Bonehead

I thrive on data. I don't know why. I have to know everything about a situation that I'm involved in or I feel lost. Listless. There are times when I do stupid things in the name of research or data collection. Tonight was one of them. 

It started out innocuous enough. I had backed up my ultrasound and CT results (pictures and reports) a couple of nights ago so that we would have a copy in case one of the radiology labs kept the discs as we ferried them from place to place. Point Jake. 

As I looked through the files that were on the discs I couldn't readily find any actual images. Just a bunch of XML files pointing to LINK files for the images. Then I found them. In no immediately recognizable format. You needed the viewing program on the disc to see anything (without a little work anyway). It was all windows based and I didn't feel like digging out an old laptop or my work laptop and everything else we own is a Mac. So that's where it ended. 

Until tonight. I had to charge the work laptop anyway so I booted up, put the CT disc in and ran the program. (All of which while Tami was in the shower and Myah was at her grandparents' house.)  I tootled around in the interface a bit and found out how to move through my insides. All great fun until I hit my liver. 

For those following, the colon cancer is really the least of my concern. It's the liver, where that cancer has most probably spread that is the real problem. I won't discuss what I found. It's enough to say that I'm not a doctor or a radiologist and I can't even begin to comprehend what those pictures actually mean (a fact that my wife will now forever remind me of). At that point...alone, with a thousand things racing through my data craving brain and nothing but the dog to talk me down...I lost it. In my irrational, tired, shocked mind it was a good as a death sentence. 

After coming out of the shower to a husband who can barely talk through the sobs, my amazing wife righted the ship. The half of this team that is usually emotional and unseeing to reason saved my life again. This is why I hold this woman in the utmost of regard. Even when she calls me a bonehead. Indeed it was an absolutely boneheaded thing to do. Rash, impetuous...stupid. 

And as she held on to my bootstraps and pulled me from the precipice of an emotional breakdown she kindly informed me that I will be looking at NO more pictures of my insides without a doctor present. Final. No discussion needed. 

Thank you for yet again being my hero Tami McManaman. I'm sure this isn't the last bonehead thing that I'll do in this life, so I'm extra thankfull to have you to catch me when I fall. 

Jake