Dream New Dreams (3 page)

I
T WAS EARLY
in the morning on Labor Day weekend, September 2006, when we received a phone call from our general practitioner; he was following up on a CT scan that had been done of Randy’s abdomen the previous day. The fact that the doctor would call us on a Saturday, much less a holiday weekend, didn’t bode well. The feeling I had was the same as when the phone rings at midnight—a big knot in the pit of my stomach. “What does the doctor want to talk to me about?” I asked Randy as he held out the phone for me.

Though rarely sick, Randy had been feeling terrible for several weeks. We were trying to find the culprit for his mysterious symptoms: fatigue, weight loss, lack of appetite, floating stool. The obvious ailments, like flu, strep throat, hepatitis A, B, and C, had come back with negative test results.

With Randy unable to get out of bed, I had been pulling the night
shift with the baby and the early-morning shift with the boys. Even having help with the kids during the week, I was getting run-down. Caring for the family, managing our house renovation project, and juggling several other commitments were beginning to take their toll. Like any couple, Randy and I had developed a routine, dividing the responsibilities and working with each other to keep the Pausch family train moving smoothly along its track.

Our typical day started early as Dylan, age four and a half, and Logan, twenty-three months, woke up around six o’clock each morning. Since I was nursing the baby and got up with four-month-old Chloe throughout the night, Randy would get up with the boys and make breakfast. Dylan would often stand on a step stool and help Randy cook, enjoying the thrill of helping out in the kitchen by breaking or scrambling eggs. Logan would play contently with toys until it was time to eat. After I came downstairs with Chloe, we would have breakfast together. Then Randy would get ready for work and start his day at the university.

My primary responsibilities included the children and our house renovations. We were raising the roof on our ranch house in Pittsburgh to give us a little extra room as our family grew. At this time, I was picking out fixtures, from plumbing items to tile, as well as tweaking the design. We were working with a great building contractor and architect who did all the heavy lifting and were very trustworthy, but I still needed to decide on the details, like the location of light switches and the number and location of outlets in a room. I also oversaw a wonderful nanny, Amy Samad, who helped me with the children and their activities. Amy gave me the opportunity to sit down every once in a while and not run myself ragged. With doctor visits, preschool, child-centered activities like music
classes, and household management, there was more than enough work to go around. Just keeping up with laundry and meals for three little ones under the age of five took up hours every day.

While I assumed the domestic responsibilities, Randy managed the family finances, taking care of bills and taxes. He also liked to suggest and arrange our travel, usually getting us to go with him on trips where the family would enjoy the location. Whenever he consulted with Walt Disney Company, Inc., we would try to go along. My part of the travel arrangements involved packing the necessary clothes, snacks, and toys for the trip. In addition, Randy focused on his career, which included teaching classes, advising PhD and master’s students throughout their academic careers, leading his research team, writing grant applications, attending and presenting at conferences, collaborating with other researchers, attending various academic department meetings, and participating in hiring decisions. He wore many different hats and enjoyed the diverse demands of the job. I don’t think people realize all the components of a professor’s job, but there’s much more to it besides teaching and conducting research. Randy loved his job, especially at Carnegie Mellon University, to the point that he felt indebted to the institution for all the opportunities it had given him.

On the home front, Randy and I had developed a symbiotic relationship in which each of us contributed to our family life and to raising our children. Both our parts were crucial to making it work. I valued Randy tremendously for his efforts and I know he valued me for mine. He was a large cog in the wheel; without him, the delicate balance of maintaining our family was thrown out of whack. The train was off its track and bumping noisily and dangerously along. Our family sorely felt his absence when he had to travel for business, which was about a week each month, or put in the
long hours necessary for his job. Randy used to joke about the job flexibility offered by the university, saying he could work his eighty hours a week any time he wanted.

The present moment would help crystallize just how much we all leaned on Randy. As he held out his cell phone for me, I was mystified why the doctor would want to talk to me. “He wants to tell you himself,” Randy said as I sat down on the floor with phone in hand. What the doctor had to tell me was that there was a mass on Randy’s pancreas that was most likely cancer. I remember the doctor telling me it wasn’t fair and how sorry he was, but I don’t remember what else he said. I didn’t bother to ask him what the pancreas did or where it was located. I didn’t ask about survival rates. I was just too stunned, too shocked by the word
cancer
. Randy was just shy of his forty-sixth birthday! I can’t even remember the end of the conversation. What I do remember so clearly was watching Randy during the phone call and studying his expression, looking for clues from the man I admired most as to what the hell was happening. I knew this was bad news, I just couldn’t figure out how bad.

After hanging up, I came over to the bed and handed Randy his cell phone. I kept my eyes on his face the entire time. His handsome, boyish face was so serious, his brown eyes intensely focused. I could only guess at the calculations going on in that wonderful, intelligent brain of his. Then, with a steady, authoritative voice, the man of my dreams told me matter-of-factly he was going to die. Moreover, he probably had only three to six months to live. All this he had learned from googling “pancreatic cancer” on his laptop in bed. There wasn’t an ounce of self-pity in his voice, just a quiet acknowledgment of the facts as he understood them now. As if intuiting how critical time was for him, Randy went to work to find a loophole in death’s contract, not so much for himself, but for me
and for his children. If there was a ray of hope out there, Randy was determined to find it and grab hold.

Looking back on this scene now, I can see how this situation would become the new norm for Randy: sitting in bed working on his laptop and/or talking on his cell phone. Instead of going to his university office or into the classroom as the dynamic teacher and researcher he was, he would conduct all his work from our bed. His laptop, once my rival for his attention, would become his lifeline, keeping him connected to his research group, his students, colleagues, family, and doctors. In this way, Randy was able to continue doing so many of the things he loved even as cancer slowly took away his energy.

Except for the yellow tinge to his skin caused by the tumor pressing against his bile duct and causing bilirubin to build up in his bloodstream, Randy looked perfectly healthy. How could he know for sure he was going to die? How could he be so sure? I was reeling from the verbal blows. The jabs from the doctor and Randy left me dizzy, my head spinning. I was trying to process all this new information, trying to hold on to the marvelous life we had built together in eight short years, which was now suddenly so fragile.

Since we met in the fall of 1998, Randy and I had put down roots together in Pittsburgh because of his job. We developed a network of close friends with whom we got together for dinner, movies, concerts, sporting events, and plays. We celebrated children’s birthdays and holidays together. We had found a church where we both felt comfortable and went every Sunday we were in town. We were involved in each other’s professional lives. When I was working, Randy would look over my web designs, make suggestions, and show me user testing techniques. On the flip side, I helped host parties at our house for his students and attended university functions
with him. We played flag football together in the Pittsburgh Sports League as Randy taught me the rules of the game and how to rush the quarterback. I played even after Dylan was born, nursing him on the sidelines during halftime, but quit a short time later. Randy continued to play for several years and we maintained friendships with our teammates.

The most significant thing we had done was start a family together. My first pregnancy had been difficult. At a seven-month checkup, the doctor became concerned by how infrequently I felt the baby move. I was sent to the hospital for an ultrasound which showed that Dylan was very small for his gestational age and that his legs were up around his ears in the frank breech birth position, which contributed to his lack of movement. The biggest issue was his weight. Our obstetrician recommended bed rest, daily fetal monitoring, and a series of steroid shots to help accelerate his lung development. The concern was that Dylan would come early and be unable to breathe, because a baby’s lungs are the last organs to develop. Randy was very calm during these meetings, always holding my hand and providing me with the emotional support I needed during this time. He did become a little rattled when my placenta partially detached and bright red blood soaked my underpants. Not only did he break the speed limit and run red lights to get me to the hospital, but he almost ran over my mother when she didn’t get out of the car fast enough. Randy held my hand throughout the emergency Cesarean surgery. When I hovered on the brink of shock, he kept me from going over the edge. He stayed beside me in the recovery room as the medication wore off and the pain kicked in letting me know how unhappy my body was with the trauma it had just experienced. The two of us celebrated the arrival of 2002 thankful to have a premature baby weighing only two pounds fifteen
ounces lying in the neonatal intensive care unit some floors below us. Dylan’s wasn’t the last difficult pregnancy and birth we would endure together, but it was the first medical crisis that would test our mettle and teach us to rely utterly and completely on each other.

When I needed to see Dylan in the neonatal intensive care unit, Randy would drive me there regardless of the time of day or night. He loved that little guy just as much as I did and we shared kangaroo duty, placing Dylan against our bare skin to help him to thrive. And thrive he did, gaining weight and normalizing his heartbeat and breathing. After twenty-one days in neonatal intensive care, our baby weighed three and a half pounds and was ready to come home. The neonatal team encouraged us to spend the night in a special bedroom with Dylan off the monitors so Randy and I would feel confident when we walked out those hospital doors and took our child home. Randy, I, and the staff had become dependent on the heart monitor to tell us Dylan was OK. When they removed the pads from Dylan’s tiny chest, we both held our breath hoping that he wouldn’t suddenly go into distress. As the minutes went by, we slowly began to breathe normally. Before the hospital staff left us alone for the evening, they pointed out the emergency cord we could pull if we felt Dylan needed medical attention. A nurse would come to our rescue if we needed her. That emergency cord made us feel a little more comfortable, but we were very nervous that first night in the hospital room.

We made it through the early days and months of having a premature baby who needed to be awakened every three hours for feedings. Adding a baby to our relationship came with its own set of challenges as we balanced being parents with keeping our love and marriage strong. We struggled as a couple during the first couple of years, as I threw myself into being a mother and didn’t give Randy
the time and attention he needed. There were many heart-to-heart discussions and some tears. The great thing about our marriage was that we could have these soul-baring talks without either of us letting our emotions get the better of us and saying hurtful things that we would regret later. We never raised our voices in anger at each other. We were both committed to making our marriage work and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wouldn’t walk away or give up on us.

When I found out I was pregnant with Logan we were living in San Mateo, California, where Randy was doing a sabbatical with Electronic Arts, a company that makes video games. A sabbatical is a special academic privilege that a professor may be awarded once every seven years or so, going off from his or her classes and university duties to do something intellectually enriching. Randy’s first sabbatical had been with Walt Disney Imagineering. Now he was working with the video gaming giant to get a better understanding of the gaming industry’s culture. Halfway through my pregnancy the sabbatical ended and we moved east to our home in Pittsburgh. During one of my prenatal checkups, my urine test showed alarmingly high levels of protein. The doctor told me to go right to the hospital; they needed to do more tests because I was showing signs of preeclampsia, and they might need to induce labor. I was so frightened, so scared that we were going to have a repeat emergency delivery and something would be wrong with the baby. To make matters worse, I had two-year-old Dylan with me and I couldn’t register at the hospital with him in tow.