This post was originally published on this site

Modern Love

By DAVID KALISH

Three weeks before my wife, Ingrid, and I were to move to Mexico, where a coveted job awaited me, my doctor phoned with results from my latest CT scan. My thyroid cancer had spread to my lungs. He suggested I see an oncologist right away.

I let the phone go silent. My excitement over the job as foreign correspondent for The Associated Press had been building for months. We had sublet our Brooklyn apartment, put a deposit on one in Mexico City, and sold our car.

We had also married — not just for love, but so that Ingrid, a Colombian doctor on a student visa, could travel freely across borders with me. My cancer had been stable in recent years, and I was itching to start my new life.

Suddenly everything felt shaky. How could this happen? Now was the time for packing and saying goodbye to old friends, not visiting new doctors.

Something hardened inside me. When Ingrid arrived home that evening, I played down the news. I had spots on my lungs, but they were all under a third of an inch. “Nothing I can’t take care of in Mexico,” I said. “We leave in three weeks. No way I’m squeezing in another appointment.”

Ingrid’s eyes glistened. “Have fun in Mexico,” she said. “Because I’m not going anywhere if you don’t take care of yourself first.”

A passionate woman who speaks from the gut, Ingrid is no stranger to setbacks. She had watched her father die in a Colombian hospital, the victim of a carjacking gone awry. Speaking little English, she had fled the violence there to become a doctor in America, cleaning houses to pay her way. She married me knowing all about my disease, a rare, incurable form of thyroid cancer, which had required three neck operations. But she wasn’t about to watch another man she loved die.

“Make the call,” she said.

A few days later, an oncologist was urging me to start a drug regimen at his clinic as soon as possible.

I had a better idea. “Just give me the recipe,” I told him. I would share it with a doctor in Mexico and get treated there.

Ingrid shot me a scolding look; the doctor frowned. “It’s not like you’re making enchiladas,” he said. “These drugs can have nasty side effects. This is not the time to move to another country.”

On the ride home, I said to Ingrid: “Why doesn’t anyone understand? Being a foreign correspondent is my dream. It’s like when you moved to America to practice medicine. Dreams are good for your health!”

“I didn’t have lung spots, and I wasn’t moving to the air pollution capital of Latin America,” she said. “If you don’t take care of yourself, nothing else matters.”

The next week, I canceled the appointment with the international movers, forfeited my deposit on the apartment in Mexico, and scanned the classified ads for a used car in Brooklyn. I settled back into my position on The A.P.’s international desk, editing articles by reporters in exotic places that reminded me, painfully, of the job I had given up.

My ordeal had barely begun. With chemotherapy starting in two months, the oncologist suggested I freeze my sperm for later use because the regimen can damage sex cells.

Ingrid had another idea. We could make a baby now, “the natural way,” she said.

I suppressed a laugh. With my career sandbagged and chemotherapy looming, I couldn’t even contemplate becoming a father. I would be nauseated and balding, in no shape to chase after a baby with a leaky diaper.

Ingrid stood her ground. Thawed-out sperm are notoriously unreliable, she said. She had delivered hundreds of babies in Colombia, and believed bearing a child was a privilege, not to be taken lightly. This could be our last chance.

I threw up my hands. I could only hope we would fail to conceive in the narrow window before the start of my regimen.

But wouldn’t you know: Three weeks later, Ingrid waved the positive test strip in my bewildered face, and our marriage entered a new phase. Around the time I underwent my first treatment, Ingrid was hit with morning sickness. Our side effects and symptoms were suddenly on parallel tracks.

I woke up one morning feeling queasy and achy from my first treatment, listening to the whir of a portable pack pumping the drugs through a steel medical port in my chest. Bile crawled up my throat as I staggered to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.

Seconds later, Ingrid burst in, looking as pale as I felt, and vomited too.

After gargling, she said: “Do me a favor and vomit more softly. I don’t want to hear your inner pig. You don’t know how sick I feel.”

“Oh, but I think I do.” In fact, I was that rare husband who knew exactly how sick my pregnant wife felt.

A week later, our symptoms overlapped again. I discovered a clump of hair in the shower drain and a bald patch on my head. At the same time, Ingrid, her body flooded with hormones, discovered peach fuzz growing in surprising places, around her navel and on her neck. She was wide-eyed with concern.

I reached into the shower drain and grabbed my hairball: “You think that’s bad? I have a clump.”

She touched my scalp, smiling weakly. “We both have nausea,” she said. “You’re losing hair. I have hair in new places. We both have growths inside us. Don’t you see? Me and you, we’re connected.”

In no mood to celebrate our newfound solidarity, I drew away.

“If your bad hair bothers you, let me shave you,” she said. “Lots of sexy men are bald. Bruce Willis. Agassi. No need for your head to look like a bad lawn.”

I said: “Sure, go ahead. But first let me shave your peach fuzz.”

She turned away: “So it will grow back as stubble? You’re not helping one bit.”

Ingrid and her hormones stalked out, sucking the air out of the bathroom. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t sympathize with my wife, but my own misery left me less able to cope with hers.

Our similarities then dovetailed even more. As we both struggled to hold down food, I lost weight and Ingrid didn’t gain enough. In fact, she was eating even less than me, preferring hot chocolate instead of dinner.

I pictured our tiny child trapped in her womb, pumped up with sugar. For the first time, I started to worry more about the growth inside of her than the one in me. “Ingrid, listen to me,” I said. “The baby needs to eat. And you’re the only restaurant in town.”

That night, I dreamed that Ingrid gave birth to a tumor while a surgeon extracted a fetus from my throat. I jerked awake to the glare of the morning sun, feeling famished and nauseated. Pulling a baseball cap over my patchy scalp, I went out to forage for food that wouldn’t make me gag. At a bodega, an idea struck me. I bought a loaf of Bimbo, a crunchy Hispanic-style bread Ingrid once told me she liked, and brought it to her.

She closed her eyes and took a bite, then blinked as if waking from a dream: “Wait until I tell my mother you’re feeding our baby Colombian food.” She crunched some more, reminiscing about how she ate Bimbo as a girl. “And the fruits! In Colombia, the papayas are so ripe and sweet.” A tear slipped down her cheek as she rambled on nostalgically.

“You’re eating,” I whispered as I also ate a slice, feeling the tension in me dissipate. “Maybe we can get a group rate on lumpectomies,” I joked.

“Please don’t call our baby a lump,” she said, cracking a smile.

As the months to Ingrid’s due date fell away, our baby grew big and strong inside her. Alas, in this, too, my wife and I were on similar paths. Despite the harsh chemotherapy regimen, the spots on my lungs were growing inside of me too, and the doctors seemed powerless to stop them.

Finally, on a glorious evening in February, Ingrid gave birth by cesarean section to a healthy eight-pound girl, named Sophie, whose screams filled the room as a nurse handed her to me in a tightly wrapped bundle. I handed her to Ingrid, who brought her to her breast. As pale streetlight filtered in, all I heard was suckling.

Our story could have ended here, with Sophie’s face scrunched against my wife’s milk-swollen bosom. That would have been enough for me.

But it didn’t end there. I went on medical leave to become a stay-at-home father. I switched from chemo to an experimental drug that, despite a few setbacks and scares, managed to hold my cancer at bay. The three of us moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York, where, come summers, we sow tomato and basil in our garden, and where our chemo baby, now 15, fills our home with art, laughter and piano music.

Lumps and all, not a bad deal.