It Might Get Messy

Atlantic coast of France, early 1945. With the invasion beaches selected for D-Day, intelligence gathering begins in earnest. An obvious problem pops up almost immediately, confirmed by overflight photography, local partisans, and daring and dangerous insertion of agents. The far end of Omaha Beach is a series of sea cliffs. Perched on the cliffs are German artillery emplacements, sighted perfectly down the beaches. Under those guns, the invasion will be a blood bath (which it turned out to be anyway, but that’s a different story). Multiple tools were available for dealing with the guns: aerial bombing, naval bombardment, direct assault. All were implemented—a measure of the military importance placed on the matter.

The hardest but most assured way of assaulting the guns fell to U.S. Army Rangers. Long before Zero Hour, the rangers were put ashore with minimal burden of food, water, and ammunition, lots of climbing gear, and thermite grenades intended to disable the guns the old-fashioned way—by hand. As the invasion started to scroll before dawn on 6 June, rangers were coming ashore in a series of SNAFUs that included misidentification of the objective (the lead boat mistook another cliff for Pointe du Hoc, 2 of the assault boats sank before reaching the beach, etc.) [1]. Soon after dawn, however rangers were hanging by vertical cables and carabiners on the cliffs, with occasional German small arms units shooting at them and working to impede their low-technology assault.

It was a harrowing venture for the rangers. As night gave way to dawn, it was clear just how vulnerable they were. Suffice to say (there is, of course, a series of long stories collapsed into that phrase) the rangers rather quickly made it to the top of the cliffs and the German infantry units were by then occupied elsewhere along the beach front. There was only one problem: the guns that were the object of the entire exercise weren’t there. What you had was units of an exhausted ranger battalion with a brilliant view of an armada of warships that dwarfed any naval assault operation to date, and nothing much to do with their hands. 

Suffice to say (have I used that idiom already? Dammit the chemotherapy drugs must be affecting my brain…or it could just be my brain…) the rangers spent something of a surreal morning wandering around French pasturelands on the margin of the massive clash of arms on the invasion beaches. Several recent television series have discovered and used newly discovered film, plus re-enactments, to good effect to document the assault on Pointe du Hoc, I commend these to you next time you’re in the mood for some hoppin’ History Channel viewing. 

Anyway, in keeping with the surreal nature of the misty morning, a couple of the rangers hiking away from the main group to try to get a grip on things discovered the guns from the sea cliffs in a farm woodlot, unguarded, with their ammunition stacked nearby. They disabled two of the guns with the grenades they carried, returned to the unit for backup, went back destroyed the remaining guns and ammunition.

Mission actually accomplished. Of course, now the rangers had the problem of being a small unit of invaders away from the primary area of Allied assault. Over the following two days, they encountered and fought with various German troops. By 8 June, 90 men remained alive and fit for duty out of 225 in the initial assault.

This is a classic and interesting bit of D-Day lore. I recount it here because I had a sort of a “where are the guns” moment at the hospital this week. Respiratory specialists at two hospitals decided, over the past couple of weeks, that my pleural cavity was accumulating fluid from my lungs and would benefit from being drained. “Drained” in this case means they take a very long, lethal-looking needle, stab it through the abdominal musculature of my back, and attempt (via real-time ultrasound observation) to get the needle point into the pleura without pushing too far and puncturing and deflating a lung. Once properly inserted, they use the needle as a conduit to pull excess fluid from the pleura for discard with the day’s load of biological waste. 

Well, Cathy kicked my butt out of my hospital-style bed in front of the living room TV and got me safely into the car. We buzzed up to the hospital at GBMC. I was quickly checked in and wheeled to the operating room. Appropriate gear was compiled—ultrasound visualizer, sterile kit with scary needles and fluid bags to catch the bad stuff, etc. The technicians sat me up facing the wall with my back exposed to the bed. Selected a needle and squished the ultrasound gel onto my back. Silence for about 4 minutes. And the tech says “Uhh…there’s not a lot of fluid here. Certainly not enough to extract.” She went to get the supervising physician who confirmed her diagnosis. No fluid to extract. 

Talk about your missing guns! Actually, I’ve been feeling really good lately. No shortness of breath, lungs painless and dry. I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t find enough runaway goop to continue the procedure. I was certainly happy they wouldn’t be cramming the knitting-needle sized shivs into my back. 

But there is more. That my lungs are functioning sufficiently well to keep fluid from leaking out and into the pleural cavity means that the chemotherapy is actually working. Oh, it’s not a miracle. My lungs remain cancerous, nothing we’re doing now can change that. But that wasn’t our objective in pursuing the catastrophically difficult and painful course of chemotherapy. We’re working to give me sufficient quality-of-life to spend a few more good months with family and friends, to write, think, play around with guitars, pastels, and photography, to sit on the front deck and enjoy the autumn weather.

And we seem to be meeting that objective (finally). This round of chemo did not dump me into an ambulance or the emergency room. Rather, it has given me (some) renewed strength. And enough symptomatic relief to be comfortable perched on my bed, reading, writing, strumming, and watching TV. 

And at this point, that is what we’re looking for. A few comfortable months before the cancer gets its legs back and finally wrecks my respiratory system. And you know what? I’ll take it!

Thanks for being here, everyone. Hopefully after all the slogging you’ve had to do through whiny, painful accounting of medical nastiness, this bit of good news will perk you up as it has me. With home-administered i.v. fluids to keep me hydrated, and a peristaltic pump to “feed” me at a rate my physiology can endure, I’m hoping this period of relative comfort will last a while. But however it works out, it’s good news and the first such in a while. My love to you all. Tune in next week for further Adventures in Cancer Land (trademark, copyright). I’m taking y’all with me right to the end. Talk to you next week!

References

[1] http://www.6juin1944.com/assaut/omaha/en_hoc.php