Untitled Chapter
I’ve always taken pride that I am a logical person. You are
a logical person, too, right? We take stock of the facts, assess them
carefully, and make sound judgments and conclusions. That’s what educated,
enlightened people do. But I didn’t do it when I had pancreatic cancer. The
facts said that only one person in sixteen lives more than three years. I never
bought into that; not long after I made it through my first chemotherapy
session I began to believe that I could survive it, that I could be the one of the
sixteen. Not because I was logical or rational, but because that’s what human
beings do – we are natural optimists, we believe we are going to win, often in
the face of daunting odds. And with a little luck, or maybe a lot of luck, and plenty
of support and some degree of determination, I turned out to be right. So here
I am 27 months after my diagnosis, still alive and sometimes kicking.
Not too long after surgery I became aware that the reoccurrence
rate of cancer for pancreatic sufferers is pretty high. But I never bought into
that either; I felt from the moment they told me ‘we got it all’ that I was
done with it. It seemed to me to be karma, the rightful end to my story, that I
faced down cancer and won. It was time for me to start chapter two and do something
important with the rest of my life. And so when I went for quarterly check-ups and
each time received the news that I was still cancer free, it just validated my
sense that this is how it was meant to be and would always be.
But it appears that odds and probabilities are stubborn, and
they don’t like to being sneered at. Last Friday my CT scan showed a shadow on
my liver, about 8 millimeters small; ‘atypical, probably a cyst’, my doctor
said, ‘but we will review it with the tumor board on Tuesday’. Which they did.
And they concluded it isn’t probably a cyst; given my history and its
appearance, it is likely cancerous. And, being that caution is the better part
of valor, or something like that, the situation calls for immediate treatment.
In other words, it’s back. I’m “Cancer Guy” again. The
foundation has shifted under my feet.
My take, which probably has some relationship with reality,
is that the outlook is much brighter this time. The tumor is small, we caught
it early; it is in a much better place, on my liver instead of my pancreas; the
liver is the only organ that can re-generate, and it is more accessible to
surgery; and we know that chemotherapy was very effective for me. I’m not in a
state of panic like last time; I feel confident that we can handle this. It’s a
setback, not a defeat.
But, it reaaaallly sucks!! I have to start chemo in about
three weeks, and chemo, at least my chemo regimen, Folfirinox, is hard! Fatigue,
migraines, dysentery, neuropathy… you don’t want to hear it, and I don’t want
to tell it. I already know this story.
So how worried should I be? I don’t know, and I don’t want
to find out. Maybe chemo won’t work this time (I think it will). Maybe
radiation and surgery won’t be successful (I find that highly unlikely). More
troubling is the idea that this may keep happening, that I will continue to
have reoccurrences. Or that the next time the cancer will be widespread and
beyond reasonable treatment. I’m not buying that either. Of course I can’t
completely ignore those possibilities, but I’m not worried, even if I should
be. But I am really bummed out that I have to go through with this, and put my
family through it again.
I was cancer free for 559 days, or thereabouts. It has not been
an easy time, for many reasons. The hardest part has been not yet finding a new
sense of purpose. But in other ways it has been the best period of my life; I
have loved to eat more, and loved to play golf more, and loved to watch sports
more, and loved to read more, and most of all, loved my family more, than I
ever had before. Every day I have noticed extraordinary things in ordinary life
that drifted past me before. There are lots of them.
Doing chemo again is going to be tough. But there is one
part that is pretty cool: I get the strangest visions when I’m in a chemo
session, as though experiencing the weirdest of all dreams but in a fully
wakeful state. I can only remember one of them clearly from the last time… I’m
watching a chorus of dozens of little owls, moving in unison to an owl director
and singing a song I cannot hear; their identical little white owl faces moving
this way and that, swaying with unheard music, and staring with their big brown
owl eyes. And the owl director waves his batons with his wings, leading them to
ever higher states of owl ecstasy. It was glorious.
I’m going to write them down this time.
