Fighting
to Win
Continued
by Lisa Aichlmayr
photos by Allison Waltz
"I thought, 'How do I tell him this?'" Melody Pees says, remembering the afternoon during the week of Aug. 15 when she was framing the conversation with her husband. She met him in his office in the MACC .
"I knew his frame of mind [with the newly started football season] and thought what bad timing," she says.
After she told him about her cancer, she says he just looked at her, trying to digest what she had told him.
"It was kind of,
'Why us? Why her?'" Dean Pees says. "Then immediately after that all the
thoughts about losing all of a sudden, or winning [in football] didn't
seem as important. It put everything into perspective."
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But on the other hand, Dean Pees says, he knew something was coming. He knew she would not have come to his office after the doctor's if nothing was wrong. Also, two of their daughters were with her, and she had been crying. Still, he could not be completely prepared for her news.
"When someone tells you something," he says, "you understand, but all the ramifications don't hit you," he says. "You don't want to let on that it hurts you as much, but as time goes on it gets to you," he says.
They called the oncologist together and immediately discussed treatment.
"It wasn't until later that day, he called and said it just hit him. He cried," she says. "He said I mean the world to him, and I said I know."
There was one good thing about the news.
"It was all very quick, which was good because my mind was concocting all kinds of scenarios," she says. "So if it happened slower, I'd just have time to think about it."
Unfortunately she would have plenty of time to think after surgery on Aug. 21.