Option 1: Do nothing. There’s an 80% chance that the surgery Andy had to remove the tumors was enough; the cancer will never come back. Of course he would have to get monitored on a regular basis to make sure, but even if the cancer returned, it’s a sort that’s slow growing enough that there’s no real risk. As long as he stuck to his surveillance schedule they would catch it with plenty of time and squash it away before it could do any harm. And anyone who knows my husband knows he would stick to his surveillance schedule. But would he worry and fret between check-ups? Anyone who knows my husband knows that, yes, he would do that too. Another problem: if the cancer came back, squashing it would require much more serious and debilitating drugs than what would be used now; see options 2 and 3.

Option 2: Radiation. Basically, he would go in every day for a few weeks and have cancer fighting rays zapped down on his abdomen. The point would be to kill any tiny cancer cells that had escaped but that were too small to be be detected by his CT scan (because no spreading was detected on his CT scan). This would reduce the odds of recurrence from 20% to less than 5%. Problem is, it would also probably make him horribly sick and more importantly, up his risk factor for colon cancer ever so slightly; his mom died from colon cancer.

Option 3: Chemo. A type of chemotherapy called carboplatin is a fairly new option for Andy’s type of cancer. It’s been used on other cancers for a long time so they know it doesn’t lead to any major long-term problems. Of course, it’s still chemotherapy so it’s not totally harmless and shouldn’t be administered unnecessarily, but it’s much more mild than the sort of chemos that would be used if a recurrence happened. Based on about 10 years of research, they’re thinking it has similar success rates as radiation, reducing the odds of recurrence to less than 5%. However, because it hasn’t been around too long it’s impossible to know this for sure. But it’s a lot easier on the body than radiation. You get one injection and then wait it out for three weeks or so. The vast majority of people experience only minor discomfort and keep working full-time.

So, what did Andy decide?

Drumroll please…

Andy wanted more peace of mind than surveillance alone could provide. To stay sane he needs to know a) he did everything he could to stave off recurrence, and b) recurrence is pretty darn unlikely. So that left him with radiation or chemo. Radiation is a perfectly good option for many, but he didn’t see the point in upping his risk, even ever so slightly, for another type of cancer to which he’s already genetically predisposed — especially when there’s another perfectly good option on the table. So that left chemo. Even after the chemo he’ll still need to get his blood tested for cancer markers quarterly and have annual CT scans in the event that he’s in the unlucky 5%, but that’s manageable enough that we will hopefully be able to return to Benin to finish out our tour. The State Department’s medical office is telling us that should be fine, but we’ll see what happens when it’s time for an official decision.

So, that’s that.

Andy is scheduled to start chemo on February 13. I guess I have to let him off the hook for Valentine’s Day this year, huh?

We don’t encounter a lot of shopping carts in Benin, so sue me. But trust me, I can drape a mosquito net like a pro.

“Sorry to interrupt…” she began.

Oh great, we both thought. She’s going to tell us that we haven’t dressed Flynn warmly enough. Or that we really shouldn’t be letting him eat whatever it is he’s currently putting in his mouth. For all you non-parents out there, you would be amazed how much unsolicited advice comes along with bringing a baby  in public. This is one of my least favorite things about being back in the U.S. Maybe the same thing happened in Benin too, but luckily I couldn’t understand what people were telling me so I just assumed they were saying he was cute.

But no, that’s not the direction this particular woman was going. “Do you have a blog…?” she continued.

“Why yes, yes we do.”

It turns out her husband is in the current A-100 class, and they poured through Foreign Service blogs, including ours, to know what to expect. This sort of thing has happened to us a number of times in the past few years, and each time we’re surprised to learn that anyone besides our parents is actually reading. So this blog does have a readership, albeit one specific to the sort of people who hang out at hotels close to the FSI shuttle. Still, it’s a readership nonetheless, and that makes what I’m about to tell you all the more shocking.

A few months ago my mom starting blogging on Open Salon — you know, the place where Julie of Julie & Julia fame blogged about her cooking adventures. Very quickly my mom built a circle of loyal followers, getting more views and comments than we could dream about. She very quickly outdid us, and now it seems she’s outdone even herself. She’s gone viral. A week ago my mom posted “25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore” and as of right now she’s received 47,000 page views.

47,000!

For a bit of perspective, let me point out than in all of 2011 our blog got 37,000 page views. Yes, your math is correct: that’s 10,000 less in a whole year than my mom got in one week.

We admit defeat.

But go read her posts! And tell your literary agent friends.

(Note: In the two hours since I originally posted this she’s already jumped up to 54,000 views. Almost 7,000 views in hours? Man.)

(And a day later? 100,000!)

But there’s my dilemma. Life isn’t just about the good stuff; bad creeps in occasionally too. And how am I to handle that bad stuff online? I faced that question last March when my dad passed away, and I’m facing it again now. Not knowing how much I want to reveal, I’ve opted so far to say nothing at all. But that hasn’t really been working. There’s a difference between not disclosing every little thing and intentionally holding back the most important thing. Holding back the most important thing feels not only dishonest but also uncomfortable. And so I guess (at least for me) that’s when a lowlight becomes scatter-worthy.

Here’s what has been going on.*

January 1: Andy found a lump that he promptly had examined by the Embassy doctor, who didn’t think it was anything serious.

January 3: The doctor arranged for blood tests and a sonogram to be done in Cotonou just in case.

January 4: The results were analyzed both by the Embassy doctor and the Regional Medical Officer; neither thought there was cause for worry. Still, Andy and I remained concerned. My dad’s fairly recent death of throat cancer was fresh in my mind, and Andy lost his mom when he was little to colon cancer too. To us, a lump meant cancer, and the possibility of cancer — however tiny — was too serious to ignore. Fortunately the Regional Medical Officer approved a medevac for Andy for further evaluation. Flynn and I were approved to fly back the the U.S. too.

January 10: We arrived in D.C.

January 11: Within the first five minutes of Andy’s appointment, a urologist at George Washington University diagnosed him with testicular cancer.

January 12: Andy underwent surgery to get rid of two cancerous tumors. They were sent for biopsy to determine specifically what kind of cells they contained.

January 18: Andy had a CT scan to see whether and where the cancer had spread.

January 20: Nine days after the diagnosis of cancer — awful days of waiting, worrying, and fearing the worst — the results from blood tests, biopsy, and CT scan were finally all in. And the news was good. In fact, given the circumstances, it was the best possible news we could have received: his cancer was both the less dangerous kind and was caught before it had spread anywhere else. The survival rate for this sort of thing (with proper follow-up care) is essentially 100%.

We are all so happy, especially this little one who actually just moved on from his incessant muttering of “Mama” to a brand new word: “Dada.” Coincidence? I think not.

Though we have the diagnosis and prognosis, there are still many unknowns.

What follow-on treatment will we decide is best? Andy might undergo a low dose of radiation or chemo to slash the odds of recurrence from 15% down to virtually none, or he might just have CT scans and blood tests regularly for the next few years to monitor the situation, and only go the radiation or chemo route if that becomes necessary. (Because his cancer was the less dangerous, slow growing kind, this is perfectly safe.) When we decide on the best follow-on treatment, how long will it take? And what will I do work-wise during that time? After treatment, will Andy be medically cleared to return to Cotonou, or will I have to find an assignment somewhere else? What will become of Andy’s spot on the Foreign Service Register? Appointments Monday and Tuesday with an oncologist and then a radiation oncologist will allow us to start tackling these unknowns.

For now, we’re focusing on the one thing we do know: when all is said and done, it looks like Andy will be okay.

* Posted with Andy’s okay, of course. He says hello and thanks for reading, but he’s still enjoying the “I have cancer” excuse to justify lazing around all day and basking in decent bandwidth and the wonders of Hulu; as a result he has no free time to actually compose a blog entry himself.

Further information from a really interesting article about Coke’s presence on the continent: ”In Africa, most soft drinks are sold in returnable glass bottles. In Coke’s plants they are refilled as many as 70 times each before they’re recycled, depending how far the bottler chooses to stretch the glass. Returnable bottles help keep prices down so the company can reach more of what it calls ‘economically diverse’ customers. Consumers, in effect, pay only for the liquid in the bottle.”

You pay for the liquid in the bottle if you drink the Coke on site and leave the bottle behind, which a lot of people do. But if you want to bring the bottles home with you, you must buy them. Bottles are sold by crates of 24, like this:

When empty, you bring your crate back to one of many bottling shops around town where you swap your empty bottles for freshly filled ones.

And freshly filled ones are delicious, if I do say so myself. There’s nothing like soda from a glass bottle (not to mention real sugar rather than corn syrup), which is why we’ve already consumed, well, quite a few. We’ve been saving the bottle caps, and I’m a little scared to see how many of them we have by the end of our two years here…

Much to my surprise, the yelling did not stop at the sight of me. The women did not apologize and, embarrassed, stumble back to their separate jobs, as I would have expected. Instead, the screaming intensified. I was here to act as judge. They would each present their case and I could decide which of them was truly awful.

She locked me out of the bathroom. She acts like she’s too good to eat any food I cook. She only cooks food she knows I won’t eat. She doesn’t say hello to me in the morning. She purposefully slams the door loudly so the baby will wake up. Such accusations – each of which was accompanied by a long and convoluted story — continued for a half hour, me watching the whole scene wide-eyed just as Flynn had been before.

Let me be perfectly clear. This wasn’t a lively discussion. It was screaming. Thirty minutes of it — of two grown women, screaming like children.

Finally Flynn started fussing. “Sorry,” I said, “I need to feed him.” I hustled off to the kitchen to prepare a bottle, relieved that I had an excuse to extricate myself from this awful situation that for some inexplicable reason I hadn’t extricated myself from before. However, the women and their screaming followed. I let it continue for ten minutes before I finally interrupted.

“Okay,” I said slowly, in my rusty French. “Here’s what I want to say. I know my French is not perfect, but I understand the majority of what you’re telling me. It seems there are a lot of problems between you two. I don’t need to know all the little details about these problems. What I want to know is this: what are you asking from me?”

They both stood silent for a moment before the conversation began again – slowly and calmly this time, in a manner that made me think my question would soon be addressed. But before long voices and tensions rose, and then again I was simply listening to screamed accusations. This time they were mostly coming from the nanny. The housekeeper comes to work late. She leaves for three hours in the middle of the day. She doesn’t work unless you’re here to see.

The housekeeper began to defend herself, but at this point I was done. I didn’t care about who was or wasn’t telling the truth. I cared that this argument was happening in front of my son and that I’d somehow allowed it to continue this long in my presence.

“Look,” I said, “I’m done for today. It’s a holiday weekend. I came home early to spend time with Flynn. I’m done listening. And you are both done working. We’re all done.”

And with that I took my baby upstairs to his room where I stayed until both of them left. Is this what it had come to? Hiding out in my own home? I decided at that moment that I could not leave Flynn in a house with two women who so obviously hated one another. Even if there was no future screaming (which I doubted) there would certainly be tension, and that wasn’t okay. One of them would have to go, and although the nanny certainly wasn’t blameless in this fight, it couldn’t be her. Flynn loved her, and we liked and trusted her. This whole thing seemed very out of character. The housekeeper, on the other hand, had never been great. I would never fire her based on the nanny’s accusations, but a lot of the nanny’s accusations confirmed suspicions we already had.

When Andy came home and heard the story, he agreed. After the holiday weekend we talked with Human Resources at the Embassy to learn about the process for letting someone go. Then, after work, we braced ourselves for a difficult conversation. Andy felt sick as we waited for the housekeeper to finish her shower. I paced around in the kitchen. Neither of us has been in a position before to so negatively impact another person’s life. We felt awful about it. We wanted to change our minds, but we didn’t because we felt more awful about the idea of not doing right by Flynn.

Let’s just say the conversation did not go well. There were objections and protests. “I don’t accept this,” she said, throwing the letter we prepared back at us. Then her kids peeked their heads into the doorway. Her kids being at our house so often without our knowledge or permission was one of the problems, but still, I didn’t want to fire anyone in front of their kids. But they stayed. Then she called her husband, and he came over too.

She asked how she was supposed to feed her kids without a job — with those very kids standing right there, staring at me. Rationally I reminded myself that she quit her last job with an Embassy family because she didn’t like the work conditions, so if she were really concerned with feeding her family she probably wouldn’t have done that. I knew her husband had a stable job with another Embassy family. I knew we gave her a generous Christmas bonus as well as a generous severance. Rationally, I knew we gave her plenty of buffer to find a new job and that we did all we could to make sure those kids were fed.

We tried our best to explain our position. We apologized. But after an hour of explanations and protests, again, we decided we were done. “This is not a conversation for the whole family,” Andy finally said. “And it’s not a negotiation. We have already made our decision. It’s done.”

In the week since then, there has been a noticeable difference in the mood at our home. The nanny is clearly happier. Even though we now have to cook our own dinners and do our own dishes, we feel far less stress in the evenings. And, interestingly, the house is really just as clean as always. Letting the housekeeper go was the right decision my kid — I’m sure about that — so why can’t I help but think about hers?

We kept Andy’s family Christmas Eve tradition of chili, and then my Christmas morning tradition of cinnamon rolls. Usually we opt for the ready-to-bake variety, but this year out of necessity we went the homemade route. After a record-breaking four hours of present opening on Christmas morning (open a few presents, deal with baby meltdown, repeat) we took a long nap before dinner with the Embassy crowd. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the beach, as is local tradition. That still just seems wrong.

These lovely little bungalows have porches looking out on the ocean. Unfortunately this time around we picked a room on the lagoon side of the resort. We’d heard the ocean side was nicer, but we didn’t really care whether our windows looked out to lagoon or ocean. However, we hadn’t known that the rooms on the lagoon side don’t have porches. Darn. Lesson learned.

A waving red flag told us that it wasn’t safe to swim in the ocean, but that was okay because there were three pools surrounded by lounge chairs. Even better.

Bar service was available at the pool, and then meals were served at this outdoor restaurant. I enjoyed a delicious seafood pasta that wasn’t even all that overpriced.

Since we stayed for less than 24 hours this time around we only enjoyed the pool, but there are also canoes, kayaks, tennis, mini golf, bikes, four-wheelers… plenty to do to fill a weekend.

While nice, it’s not exactly a four-star resort. (The management realizes they should supply shampoo in the bathrooms, but it comes in tiny bottles that have clearly been used again and again for years, for instance.) Still, we’ll take it. We’re already planning another longer visit  in February when my mom is in town. And yes, we’ll be shelling out the extra $20/night for a porch where we can sit listening to crashing waves.

Well, guess what!

I was out grocery shopping yesterday at Erevan, the giant supermarket I’ve written about before, and what did I find? Santa! Flynn was home with Andy, but I high tailed it out of there immediately to fetch him. Back at Erevan, we produced this beauty, which is possibly the most amazing first Santa picture there ever was, if I do say so myself:

Foreign Service friends, can you compete? If we stick with this career path I imagine there will be many more non-traditional milestone pictures to come.