I headed up to Santa Cruz  in preparation for two appointments on Wednesday.  The next morning we woke-up, had a cup of tea and some swamp water, and then packed-up for the commute to Palo Alto.

As we were waking-up in my parents’ cozy sitting room with the wood stove, something caught my eye.  I looked directly past James, and there, through the towering redwoods, was a column of light– a vivid, perfectly vertical rainbow reaching up into the sky.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

We made it over 17 pretty easily, despite the entire northbound stretch just past Vine Hill being shut down as they cleared a landslide.  Lexington Reservoir was full to the brim.  As we made our way to Stanford, we were astonished by four more separate rainbows.  One reaching across the entire sky, from 280 to 101.

Our first appointment was with the radiation oncologist.  Although we went in generally expecting her to recommend radiation… I mean when you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail… it still knocked us back a bit.  She felt very strongly that radiation was critical and needed to be scheduled immediately.

We had a tough afternoon, wandering a bit aimlessly through the most beautifully landscaped outdoor mall in America, visiting a good friend of James’, and then heading back to meet with the melanoma oncologist.  That appointment was better.  The nurse was named Jaime and the doctor emphasized the positives– the tumor was small, in the scheme of tumors, and they were able to remove the entire thing with clear margins.  In the world of melanoma, surgery is the best treatment.  He explained that if it was somewhere below his neck, surgery probably would have been the only treatment recommended at this point, with very frequent scans.  But, a person’s head and neck are very important real estate with a lot going on– subsequent surgeries could be much harder.  Ultimately, we left Stanford fairly convinced that we should go through radiation, as a precautionary measure to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back or spreading.

We don’t yet have the schedule, but James will likely begin radiation treatment in Los Gatos at the end of January.  It will be six weeks of treatment that lasts just a few minutes a day on weekdays, with time off on weekends.  It will be hard to have James away for so many weeks, but we feel confident that he will have the highest quality treatment and be in the care of the best doctors.

Wednesday night we drove home to SLO, coasting in at 10PM and falling into bed.  It was an exhausting week, but we now have the semblance of a plan.  We will still be meeting with an expert in San Francisco on the twenty-third, and another at UCLA on the twenty-fifth.  We’ll see whether their recommendations or approaches vary from our current team and continue moving forward.

Although it was an emotionally and physically draining week, I still think about those five rainbows.  It’s abundantly evident the universe was overcompensating… practically shouting that no matter what we heard that day, “It’s going to be okay.”

And I know that it is.