It Might Get Messy

Ever go into a tourist shop in D.C., maybe one of those in Adams Morgan where authentic foreign antiques and trinkets mix with fakes made everywhere from Hong Kong to Hackensack? What’s the first thing you see in front of the store? Of course, it’s  Matryoshka dolls, traditional Russian nesting wooden carvings that start with a large mother doll, with smaller and smaller dolls inside. Actually according to Wikipedia the “tradition” goes back to 1890, when the first set was carved anticipating an international exhibition in the early 1900s. 

Still, even a century old “tradition” can be an effective metaphor. As in, every time I go near a hospital, somebody peels away another layer of doll and finds a hidden medical problem. First there was the trip to Baltimore to close out the surgery by removing the last few dozen staples. At that point they found a blood clot in my lungs with potential to generate a heart attack, and put me on so much blood thinner that a few days later I started to bleed like a second-rate bull in a small-town Andalucian fighting ring. Out of the hospital from that, and they stuff me into a very tight, dark claustrophobia-inducing MRI tube to locate the best way to irradiate the known tumor on my palate. At the same time, they find something the radiologist thinks is “suspicious”. So then they send me back to the hospital where a guy with an ultrasound unit and a microscalpel slices up the raisin-looking “suspicious” item, vacuums its little pieces onto microscope slides, and sends it in for analysis. Which comes back “non-malignant”. Great news, no? A possible cancer that’s not cancerous! Yeah!!

Except, it turns out the raisiny spot isn’t totally clear. According to the radiation oncologist, the cells are “reproducing funny”.  He says “funny” means definitely abnormal but also definitely not malignant. I assume he doesn’t mean funny haha. And what whatever he means, the hilarity is not going to interfere with the treatment plan the docs are cooking up as we speak.

We’ve already made the form they use to bolt me to the table so the radiation burns are confined to the desired tissues. Which, I remind you, doesn’t mean they don’t hurt. In fact, the radiation burns hurt like hell, in a stinging, constantly painful way. Anyway, the next thing to do is figure out rad dosage, number of applications per day, what chemotherapeutic drugs to use and how often, shit like that. 

Radiation is now scheduled to begin 14 May at 1400 hrs. The doctors say they “hope” the plan will be “ready” by then. There are only three of them, I’m not sure how long it can take them to cook up a plan to…uh…cook up my tumor. But that’s where we are. There may be more layers of matryoshka dolls to peel away in the interim, but at the moment they’re thinking we’ll be ready to go by mid-May. 

At that point, you’ll REALLY start getting the whiny weblogs. For the moment, there will be material around the weblog horn by Sunday evening. See important stuff at http://aehsfoundation.org/ (go to lower left on home page and click through to blog), http://docviper.livejournal.com/ ,  http://www.theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ ,  and http://www.sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Also, see DAC Crossley’s wild west weblog at http://daccrossley.typepad.com/. DAC was my major professor at UGA, and is one of the liveliest and funniest people you’ll ever meet. He’s also gone one better than the rest of us—he’s written and published novels. Dammit. I gotta get my ass in gear… .