It Might Get Messy

Diagnostics and treatments come in rhythmic sequence. Week by week by week in daily measures we count off the accents: radiation, blood drawn, radiation, visual exam, radiation, chemo infusion, radiation, see the nutritionist, radiation, see the oncologist, radiation, see the social worker, blood drawn… . The routine is comforting, especially when it comes with the positive feedback of Dr. Z’s eyes lighting up when she palpates the tumors and find they’ve shrunken and softened and with the kindness of the facility and the nurses who let me invade their space to use quiet corners as my office.


This week, my overall pain pattern changed. Not sure why. My tongue is covered with volcanic-looking lesions that are the second-degree radiation burns. But they don’t hurt as much as they did. Maybe I’m just getting used to it. Certainly the blunt, pounding pain of the tumors themselves is less. It’s easy to feel that the tumors are smaller and softer. Now I have a very specific and intense pain. It feels like there’s some kind of sore dead-center on my epiglottis. When I swallow, it feels like there’s a lump going in and out with the valves, like somebody super-glued a #2 buckshot covered with sand in my throat. Makes it almost impossible to talk (which isn’t that easy in the first place). But it’s apparently very important that I practice swallowing so that when the entire mess is cleaned up I can still do it. All 4 of the senior docs working my case gave me that advice independently, so, weird as it seems that you could “forget” how to swallow, I’m following it. Despite the bumpy “ouch” I get every time. 


Emotionally, it’s not really been a roller coaster ride—more like a long hike through dull and difficult country to get somewhere interesting. But something snapped on Tuesday. I could feel it change. Not that the destination was in sight—although the first stop, end of radiation and chemo—is indeed this week upcoming. Something changed inside. Took me a while to place it. But it finally crawled through my thick hide, the pain, and the drugs—I’m winning. I’m not fighting for my life anymore. The cancer is fighting for ITS life. I don’t know how or why or what altered the hormone balance that kept me in equilibrium through the past couple months, but something sure as hell did, and tipped that balance my way. 


Not that the war is over. In the completely pointless land battle for Berlin in spring 1945 that could not have changed the outcome of the war no matter how it went, more than a million people--hard-bitten Soviet infantry and German children and retirees dragooned into launching Panzerfaust rockets into the the Russian armor—died. And that only accounts for nominal “combatants”. Add in the civilians, and you can see that “winning the war” doesn’t mean the end of the battles or the pain or the complications.


Things aren’t pretty even at this point in the game. The radiation has made my 35 year old beard a cosmetic liability (and lord knows, I have enough of THOSE without adding to the total).  The big tumor under my tongue has, in what are hopefully its death throes as it readies itself to face the surgeon’s scalpels, flopped itself into a big flabby mass on my throat. That’s the one that Doctor Z thinks is decomposing into the sore on my epiglottis. 


That’s ok. I’ll take it. With a little strength returning (Colin and I went for a nice little hike on the Catoctin Ridge yesterday, photos to go up at docviper), and Dr. H sharpening his surgical tools for slicing me up next month, I’m starting to feel like the armistice will be something I can live with. We’ll see. Key word being “live”!