Reprieve

The past couple of months have been pleasant.  Sure, the weather is by and large Washington-horrid, with temperatures in the high 90s and the humidity nearing solid level. You don’t hike, you swim through the vegetation. The poison ivy this year is particularly nasty, with vines thick as a wrist winding around trees, and the three-leaf clusters nasty underfoot. Deer have eaten the flowerbed in my back yard down to a nub, but I can’t get angry. The fish in my small pond seem happy, almost $500 spent at the vet’s showed my cat is healthy, and the mourning doves nesting in my dogwood haven’t filed for divorce.

People are still killing each other all over the world; political figures who should know better, don’t, as always; and me, I haven’t seen a doctor in more than two months and feel all the better for it.  

This being said, I don’t really dare hope that my recurrent cancer has gone for good. I’ve been told twice that I am cancer-free, and three times that I’m not. So this nine-week period has been a welcome hiatus, but now the fear is just starting to creep back.

Here’s the thing: my cancer, surprisingly, hasn’t hurt, not physically, anyway. The attendant pain has been due to the probing, cutting, burning, and post-surgical treatments; it’s been due to the chemo and the effect of having poisons injected into one’s system-- sheep tuberculosis, to be exact, which is so beyond-the-pall weird that I can barely cope with it. Sheep tuberculosis… I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up one morning and started bleating.

The next tests are in three weeks. The last time I was scoped, some six months ago, the surgeon was looking at the screen which displayed the inside of my bladder and said, Uh oh. This is not a sound you want to hear from anyone in the medical profession.  I think I said, Uh oh what? But I knew. He pointed out several small areas that looked as if mold had taken hold, and a larger growth that was undoubtedly a tumor. Uh ho.

All in all, there have been five operations so far. The recuperation periods grow longer each time, which worries me. I’m convinced being anesthetized more than a half-dozen times in three years can’t be good for me either, all the while being grateful not to have undergone these procedures wide awake.

I find myself worrying uselessly. Am I more tired than normal? Am I sleeping enough, or too much? What’s that twinge in my lower abdomen? Why are my legs sore? And that slight raspiness in my throat? I can see myself slipping into hypochondria or some other schizoaffective disorder.

                                                                                                     
One positive thing: I’ve stopped looking up symptoms on the internet. I did that one day some months ago and among the possible reasons for feeling as I did was pregnancy. I’m realizing more and more that, though some sites are informative and well-researched, a lot more are not. And the fact is, each incidence of a disease, be it cancer or something else, will vary greatly from person to person. I have heard of people surviving pancreatic cancer and dying of melanoma. Odds vary greatly according to past health, age, gender, and even outlook.

So I’m grateful for the doctor-free time, for not sitting in waiting rooms, for not lying in a hospital bed waiting for the nth person to come and explain why the surgeon did not come and see me after the operation, and yes, I’ll be told of the results in a week or so.

It’s hard won gratitude, to be sure, but the alternative isn’t worth considering.  

One Year Later, Part II

It took a couple of weeks for the biopsy results to come in, and one of those weeks I spent with a catheter, a medical imposition that can make life… interesting. Those of heightened sensitivities should probably stop reading here. Bluntly put, a catheter’s job is simple. It serves to give your bladder a rest and empty it as quickly as one fills it with liquid. I’ll simply say that it is amazing the amount of liquids one’s body discards in a matter of hours. It’s an ongoing process which seems to be unrelated to the amount one drinks, a sort of physical conundrum I have yet to figure out.

The biopsy results came back in two weeks and they were positive. The tumors were cancerous and would need to be removed. Not a particularly demanding operation, I was told, but one that would require going under once again. TGD (The Good Doctor) refused to use the word ‘cancer,’ I noticed. I found this odd and mentioned it to the psychiatrist my HMO had sent me to when the diagnosis was made. That doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe he has an aversion to the word.”

Between diagnosis and surgery, I went through a deep depression which segued to anger, then to resignation. Bladder cancer is highly survivable (even though my oldest sister died from it), and if caught in time can be fully resolved. But still. Cancer is such an evil word. One out of two men in the United States will have a bout with it, and one in four men will die from it. I spoke about it to friends and noticed that some shied away. Initially, that mystified me, and in time I came to understand and justify their actions as fear of death by contagion. Never mind that cancer is not catching; I think somewhere in our reptile brain a few cells have ancient memories of plague, of leprosy, of deadly epidemics and cancer, in our times, is just that.

The second surgery was rougher than the first. More scraping, more serious discomfort. I had been given prescriptions for painkillers but my history is not good when it comes to addictive substances, so I kept the Vicodan in the back of the medicine cabinet and, in the end, never took any.  A few friends came to visit but I wasn’t particularly amicable. I wrote, I read, I watched bad television and all the seasons of The Wire and The Sopranos. I meandered around eBay and looked up cars I couldn’t afford and cars I once could afford. I got angrier. In time I came to terms that whatever was happening to me was small potatoes in the universal sense, even if it was trés grosse pomme de terre in my very small universe.

Three weeks later I received a phone call from TGD (The Good Doctor) that I was now cancer-free. The relief was enormous.

Three months after that, a routine post-op check-up discovered  I no longer was. There had been a recurrence, TGD told me, but it was hardly worth mentioning, just a small anomaly, an annoyance at best.  Still, it would require another surgical episode.

Once out and healed, I underwent six treatments of chemotherapy.

On October 29, I’ll be checked again. Right now there is neither fear nor optimism. It will be what it will be, and for the moment, that’s OK.