It Might Get Messy

When I was a kid, bowfishing—shooting fish with a bow and arrow—was a popular summer pastime. It’s easy enough to do—you fit a rig holding 25 or 30 yards of strong line to your bow, tether a barbed arrow to the string, shoot a fish, and reel it in with the line tied to the arrow. Pompton Lake and other local water bodies were loaded with enormous carp. Carp spawn in shallow water and make a noisy mess of things, thrashing around in the silty sediment of reed beds and lily pads. To hunt them down, you either wade through the goop or use a flat-bottom boat to get close enough to shoot.

Pompton Lake was also home to some enormous snapping turtles. We often caught them, sometimes eating them but usually just dumping them back in the lake where they sometimes made a spectacular ruckus by grabbing an adult swan’s leg and struggling for hours (and invariably failing) to make a hefty meal of the big bird. 

One summer we caught two particularly large turtles—a 48 pounder and a 52 pounder. These we carried home to show off and contemplate the degree of difficulty that would be involved in converting them to soup. We ended up having my friend’s metal-worker father rivet engraved name and address plates in the edge of their carapaces, and carried them back to the lake and let them go.

Later in the year we sloshed out in the mud to join a guy already set up for bowfishing carp. But when we got close he got all excited. “Come see this. It’s awesome. I just shot it…”. Sure enough, it was our biggest turtle, name tag hidden under the goop covering the shell. The guy had put his arrow straight through the turtle from top to bottom, approximately dead center in the top shell. The guy was really proud of that turtle, and at first refused our pleas to cut it loose and release it. But when we scraped off the name plate and showed it to him, he grumbled, but snapped his arrow, pulled it out, and let the turtle race off the mud flat into deeper water.

We worried that the turtle had a lethal injury. From the placement of the arrow, it was a fair bet that it went through the liver and/or a kidney and a good chunk of the gastrointestinal system. But not to worry. In early autumn we rescued a duck from a turtle in shallow water, and it turned out to be the very same turtle. High fives all around, then. That turtle overcame devastating injuries, healed up, and lived a normal life (we ran into it several times in the next couple of years).

These days, I feel a deep kinship to that turtle. I’ve had some brutal shit done to my body, and I’m still living (although, I must admit, not living “normally”). Better than that, though, was the conclusion of an appointment with the oncologist on Thursday. Based on a CT scan taken while I was in the hospital for pneumonia a few weeks ago, it appears that the 6 rounds of chemotherapy did a good job. There is still a visible “abnormality” in each lung. Dr. T says that could be fluid, scar tissue, or malignancy. But both are relatively small. If they are cancers, we’ll have time to develop treatment options before they become too grossly symptomatic. And if they’re NOT cancers, well, I could consider myself cancer-free, at least for the moment.

This was by far the best possible outcome of all the chemo treatments. It’s not a magic bullet. I still have the mass in my chest cavity and associated pain in my throat and chest, my throat feels like it’s got a mass trapped in it much of the time, which interferes with keeping the plumbing clear of mucous and to an extent with breathing. And, most importantly, my cancers have been consistently viciously aggressive. Which means that where there ARE residual malignancies—in lungs or anywhere else—throat, lymph system, pleura, wherever—it won’t be a hell of a long time before I’m back to the ugliness of cancer therapeutics. 

But not for the moment. I don’t need chemotherapy right now. I don’t need radiation right now. I just need to make myself as comfortable as I can with the residual damage from the past few years of cancer wars, work on gaining some strength, maybe gaining some weight. 

So I’m probably not in as good shape as our enormous snapping turtle was, post-shooting. She recovered completely to continue her long reptilian life. I’m happy enough at the moment to have the treatments of the past years leave me in this position at this moment in my life. It probably won’t last. But it’s nice to have now. 

Thanks for being here for me, everyone. I can’t say it enough—I know you’re out there pulling for me. Gives me extra strength for the cancer wars, and helps me through the residual pain and damage that keep me uncomfortable and crippled even as the cancers have receded. I love you all. And I thank you. Be sure to check back next week for a briefing on how my momentarily cancer-strong body is holding up!

PS—below I offer a few of the best photos of birds at the feeder on the front porch. Feeder’s been busy, given the cold weather and associated snow. Got a nice taxonomic diversity, all things considered. And I figure, given the hell that's being unleashed on the global social fabric at the moment, that we could all use a few moments to contemplate the peaceful and the pretty…remember in most browsers you can enlarge if you double-click on each photo...