normalcy...or almost

Wednesday afternoon I joined Tad in Santa Cruz where he had finally arrived forty-eight hours earlier thanks to the loving Carl who agreed to fetch him in San Francisco and drive him home (during rush hour!!).
I had been looking forward to being there when Tad was finally reunited with his/our cat and garden but unfortunately I was in the Midwest attending a gathering with my family of origin.
I suppose it was silly of me to build up expectations: I had this fantasy that we would spend our month-long inter-regnum period (between two doctors) doing things that bolster Tad's health like daily walks, morning meditations, time in the vegetable garden, seeing friends.
Instead we came back to our usual routine of being quite domestic only --thanks to a mention from the doctor about being particularly vulnerable to bugs--we're even more domestic.
Tad is more tired than I expected. He can't put his hands in dirt - no doubt the single most healing thing he loves to do. He can't go near the cat litter box and has to be careful not to play too rough with her for fear of open scratches.
The first day he spouted his anger at the fact that he doesn't even really get a proper one month break: the next oncologist already has him down for coming to San Francisco to meet and do some lab work in a few days.
"I was planning on staying away from a frigging hospital for a month," he said to me.
The next oncologist is a bone marrow transplant specialist.
It seems the most promising procedure for long-term cancer-free living is a bone marrow transplant (many of which are done with one's own bone marrow cells causing a etymological conundrum in my opinion), a very painful and potentially lethal affair.
In essence people who get transplants instead of just chemo actually live longer with no sign of cancer returning after five years however they are more at risk of dying during the procedure than folks who just get chemo. The good news is that all of the data we see on AML are skewed by the fact that the median age of someone with this ailment is 67 years old (around 4% of people with AML are actually in Tad's age range).
So I keep praying that, in the same way he surprised everyone at the previous hospital by his robust return to health after chemo, he will surprise them all yet again.
But the part of me who fantasizes about some Hollywood version of Tad walking daily along the beach with me, sometimes twice a day, to slowly rebuild muscle mass, lung capacity, heart rate; the part of me that imagined some other version of Tad transformed by the specter of death into some go-getting extroverted super hero is letting go slowly and remembering how amazingly well he knows what is good for him. Right now it is lots of rest, reading and lying low. My job is to love him and calm my own fears that that might not be enough to keep him alive through the next round of hell.