This is too hard.

Audio Transcript:

This week we have to decide whether Micah will proceed with his last, planned stretch of chemo treatment and put himself at greater risk for Covid-19, or end his treatment now. There is no guaranteed safe path through this. Last night, I fell asleep to the phrase “this is too hard” pinging through my brain, and they were the first words to cross my mind when I opened my eyes in the morning. I texted my sisters: “Remember the easy days when it was JUST a baby and cancer???”.

Before I found out I was pregnant, I was so afraid of what it would mean for my disabled body – of all the unknowns – that a real part of me believed pregnancy would kill me. This was not a feeling backed by evidence. My anxiety was just so loud and reckless that death became too easy a picture to conjure. When I actually saw the two pink lines on the pregnancy test, my chest clenched. Seven days later Micah was diagnosed with cancer. One month after the surgery to remove his tumor and one week before he was scheduled to start four months of chemotherapy, the city shut down in an effort to stop the spread of a global pandemic. Tomorrow I will be thirty weeks pregnant, and the stark truth is that the gritty, textured, specific reality of this moment is so much worse – so much harder, scarier, and more painful than I imagined.

The part that blows my mind, though – the part I can’t quite make sense of – is that, for right now and as we sit perched in the eye of this impossible storm, we’re still here. We’re still making mashed potatoes for dinner and laughing at our kitties disgruntled harrumphs. We’re still dancing to MmmBop, still putting words to our deepest fears, still holding hands, still watering the plants around the house and finding new shoots sprouting off the vines. How? I do not understand the human capacity to endure. Honestly. I am stunned by it. Because all of this is indeed too hard. I mean it – THIS IS TOO HARD. And also?