Since everybody keeps asking how I'm doing, perhaps I should tell you. It is a principle of long standing to give the people what they want, even if talking about yourself can get old or embarrassing quickly.
(I'm kidding. I'm a teacher. Telling stories on myself is one of my favorite tools.)
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| Sanballat, Sanballating |
First, let me thank everyone who keeps telling me that they've been praying. I try to tell everyone that regardless, but it remains true if I missed you! There is nothing better than thundering at the gates of heaven, and it's even better if you don't have to do all the thundering yourself. Saves a ton of wear and tear on the knees.
Second, a little background.
A Little Background
My doctor and I had been trying to figure out what was going on with my digestion for months. I felt fine, but I kept bleeding. He was perplexed because I was thirty-five, healthy, and had no family history of cancer. [Not true, as it turned out. One of my great-grandparents apparently had colon cancer. You find out many interesting things about about your family as time rolls on and the right conversations happen.]
So it couldn't be that. But he thought we ought to schedule a colonoscopy just to make sure.
So I contacted the absolutely splendid Veritas Surgery here in Moscow: a "direct-pay surgery group" that cuts out all the ridiculous insurance craziness of our modern healthcare system, and they got me in within three weeks. The doctor said there was something that didn't look healthy, but we'd wait on the biopsy.
Then he actually took the time, while out of town, to call us and deliver the news personally. Then he prayed for us, then and there. It was the best way we could have started a very wild ride.
That was in mid-July, and we were ramping up for the upcoming school year and going to rehearsals for a musical show I performed in. We didn't tell anyone just yet--we wanted to see how bad things would be. Then came all the scans. PET scans. CT scans. MRI scans. I got injected with something radioactive at some point and did not develop superpowers. (Yet.)
The news was good, for cancer. The tumor has a good chance of responding well to treatment, and the cancer hasn't spread to anywhere else. The bad news was it was too far along to simply cut out. So the preferred option (said my heavily Hispanic oncologist) is chemotherapy. See if we can shrink old Sanballat right down to nothing. Or at least enough to chop out with a robotic knife.
Chemo
So what does chemo actually look like? Opening shot: cheerful high school teacher and absolutely amazing, hot, caring wife enter car. Following shot: A drive down to Lewiston and St. Joe's Cancer Center, forty minutes away. The usual meeting with the nurses. Blood pressure. Height. Weight. (Colon cancer is great for the waistline, by the way. I haven't been this skinny since I got married!) Check in with the doctor. And then you enter The Room.
Well, I call it that. It's a large room with ten or twelve comfy, slate-grey chairs, with enough room by each for an IV rack and a companion chair. Most of the occupants of the chairs are in their sixties or seventies; frail, wispy people who mostly sleep as life-prolonging poison drips into their veins.
The nurses prep you with a bag full of saline. They plug it into my chest (I got a fancy port installed under my skin so that they don't have to find a vein every round, which means I am now technically a cyborg. Booyah!) and wait. Draining that takes about forty-five minutes. I can taste it in the back of my throat when they start, and for your information, it tastes terrible. Somebody invent some tastier salt water, please.
Meanwhile the pharmacologist mixes up my specific dose of the day, checked and triple-checked by the chatty nurses. Then they plug that in, and for two hours I am free to read in my chair, while my wife sits beside me grading papers on the center wi-fi or makes a CostCo run. So far I have knocked out an A.A. Milne murder mystery (who knew Winnie-the-Pooh's creator wrote those?) and most of an overview on the political theory of the Middle Ages. The number of books I read this year might break the record. Meanwhile, various chemicals continue to drip. I am told this particular combo is so popular it has its own acronym: FOLFOX. It sounds like a bad country cover band, or a sixties missile silo.
Finally, you beep. But you are not done! No, dear reader, not content with poisoning you for two hours, they hook you up to a wearable pump, powered by your very body heat, that you wear around in a fanny pack for two more days. (That sounds really gross when I type it out like that...)
Then you return to The Room, where they make sure you haven't suffered anything too alarming, unplug you, and set you free for another eleven days until you do it all over again. Takes about half an hour, tops.
Hiccups
Now, while you are being actively poisoned, you are--follow me closely here--poisonous. So they have to put you on more nausea drugs to counteract the other drugs eating into your intestinal lining. And the most common side effect of those drugs thus far has been...hiccups.
Now, I'm not talking the usual, five-minutes-and-done hiccups. These are Dopey-the-Dwarf level hiccups; Chinese-human-wave-attacks-in-North-Korea-1950 hiccups, should-have-been-one-of-the-plagues-upon-Egypt hiccups, squeaking their way out of my diaphragm once every eight seconds for an hour or two at a time. It makes teaching...interesting.
I have always found hiccups oddly funny. God appears to want to test my endurance of that viewpoint.
But actually, other than that, most symptoms from that long, scary list they shove under your nose haven't showed up yet. Some minor sensitivity about the mouth--rather like you've burned your mouth but for a week at a time. Oh, and when I drink cold drinks it feels like a swallowed a cupful of porcupine. Those of you who know how much I love ice water will know what a sacrifice this involves.
Hesitations
Round II (which I finished last Friday) knocked me out rather more than Round I. I expect that trend to continue. But not knowing exactly what health challenge is coming next does make planning for the future...difficult. What will Christmas look like? Semester finals? Will I have hair? An appetite? Should I try to take on more work while I still can...or try to streamline what is already working?
The prayers and well-wishes help. Calvinism helps. The psalms help more. "Cancer is a word, not a sentence," as British journalist John Diamond said.
Pray that I keep pushing through it all. Pray that the side effects stay minimal. Pray for my lovely wife, who has to put up with me being a cross between a zombie and a cyborg. And pray that the next ten rounds go quickly. Those hiccups get old quick.
On to Round Three.
