![]() ![]() Most have their own one-bedroom apartment, but they share food expenses, cooking responsibilities and an outdoor space with a hot tub, fire pit and hammock. A couple of years earlier, they founded a co-owned community called Radish, where a dozen or so people in their 20s and 30s live together. Not long after, they invited us to their place in Oakland for an outdoor dinner, but “their place” requires some explanation. One afternoon, our good friends Kristen and Phil visited us in our backyard for the first time, they understood the gravity of what we were dealing with. I looked into the future and saw night after night of coming home to an empty apartment, numbing myself with pizza and Netflix, and thought: We can’t do this by ourselves. Covid precautions would make it hard for friends or family to help or even visit, and the hospital would only allow Scott a single visitor per day. Two major surgeries would also be required to remove the lesions. Upset about that and all of the right shoes he would no longer need, I collected every one and shoved them into the back of the closet.Īfter our honeymoon (spent on the seventh floor of the hospital, followed by my mother-in-law moving into the apartment next door for two weeks), we received more bad news: The other suspicious spots meant he would have to undergo six cycles of intensive chemotherapy, during which he would need to live in the hospital. When I unpacked Scott’s suitcase at home, I discovered his right shoe rolled up in a trash bag. Soon the hospital’s Covid-19 visitor restrictions forced me to leave, and I stole one last glance at the space in the bed where the bottom of his leg had been. He grinned a goofy, Fentanyl-fueled smile, but it faded as the drugs wore off and what he called the “Civil War pain” of his surgery kicked in. Twenty-four hours later, I met him in the postoperative recovery room. I looked at Scott, handsome in his navy suit, noting that this was the last day he would fill it out with two legs and two feet. The next day we stood, masked and socially distanced, in Golden Gate Park with our closest friends, gathered at a week’s notice. That’s how we ended up gathered on a roof telling amputation jokes and making bad puns about Scott getting “cold feet” before the wedding. Scott, however, wanted something more in line with his arid sense of humor: a foot roast. I wanted a wedding celebration, even if it was last-minute, so we could mark the occasion with more than just the administrative staff of the county clerk. Our friends announced they were throwing us a wedding in Golden Gate Park the day before the surgery. We scheduled Scott’s below-the-knee amputation for 10 days later, a Monday. But if something happens to me, I want to make sure you’re taken care of. “I’ve never been below the top 30 percent for anything. Together for five years, we were only 32. The five-year survival rate for multifocal osteosarcoma is 30 percent.Īfter we hung up, Scott - vegan, athlete, artificial intelligence engineer, the kind of person who adds turmeric to all his food - took my hand. It was osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer that afflicts some 800 Americans a year. ![]() We pulled off the highway and put her on speakerphone. “Plenty of people have ankle surgery, right?”Īfter multiple biopsies over many weeks (Scott said he felt as if he were an Ikea desk being drilled into), his doctor called to deliver the diagnosis. ![]()
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