Damn Spot

I decided to clean our carpets today. Actually, I decided to do it months ago but kept procrastinating because cleaning the carpets was always one of Chris's jobs. I finally accepted the fact that he really does have a good excuse for not doing it this time and got down to business myself.


I borrowed my brother-in-law's carpet cleaner and went to work in the toy room. It really wasn't that bad. The machine is a little heavy but I could handle it. When I was done, I took the cleaner upstairs to Claire's room because I knew her carpet was in really bad shape. I pulled her crib away from the wall and gasped when I saw a giant brown spot on the carpet. This was not the first time I saw this spot. It was there when the room was a guest room before Claire was born. In our preparations for turning this room into her nursery, Chris and I had removed the double bed that was in there and bought the crib. When the bed was moved, we saw the stain (and a few others throughout the room).


During the first few weeks of December of 2008, I frantically tried to finish decorating the room and asked Chris to clean the carpet and especially focus on that spot. I noticed that it took him longer than usual to start this project. He was more tired than usual and, frankly, not as helpful as I was used to him being. By the time he finally did clean the carpet, he did a really half-assed job of it.  It almost looked like he hadn't cleaned it at all.


I noticed that some of the smaller stains on the carpet hadn't really come up but didn't pay attention to the status of the huge stain for some reason. I think I was too distracted with keeping Ian away from the carpet cleaner, being hugely pregnant, and feeling too exhausted to notice or care. I remember saying something like, "Well, that didn't do much good.  Is that thing broken?". And Chris just--very uncharacteristically--shrugged. I dropped it knowing there were other important baby tasks to complete before Claire's birth.


So, when I saw that stain again today, I was determined to get it out. To my surprise, it wasn't difficult to remove at all. In fact, it nearly disappeared. So, why hadn't it done so when Chris tried, I thought. Then I realized...he probably didn't put any soap in the cleaner. The day he cleaned that carpet was a mere 48 hours prior to our trip to the ER for his headaches. Looking back on the few months leading up to Chris's illness, I can identify incidents of confusion, apathy and fatigue that I know now were signs of the glioblastoma. They were all incidents that could be explained away by the chaos of having a 17 month old and a baby on the way. But I was reminded again today how cruel a brain tumor is especially when it resides on the part of your brain that controls your memory and personality. It robs you of who you truly are before you are gone. And it robbed my brilliant husband of the simple ability to put soap in a carpet cleaner.


So, today I say, "Damn you, spot and damn you, glioblastoma."