Appetite for Nothing

Each bite is now a struggle, the cancer and its treatment give hints at the war taking place beneath my wife's skin with intense pains being replaced with the dull ache deep in her bones as the daily radiation treatments kill the cancer while also leaching calcium from the bones caught in the line of its penetrating beam. It is a gift from God each day she is blessed free from the ravenous cancer pain or the creeping nausea that dogs her from one chemo treatment to the next. It is only handfuls of medication that keep the nausea from blossoming into full-fledged vomiting. 

After three days of little more than berries and juice abutted only with lightly buttered toast combating the first bought of the now almost daily nausea; Jill was able to finish a small bowl of the left-over spaghetti for lunch followed with a healthy dinner. Her body succumbing to a long overdue sleep only minutes from eating, it finally finding the nutrients it had been starved from the previous days. 

The weekend quickly approaches when we take a vacation from the fresh sheets of the hotel and the pain and misery that is cancer and have the short opportunity in our home for the last 12 years and if even for a short time have the feeling that everything is normal once more, with the only fears being born of how one child reacts to another with the mere finical worries, no different than any of our friends or neighbors.