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As I sit to write this, there is a faint twitter in my abdomen, then another. Though I've felt our unborn child move regularly for weeks now, I have yet to grow accustomed to the experience. I am floored every single time.

 

Each new day of this pregnancy, my first, finds me in a greater state of awe and humility as I consider the growing life inside me and what is yet to come. I'm sure I cannot possibly sound more cliché when I say I am overwhelmed with joy and gratitude at being allowed to be part of such a miracle of nature (I'll risk the scorn and say it anyway).

 

Each day I enter more deeply this cocoon out of which will emerge, in only a few short months, not just a new baby but a brand new version of myself, fully transformed: body, mind and soul.

Certainly, there are the easier-to-spot physical signs of this transformation – the hiccups our child seems to get after dinner every night, my ever-expanding waistline (not to mention the swelling ankles and feet), and the sudden onset of heartburn, semi-constant nausea and dog-like capacity to sniff out lingering odors more than two rooms away.

 

Subtler are the small shifts in my perspective, the elevation of my overall disposition and renewed state of mind. In every way, my pregnancy is life building, not only for our unborn child but for me.

 

Three years ago, I lost my father to cancer, a loss so consuming that I thought the boundaries of my life had permanently shrunk. Until now. This pregnancy is pulling me gently, lovingly, from a long and heavy sleep.

Cancer Is Not Always a Long Journey

If there is a graceful way to sit before a skilled clinician, a stranger, and receive news that your life is about to change forever, I certainly did not display it.

 

Nearly three years ago to the day I am writing this, Anne Traynor, MD informed my father that he had stage IV lung cancer and that it was terminal. My father had not asked me to come along to this appointment. In fact, he had quite clearly expressed his desire that I not be there. I showed up anyway.

I can't describe the emotions that ran through me as Dr. Traynor delivered the news. What I remember most was the need to run, and I did. I left the room before they finished. Tears had not only welled up, but were pouring out of me with sobs I could not stifle. I ran to the bathroom at the end of the hall and never returned. I was too ashamed at my display, when I had so fervently prepared myself to show up and be the strong one!

My father met Dr. Traynor only once.

Following his appointment with Dr. Traynor, he began a series of eight radiation treatments. He died the day he was scheduled for the eighth, but not before shedding more than 40 pounds in less than a month.

 

My father's fate was to know he was dying just long enough to experience the horror of a violent and painful death. For his family it was traumatic to watch, without even the small comfort of enough time for a meaningful goodbye.

My father was 61 years old the day he died on April 17, 2006. His wife, three daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren have missed him every day since. Likewise, his influence, humor and fierce love will be sorely missed by the child I now carry, who will never have the opportunity to meet his  grandfather.

Statistics to Knock the Wind Out of the Healthiest Set of Lungs

 

During the brief period between my father's single appointment at the UW Carbone Cancer Center and his quick decline, my mother and sisters and I were able to scour the Internet and educate ourselves somewhat about his disease. What we learned shocked us to the core, especially in this day and age of medical advances for the detection and treatment of cancer.

For starters, we discovered that lung cancer is the leading cause of death in the United States - in every single state, and for every ethnicity or social group. It kills more people than heart disease, and more people than car accidents.

 

Perhaps most shocking: lung cancer kills more people than breast, prostate, colon, liver, kidney and melanoma cancers combined. Add to this, lung cancer is largely undetected and undiagnosed until it is too late to receive effective treatment of any kind. To date, there is no approved screening test to improve early detection efforts.

Despite lung cancer's far-reaching and deadly nature, it is still the least federally funded of all cancers, per research dollar. For 2007, total research funding from NCI, CDC, and DOD for various cancers was as follows:

This is despite the fact that the majority of lung cancer patients will die within a year of diagnosis.

Despite the fact that I was a 30-year-old woman, educated and living away from home for several years, and even newly married at the time of my father's death, in many respects my father was still the center of my world.

 

He was still the go-to guy for me for any big decision, be it a big purchase of any kind, like a vehicle or my first home, or which school to attend or career path to follow. 

 

I followed in my father's footsteps - undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame, and then into the practice of law. I even began my career under my father's direct tutelage as an associate in his law firm, where we both practiced until the day of his death.

 

My husband had great fondness for and a vibrant relationship with my father, but it's safe to say my reliance on my father's opinion and insight drove my poor husband nuts.

Luckily, the affection between my father and me went both ways, and we expressed it easily during his lifetime. This has offered me the blessing of little regret.

 

At her wedding

Since my father's death, I have experienced further blessings as well - some I might never have known but for my father's death. When someone you love dies, you die too. For a while, anyway. You stop looking forward, because you can't bear the thought of a future without your loved one. You withdraw. You wallow. You give up on hope, and you give up on life.

And then one day, maybe months or years later, something stirs inside you, and you begin to find your way back.

  

Where once my role as daughter so occupied my time and efforts, a new role as mother now demands my attention. Would I have been as ready to embrace my new role were I still so caught up in the old? Perhaps. But maybe it is precisely the experience of losing my father, losing my tactile connection to my role as daughter in every day life, that is allowing me now to approach my new role with an independence and strength that was previously inaccessible.

 

I believe my father would approve of this. It embodies all that he taught his children: to never give up, to never get stuck, and to always look toward our futures with hope, no matter how scary or unfamiliar or difficult.

Breath of Fresh Air

Since my father's death (and certainly spurred on by his death) I've become involved with the UW Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center, most recently with the newly formed Lung Cancer Task Force. The task force is endeavoring to raise enough funds to secure a spot for lung cancer research in the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research.

 

Though I, like my father, had only visited the Center once before his death, since that time I have been drawn back again and again, perhaps due to the need to reconcile my family's experience and the appalling lung cancer statistics with my hope for a better future, including earlier diagnoses and better treatment alternatives for this disease.

 

I come back for the newly diagnosed and their families, and the yet undiagnosed. Now I come back for my child, who will grow up without knowing his grandfather, and is thus affected by the reach of this disease from the moment of his very first breath.

I have heard Dr. Traynor speak on more than one occasion over the past few years, in addition to other passionate advocates of lung cancer research who are connected in various ways with the Comprehensive Cancer Center.

 

For all practical purposes, this disease has been getting the better of us for at least as long as lung cancer research has been underfunded, but the perseverance and tenacity with which these advocates approach the disease has struck me deeply. I've grown new hope from the seeds of their enthusiasm. I have come to believe in Dr. Traynor's ability, together with those of her colleagues, to gain a better understanding of lung cancer, which will hopefully translate into better diagnostic and treatment options for lung cancer, maybe during my child's lifetime.

We need only the research dollars and scientists to move forward in fighting this disease.

 

Fishing with her father when she was young

In approximately four months I will officially step into my new role as mother, to meet my first child as he enters the world. I look forward to the moment with anticipation, though undoubtedly it will be touched with sorrow.

 

She will never experience her grandfather's quick wit or devilish smile, but I hope that whatever she lacks will be made up for by the values and love my father bestowed upon me. I am now able to pass along the same to a new generation.

 

As I await my child's hearty wail on his way into this world, the memory of my father's last painful breaths mercifully begins to soften its grip. There is just enough breathing room left for me to remember and anticipate, simultaneously. In this space my child and my father already know one another. I am simply the air in between.