It Might Get Messy

I have a physiological update for you. But first, let’s deal with some of the psychological, emotional, spiritual fallout. 


When I was first diagnosed, and the treatment plan was laid out, it seemed that cancer was a threshold event in life. That there was “before cancer”, “after cancer”, and that the treatment would be a trip through a tunnel between the two worlds. Nothing would be the same once I came out of that tunnel.


Well, that turns out to be pretty much true. But somehow I think I expected the world at large to be different at this end of the tunnel. What, in fact, is different, of course, is me. 


A few evenings ago I finally resolved a weird gnawing at the base of my psyche. It’s gonna be a little hard to make this coherent, but I’ll give it a shot. It turns out, I’m the wrong person. Which, of course, begs the obvious question “for what?” Well, I think I am the wrong person for this place, this time, this corpus. I feel displaced in my own skin. 


This wrong place/wrong time thing has been with me my entire life. Sometimes it is strong and worrisome, mostly it is just a background buzz. But here at the after-cancer portal of the Tunnel of Life, it seems to have settled in as a load-bearing component of my foundational infrastructure. 


It is not uncomfortable. This isn’t another weak-willed-bozo-with-the-low-threshold-of-pain whining thing. It is a fact of life that has been part of me forever, but has finally claimed its place as a meaningful brick in the wall. I know how weird that sounds. After all, I’ve lived in the same place, with the same people (swapping out only a succession of canines), for 25 years. I’ve had the same avocations, I realized this week, since my childhood. It was just a blip of child-rearing that occasionally interrupted my predilection for disappearing into temperate woodlands under the excuse of seeking pit vipers to commune with/photograph. I still paint, write, make music, take photographs. And yet I’m doing it all as a road warrior. I am not “home”. 


All this sounds bleaker than it is. In fact, midweek, I had something of a revelation. Late one night, I found myself thinking that I was completely at peace with myself and my world. That I was happy, comfortable, competent, without need. I have not felt that deep a contentment ever before. But there it was, around midnight on Friday. 


So there we have it. I’m homeless, but happy. And it took the colossal battering of cancer and cancer treatment to make that clear. Weird, no? But don’t ask me. I’m just the reporter, the inquisitor, the seeker, the messenger. Nothing to be gained by blaming me for the truth. 


And what the hell triggered this quasi-mystical bit of self-discovery? Well, I’d like to blame it on staying up late watching first “Predators” and then “Pitch Black” with Vin Diesel (great movie, BTW. The visuals are stunning and worth the price of admission all by themselves). But I think it climbed aboard as many threads of cancer uncertainty came together this week.


Should you find yourself facing serious illness, I highly recommend signing up for whatever funded studies are being conducted by your doctors and their institutions. For one thing, most of us reading this weblog (certainly those of us WRITING it) are grossly overeducated, and one way we can help make amends for taking more than our share of education out of the system is by acknowledging and responding to the need for experimental medical subjects. More importantly, you will learn things your day-to-day medical team may not think useful.


I’m signed up for two studies. One regarding swallowing after the devastation of throat cancer radiation therapy, the other regarding possible interactions with flu vaccine. This week I went in to get blood drawn for the latter, and to do the barium-illuminated imaging of me swallowing various textures of foodish substances (thin, thick, and “paste on a cracker”) for the former. 


The nurses reinforce what the surgeon told me the week prior. That my throat infrastructure is still all screwed up from the radiation. The swallowing nurse shows me how my crippled epiglottis is trying to function, but letting a tiny fraction of each swallow run down the windpipe instead of the GIT. Points out that my inability to form a functional food bolus in my mouth is due to my tongue still being displaced by the radiation-induced inflammation. She is worried that the epiglottis thing might be permanent, but thinks that when my throat finally recovers so it isn’t lined with a crust of inflamed, mucous-starved (because my mucosae were destroyed by the radiation) immunoresponse tissues that it will be a very minor issue in my oral-pharyngeal functioning. 


I hope so. Because she also says her experience (she’s a little older than most of the medical players in this soap opera—younger than I am, but way older than my surgeon and might even have a year or two on my radiation oncologist) is that the intense two-a-day radiation exposures my therapy involved require six months to a year just to recover from the basic devastation. And that my struggle to keep my weight up is fully to be expected. Over all, she thinks I’m looking good and doing well. Says there’s nothing to do but live through it, and that I should be grateful for being able to do the “living” part of the exercise. 


Indeed. Coupled with my new-found contentment with my out-of-place place in the universe, I’m feeling pretty damned good about things. I’ve walked a fair chunk of the distance out the dark trail to the end, and managed to make it back intact (so far). I’m still alive to live through. Life is funnier and more complicated than it’s ever been. And I’m here to laugh. There is a light side to existence, and I’ve parked my butt square on top of it. Turns out, you don’t have to be darkened, downtrodden, and confused to be existential. You can be happy, even if you don’t know where you are and you spend most of your time just watching life happen in front of you. You can learn, you can grow, you can laugh. Maybe every place and every moment is “right”, and there are no wrong ones. Judging by me, that’d be true.


Apologies to all for the weird existentialist meandering. There’s some nice new photos up over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , the other sites http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ will be updated later in the week. And thanks for stopping by!