Listen
to Anne share her experience with Judi's cancer in her own words.
(214 K .au file)
Listen
to Anne share her experience with Judi's cancer in her own words.
(214 K .au file)
Judi's cancer was the first major crisis that Anne and Judi had to face together. Anne prepared by gathering people together for support, by arranging legal papers, and by being there for Judi.
I'm Judi's partner, and as she said we've been together for four years. Two years ago, we had a ceremony where we exchanged vows and rings. We've been living together since that time. And so it was just a little after we had been living together for about a year that she got her diagnosis. And we talked about it a little ways into her treatment and how we'd felt like newlyweds up to that point. And once she got her diagnosis, our relationship had moved into something different. We'd faced our first major crisis together. We hadn't been through it yet, but we'd begun to face it.
We were in a good position in our lives to weather a crisis. We
had been together for four years. We had a lot of friends and
support. I had just graduated and hadn't found a job yet, so I had
plenty of time. And Judi was in a work situation where she had lots
of sick time built up, she had lots of support. Our lives were in a
very stable place when this happened. We thought several times, what
if this had happened a year later after we'd moved to Michigan and
had no new friends and had no real support basis. It would have been
much harder.
We got the diagnosis on a Monday, and Judi's surgery was scheduled for Friday. And people had expressed a desire to come over and see us that week. And so we started telling people to come over Wednesday night and we weren't quite sure what was going to happen. But we ended up with a Baptist, Jewish, Buddhist, Lutheran, Pagan prayer meeting where we sang some songs together and we gathered around Judi and prayed for her. It was a really wonderful time. It was a very tangible showing of the support that was there for both of us, and especially for Judi. It felt like we were doing something at a time when we felt so helpless.
And after her surgery, my parents came up. My mom is a nurse and
she does home visits often with people recovering from surgery. So
they were very supportive. My mom said that they went grocery
shopping, prepared a lot of food that we could just pop in the
microwave. And Mom changed the dressing over Judi's surgery. And they
were for about two or three days, cleaned the house, took care of us,
and kind of drove off into the sunset. So that was really wonderful.
It was nice to have my parents respond, to treating Judi like a
member of the family, which she was.
The day of her diagnosis was awful. She called and said that the appointment had been canceled and she'd try to see if she could get in later, but she didn't think she could. So I went home and waited to hear from her, and when she had to go over right away, she didn't call me, thinking that I couldn't get there in time. So I expected her to be home about 4:00. I paged her around 5:00 and she didn't answer. And she didn't get home until 7:00. I was in panic at that point. When she got home I was looking, hoping for a dent on the car somewhere so that there had been some other reason. And I was angry that she hadn't called, but I just tried to be real calm and I said "Are you okay?" And she didn't answer and my heart sunk, and we went inside and she told me. So we just spent some time crying, and then the next day we told Judi's sisters and my parents and began to deal with it.
We had heard about a lesbian whose partner developed a terminal
illness and the parents refused to let the partner in to see her. The
way the hospital saw it, the partner was not a blood relative, and
the parents, who had been estranged from the woman for years, were
blood relatives. And so her partner died and she never got to see her
after she was initially taken into the hospital. The fear that I was
living with was that I wouldn't' be able to be with Judi while she
was in recovery, or that something would go wrong and I wouldn't be
able to be near her. Well, this was the Bay area, so nobody batted an
eye. You know, we went to an attorney, we signed our forms and they
said "Oh, good. Well, let's make copies right away and we'll put one
in the front of the chart so that there's no question." There was
actually no problem from anyone. We just had these fears because of
horror stories we'd heard from other people.
For me the harder times were when I had to stand back and let go. What was reassuring to me was to be at her side. And sometimes things would happen, like Judi joining a support group that did allow spouses, and she'd say, well, you don't have to go if you don't want to. And I'd say, well, I want to. Do you want me to go? And she'd think about it and say, "Well, not really. This is something I'd like to do myself." She got radiation five mornings a week. I was willing to go every time, and she said "Well, you don't really need to go and I'd kind of like to just not make a big deal of it." So those were the harder times for me. Working hard to be supportive felt right, and the times when Judi wanted privacy or wanted to just go on with her life as if everything was normal, that was harder to let go and stand back.
We had a few things that we clung to, like my acceptance into med
school. And we had been able to be present while our godson was born.
Getting to see Nathan as a little baby and be present as he was
dedicated at his church. Also, right after Judi's second surgery, we
brought home a baby parrot, an African Gray. We'd already decided to
buy it and paid most of the money for it, but it was still a baby and
not ready to go home yet. And the day before Judi's second surgery,
she said "Let's get the bird." We went by the pet store the morning
of her surgery and Judi was just charmed with how cute this little
bird was, and the pet store owner said, well, we could conceivably
let her go home. Judi said, "Well, we'll pick her up tomorrow,"
meaning I'll pick her up because Judi would be recovering from
surgery. But it was really something wonderful to focus on.
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