My heart aches a little bit this morning. I have an unease about me that always associates itself with MRI day. As I post this, dad is en route from the MRI to the neuro-oncologist. I'll have this tense feeling until mom calls me after the appointment. I go through this every 3 months.

21 years ago, on April 21, 1988, dad underwent his first brain surgery at St. Vincent's in Portland. Mom mentioned it to me yesterday and my reaction was to pretend that I didn't hear it, or that it didn't matter to me. But of course the thought started tumbling around in my head, gaining momentum and emotion. Memories of that day, as much as I might have tried to suppress them, make me feel vulnerable, scared and a little anxious, just like it did back then. I think I tried to stifle these feelings for a LONG time, but now I've tried to embrace what's happened and is happening to my dad and meet it head on, with a weird sense of confidence that helps me sleep better at night. And for the sake of my effort to heal myself of these uneasy emotions, this is what happened, as best as I can remember.

I went to school that day. Good old mom, trying to give us some sense of normalcy and mitigate our anxiety and stress, which for her was almost unbearable. Because we were trying to be so "normal," I think some people may not have realized what a tremendous impact this was making on our lives. I just remember coming home from school and talking to mom on the phone and her saying something about "cancer" and "they probably got it all." Cancer? When had anyone said anything before about cancer? No one had discussed with me that a tumor in the brain could be cancer. That word was so scary because we had just found out that grandpa had lung cancer just a few months earlier. And sometime in that same school year grandma Barnes died from pancreatic cancer. First open casket funeral. Tough stuff on a 11/12 year old. But little did we know back then that brain tumors, whether malignant or not, are devious, nasty growths that destroy the essence of a person and nearly always return to wreak more if not greater havoc in the future. We took "probably got it all" as license to try to forget about brain tumors and believe that we would never have to think about it again. How naive really.

I never did go see my dad in the hospital. It seems like he was there for weeks. I think I had one chance to go, but I was too scared. In the course of his recovery, I went to British Columbia with my dance studio for a highland dancing camp/festival/workshop. It was really fun, but I missed my family. When I got back I turned right around and went to Outdoor School (6th grade school camp) for a week. It was my first experience with camp and I loved it greatly. But when I got back, on a Friday afternoon I think, I walked myself home from school with my sleeping bag and camp pack in tow, and returned to my dad, alone, at home. I hadn't yet seen him and this was a little overwhelming. Since the previous summer of his first few seizures, I was always afraid that he would have a seizure again in front of me or while he was driving me to dance class. It's a horrible thing to be scared of your own parent like this, and I'm ashamed of it, but nothing less can be expected of an anxiety-riddled little girl. I was so afraid of him that day. He looked so different - shaved head, pale(er than usual), a barrage of staples all the way across the top of his head holding it together with all their might, or so it seemed to me. He asked me to sit down by him where he was laying and told me I could count his staples. I think I did, just to show him that I was ok, but I really wasn't. I wasn't for a long time, and I think I'm still not. That day wasn't the end of his tumor, it was the beginning on his deterioration - slow and unnoticeable at first, but continually whittling away at a once strong man, in mind and stature.

I miss you dad. I miss the person you were and the things you did and the things you knew, even if you were hard to live with. You don't deserve this.