Rats, Fires, and a Kidnapping

welcome to my stress dreams

Hi, it’s me. Since this whole ordeal started I’ve been begging Bryan to let me publicly call it his Butt Cancer. He has so far not been excited about that — he makes a “that’s cringy” face at me — but I think he just doesn’t appreciate how fun it is to say the word “butt” over and over again like a 12 year old boy fish.

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How to {Opt Out of Cancer} Updates

Hello and welcome new subscribers! 👋 I normally post on Wednesdays, but this is a (hopefully temporary 🤞) special newsletter about dealing with my husband’s colon cancer diagnosis. If you want to stick with Wednesdays only, you can opt-out of Shrödinger’s Polyp updates from your subscriber settings (manage subscription) and still receive my regular Wednesday newsletter. As far as I can tell, you can’t do this from the Substack mobile app – you need to be on the full website. Here’s a quick screencast of where to find that from jenzug.substack.com:

(In the video above, I get to Manage Subscriptions by clicking on the three lines in the top right corner, then Manage Subscriptions, then toggle off the one I want to stop receiving to my inbox.)

We Have an Update!

The other day I was on a Zoom call for work and Bryan interrupted to tell me a last minute appointment opened up that we’d been waiting for, but we had to leave RIGHT NOW to make it in time. He was kind of intense about it, so I hung up on my co-worker and ran out of the house like it was on fire – phone, keys, and small notebook in my pockets. We arrived with 15 minutes to spare. 

As much as we banter and talk about Butt Cancer on Substack, I didn’t tease him about his action-movie-like intensity. My intuition is teaching me to listen to his emotions and follow his lead. He wasn’t feeling bantery but was discombobulated by many things: last minute schedule changes, missing work meetings, snow flurries during our drive, CANCER. He needed comfort and reassurance, not jokes, so I focused on driving and staying calm. After the meeting, we were back to bantering on the drive home.

Waiting for the surgery consult at Swedish Medical Center in Edmonds.

The appointment was a surgery consult with the Poop Plumber who would open Bryan up if we went with this particular provider (we’re getting a second opinion regarding treatment options). We learned that treatment for colon cancer is approached differently based on whether the polyp is located in the rectum or in the colon. Schrödinger’s Polyp is right on the border between these areas, and it appears our two competing healthcare providers are approaching treatment differently – one based on the colon and one based on the rectum. 

Here’s a seven minute recap video we recorded immediately following our appointment where we debrief the meeting and accidentally pitch a new reality television show called The Amazing Colon Race:

To recap

Bryan had a CT scan on February 24th that looks very promising. Based on this, the option 1 treatment is surgery to remove the polyp and a section of the colon

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and have a good look around to see if further treatment is needed.

The second approach option is for Bryan to get an MRI, which is scheduled for March 13th through the Second Opinion provider. This will provide clearer, more detailed images of the polyp and surrounding area, which will be reviewed by a cross-functional care team. Since the video above was recorded, Bryan has decided to go with whatever the second team decides (more on that decision process in another update).

If you want to stay in-the-know, be sure to subscribe.

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I had a stress dream the other night. 

I was standing on the porch outside our front door when I felt warm, tight pressure on my upper right arm. I turned my head and saw a rat with its little legs wrapped tight around me, hanging on for dear life. 

Immediately I tried shaking it off, and I remember hearing my voice screaming, “GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF ME!”

Either it was trying to eat my arm or hump it – either way, the scene was chaotic, and I couldn’t get Bryan’s attention inside the house, even though I could see him through the window. 

Then I heard his voice right next to me.

JEN!

But the rat was still on my arm, eating its way through my shirt. I could hear Bryan saying my name, but I was distracted. I sensed the rat was about to break my skin and I was afraid of rabies or whatever it would give me.

JEN!

I heard the whoosh his CPAP machine makes when he pulls the mask off his face, and I felt his hand on my hand. But the rat was still on my arm!

JEN!

He pulled on my hand and I finally heard my own voice. I was moaning – hardly the scream I thought I was making – and I remember thinking, “He’s gonna think I’m having a sex dream. Why doesn’t it sound like I’m screaming?!”  

ARE YOU OKAY!

THERE’S A RAT ON MY ARM! I yelled.

I think he laughed? It’s Charlie, he said, our 15lb black cat who sleeps between us. He was leaning against me, putting pressure on my arm as I laid on my back. It was the exact pressure I was feeling in my dream, and my brain couldn’t make sense of the reality.

Charlie was the rat? 

Charlie’s a big boy, but he ain’t no rat. Is that a movie line? Is “He ain’t no rat?” a movie line?

Just to set a baseline of what my normal (?) dreams are like, here’s one I had a few years ago that I wrote down: March 2, 2016: “Last night I dreamt that my doctor was located inside a pizza restaurant and she sent me to get a CT scan at a tanning salon and I haven’t even started taking Claritin-D yet so this allergy season is going to be wack.” 😂

(who says WACK?)

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a stress dream, but I can only remember five of them – three as an adult and two when I was a kid.

In 2018 my team at work got a new department director and she was a piece of work. We had a thriving creative team culture in a high-trust environment, and she blew that up in a matter of ten months. She was a menace. 

During that season I had a stress dream about being stranded in a meadow with my kids, surrounded by a raging forest fire on all sides, with no way out alive. I woke up with a raging headache and a sore face and jaw from clenching my teeth.

In 2015 Bryan and I were in the middle of a fight that went on FOREVER (his fault, of course) and I had a stress dream that I was kidnapped, managed to escape and flag down a stranger driving by, and ended up in a dramatic car chase fleeing from the kidnappers. 

And when I was little, somewhere around six or seven years old, my parents got divorced. I’m not sure how much I knew about what was going on, but I had two stress dreams during that time that I still remember vividly all these years later. 

Both involved my house being literally destroyed — in one dream by a giant snow boulder and in another by flood. At six years old my subconscious understood my home was falling apart.

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Anyway, the most frustrating thing we had to navigate in the first two weeks of Bryan’s diagnosis was disorganization and silence. I won’t get into the details here, but people weren’t returning our calls and “urgent” procedures were being scheduled a month out. 

This was the context of my stress dream. Not the cancer itself, but the fear that bureaucracy could potentially kill my husband if somebody didn’t get their shit together.

I want to shout out our friend R who reached out with practical tips, insights, and specific questions to ask based on his own personal experience, and our friend M who did some bureaucracy-busting that contributed to finally getting a call-back.

As you keep The Zugs in your thoughts and prayers, please also be thinking about several friends in our friend-community who are going through similar scary health issues. We’re the weirdos who post everything we do online, but we’re not the only ones facing the unknown.

Go forth and enjoy your healthy butts.

Until next time,

Jen

p.s. Everything looks like a colon now:

1. I asked Bryan if I could publish this and he said, “Yeah. It’s stupid, but it’s good.”

2. Kim, a fire night regular, said, “Bryan, if you have a piece of your colon removed will it be a semi colon?”