It Might Get Messy

It Might Get Messy

Our high school football center…let’s call him “Reg”, since that’s his actual name…had knee trouble one season. He developed this huge, basketball-sized hematoma over his right knee, a big, blobby sack full of body fluids. No other real problems—his knee was structurally sound and pain-free. He just got this big bag o’ goop over it periodically. To prep him for games, some of us took to getting to the field house early on Saturdays to help stick the needles Doc K gave us into the hematoma and squeeze the bucket of blood out before we taped everything up for the game. 

Per the title, things here in CancerLand are indeed messy. Again. The photo below

 shows the enormous volume of lymphatic fluid being drained from the reservoir in my leg where they harvested the abortive tongue-replacement muscle. They could install a permanent drain, which I would have to empty several times a day. Or, we can just let it build up to this couple-of-liters level and empty it whenever I go see Dr. H. Which is where we’re goin’ now. 

At the moment, that’s the least of my problems.  After letting the available information sink in, and listening to the Be Good Tanyas sing “Waitin’ Around to Die” a couple dozen times, I have opted to put myself back into the ovens and go for the full course of radiation and chemotherapy. Once I cut the doctors loose, they were like a pack of hungry huskies waiting for the washtub of frozen herring to be thrown out the back door of the yurt. Wednesday I let Dr. H know I was ready to face the fire. Today they stuck me in a CT scanner, heated up a full-size mesh head-and-torso blank, laid me down, and bolted me to the table while the hot mesh roasted my skin and cooled into my shape. I prevented myself from having a screaming claustrophobia incident by remembering that on Monday I have to face a full size/full time MRI. That’s the one where they stick you in a powerfully magnetic test tube and monitor density differences at a millimeter scale from head to torso. It is almost the definition of claustrophobia.

I forgot how terrifying this entire experience was last time. And how dangerous. Dr N enumerated potential downside effects, reminding me that jugular veins are at risk (last time they cooked my left jugular, had to restore it surgically with massive loss of blood), and that my spine is in the line of fire. It doesn’t take much radiation to burn the spinal cord itself beyond physiological effectiveness. 

And it goes on from there. And of course you have to add the weekly chemotherapy infusion to the twice-daily radiation burn when summing the grim and painful downsides. Damn, those radiation burns sting like a son-of-a-bitch once they form, and they take forever to subside. In fact, in some cases they may never subside. 

So ok, the upshot for this week is that I am about to go back into the deep, deep shit, hoping for that tradeoff kicking a now weakened and diffuse tumor while it’s down and running for the 30% potential for full recovery. The doctors are confident. I am terrified. The radiation is what it is—a dangerous but potentially miraculous tool in the hands of experienced tradespeople. 

If nothing else, I should at least have mildly humorous blog entries for the foreseeable future. These treatments are going to go on for a while. Meantime, remember to surf on over to http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ for the professional blog on sustainability, and its weblog empire companion http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . At http://docviper.livejournal.com/ there’s a short draft of chapter 7—7th Street—of the urban ecosystems book.   No new material up at there’s a turtle in my soup. Expect the entire weblog empire to start to fill up now that spring is here, though!

Love you all, my friends. Apologies for putting you through the whining of another round of radiation treatment. But that’s where we’re going. I’ll be thinking of you as they apply the radiation beams, and hoping they’re getting them into the correct tissues!