Comment by gassius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gassius | Hacker News Reader

Life finds a way. My wife had generalized tonic-clonic seizure for an entire year (non previous seizure history) without any cause being detected by multiple MRIs. She was taking increasing doses of Levetiracetam that somehow controlled the scope of the seizures but not avoid them completely. After a year of this, we go for another ER visit after the latest one and she ask, somehow randomly, to have a pregnancy test, it comes negative but, finally, the root cause of the seizure does appear on imagery, at that point a low grade astrocytoma. She went into major brain surgery to try to remove it and pathology confirms the low grade astrocytoma, and after a month of recovery, the oncologist recommends to start a chemo and radio therapy treatment.

As the low grade astrocytoma is treatable and with high long term survival rate, he recommends that we might extracts some ovules if we decide to have another kid in the future, as the chemo had a high chance of infertility. We had one son, and being both on our middle to late 30s, we agreed.

We go to her OG for this, and as he is performing an preliminary echography... a heart beat start blasting on the speakers, over two months of his negative blood pregnancy test, after major brain surgery, after major doses of meds of all kinds, she was, indeed, pregnant. We knew exactly when she got pregnant, it was 5 days before that ER visit. She "knew" it that day in the ER, that's why she asked for the pregnancy test (that, once again, came negative).

She decided to have the baby, no matter what the risk for her it was, no matter what risk for the baby it was. Chemo was out the question and radio treatment was a high risk and had to wait for at least another month. 6 months later we had a healthy baby, who is now a healthy 10 year old girl.

Sadly, some months after given birth to her, my wife had a relapse, the brain tumor came back, this time as GBM, a month after the girl second birthday, she passed away.

Life found a way, tho, and my wife never had any remorse of the decisions we made and she would be proud of what her sons are coming to be

Jesus, this is heartbreaking. I'm so sorry.

I haven't gone through anything quite like that, but after friends' deaths and suchlike, I always loved this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five:

> The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

> When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

Somehow it has a similar content of this one published in "Facts of the Faith", 1919:

--- Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used, put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we shared together. Let my name ever be the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

This is heart breaking of course, but is it wrong to say it's also beautiful? That her last act before death was to create and nurture new life. There's something amazing about that

I'm so sorry. Thank you for sharing your story.

Thanks. We are all as good as we can be now, Life, aside of finding ways, continues.

This is a heart breaking story. Stories like these really put life in a different perspective. This sort of reminds of me my brother's wife story. She died of Glioblastoma at very young age (age 34).

Thank you for sharing this.

Thank you for sharing <3

Hearth-breaking. All the love to you and your family.

Sorry for your loss

Thank you for sharing that.

A heart-breaking story, thank you for sharing.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

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