Upside Down - T+48 hours

I'm washing water bottles and refilling them.  Bleaching high chair straps and washing the grime off of them.  Changing diapers and wiping faces.  Disciplining and hugging children.

The sun is shining.  Everything feels normal.  Looks normal.

And yet.

Fabric lies uncut for projects that are now delayed.  We haven't been to work since Thursday and we're 100% okay with that.  I keep forgetting to cook dinner - tonight, I pried a completely frozen steak off of splintering styrofoam and nuked it to thaw 20 minutes before we hoped to eat - and laundry lies unfolded.  We've cried more hours in the day than ever before, and we hold each other as if today was the last, even though we don't know what the future holds yet.

Everything is wrong.  Everything is hurting.

And yet, life around us continues on, normally.

The last 48 hours have turned our lives upside down.

For most of the summer, my husband has had very minor symptoms in his chest - mild reflux, pressure on his chest, and some discomfort when he breathed deeply.  He mentioned it to his PCP in June, and they pursued antacids and a routine course of treatment - and we didn't think much of it.  He was stressed about work and we were processing some big decisions, so we figured it was anxiety and stress, or maybe some minor lingering bronchitis.  But when it didn't resolve, he scheduled a follow-up for this past Thursday evening.

His doctor ran a chest x-ray, among other tests, and called him within fifteen minutes of him leaving the office to tell him that he had a abnormal mass in his lung area.  A CAT scan the next morning confirmed that it was a large tumor - six inches by three inches - located on his thymus or lymph node near his sternum.  [For perspective, a dollar bill is 6 inches long and 2.5 inches wide.]  We have an appointment scheduled for Tuesday the 26th with a Thoracic Surgery and Pulmonary Intervention Specialist - and hopefully at that point we will know more.  We are anticipating numerous scans, tests, and biopsies to determine what the mass is, and whether it's benign or cancerous.  We are guessing, most likely, at very least, we're looking at a surgery to remove the mass.

Everything looks and feels normal on the outside.  My husband looks (and feels, for the most part) perfectly healthy. But everything else feels upside down.