October 5th Tuesday: MRI Trip to Calgary

Charlotte needed to be at the hospital 9:00am on Thursday so we thought rather than getting on the road at 5am she should go up the day before. Since that would have cut out two of the pre-wedding parties I was helping organize Rob offered to go up without me. We didn’t anticipate there being any trouble, we have done several MRIs and hearing tests in the past and it wasn’t a big deal. Robs sister offered to go up with them to help out on the road, that way they could take Yolanda off my hands as well.

Our bachelorette party on Wednesday night turned out great. Since the bride’s family claims that Black Bart the pirate is somewhere back in their family tree I thought it would be fun to have a silly pirate kind of theme. With an assortment of dollar and thrift store shopping we pulled off the look quite nicely. Thursday was the bridal shower and I did some running around town that morning to get ready.

I was anxious to hear how things had gone up in Calgary and left a couple of messages on Rob’s cell. Finally, about an hour before I was to be helping set up for the shower he called back. Just the falter in his voice made me sink to the floor. Things had not gone as well as we had hoped. Her hearing test was good, but the MRI was not. Everything came crashing down –again. Not wanting to spoil the party I called in sick, and let the other bridesmaid believe I had the flu. I called my mom and sister who came over and cried with me while we waited until Rob got home with the girls. My friend Tammy let Abbey know after the shower about what was going on so they came over for a bit too. I figured that I could not keep this a secret for the whole weekend and it would be terrible to have it slip at the wrong time, better to all cry it out now together.

The MRI showed something had formed over the past three months. It was about 1 to 1.5 cm big and right on the side of her original tumour. From the shape of it our Doctor is speculating that it is the same tumour coming back. We were so shocked to hear this. Charlotte had been so strong and done so well with her chemo treatments. We were told in the beginning that this was an aggressive tumour. Somehow we just figured that since she was doing so well outwardly that things must be working on the inside as well. I really was convinced that there was no way it would come back during the chemo; I was not worried for this MRI at all. It was the next one that I was concerned about- I thought that with three months off the chemo if the tumour rears its head again that would have been the scan to look for. But no, once again we were caught off guard and knocked to the ground.

The rest of the week was imaginably very hard on all of us. We were able to suppress everything for a day and truly enjoy the wedding. We got some cute family pictures in with everyone all dressed up. I got through my speech without crying and even got a few laughs. It was a beautiful day. For the rest of the weekend we stuck pretty close to home and I started to repack for our next journey up to Calgary on Tuesday. Although her line removal surgery was cancelled we now had a meeting with our (Oncology) Doctor and Charlotte’s neurosurgeon to see what we could be looking at for the next few months.