The Big CWell, the Republic of Equity is going to have to wait a bit. The Dictators of Debt can continue their evil ways without my stuff, and I'm sure they're relieved. I have a bigger, more personal, and much easier-to-write-about thing going on.
I have cancer.
The road here:
A soft-spoken well-dressed guy I have known a little for years was taking over as my dentist. Our first visit was mid-March, and he does this macro head exam, taking casts, making models, shooting x-rays and photos and generally poking around. Plus he felt my neck, and, with his fingers on the left side, said "What's that?" I said, "Dunno." He said, "Get it checked out." He was quite insistent. "Get it checked out right away."
I had noticed it before, while shaving. I thought it was a sort of muscle, kind of buff. That's it.
So for the next six weeks I went through appointments broken and met, no big sense of urgency. First my regular doc, who sent me to an
ENT, who did what's called a needle biopsy, and that didn't show him enough, so I went in for a real cut, under general anesthesia for the first time since I was five. (That was for a tonsillectomy.) He said the results would usually be - I like this term, it has a certain hauteur - "unimportant."
They put a drain, not a lot of fun, in the neck for the next couple of days, and upon my going in to have it dismantled and removed it fell to the nurse practitioner to reveal that the results were, well, important. Cancer in the lymph node.
I wish none of this were happening to me, obviously, but it's pretty interesting. The lymphatic system acts like a little storm sewer system in the body, separately from but in coordination with the blood circulatory system. Cancer cells travel to
lymph nodes, and accumulate there. That's what they found. The cancer is metastatic, which means the cells are coming from a primary cancer somewhere else.
So the next step, of which I'm in the middle,* is to find the primary cancer. The first step was a PET scan.
PET scans are one of these jobs where you lie down on a tray and they move your body in and out of a tube. Fine, but they take a while and I was
desperate for reading material. I resolved to memorize great speeches or great poetry so I can reel them out at future such times. As it was, I tried making lists, the first being a list of old girlfriends. I told this to the techies who run the machine and they loved it. (I wish their lives, by the way, on nobody.)
Yesterday we** met with a radiation oncologist, who tells you what to expect, generally, from the radiation treatments that are almost surely ahead. He gave us a first report on the PET scan and it sounded good. No evident cancer outside the head and neck. Something may going on with the right side, in an
epiglottic fold***, but it may not be what they are looking for. All of this is pretty consistent with the better-case predictions I had heard.
Now on to the decision to move from the suburban
hospital where all this has taken place so far, to a city teaching hospital, which is what practically everyone says to do. In particular, move to the
Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes, which does indeed sound like a first-class place. I don't know the pros and cons. Why wouldn't everyone do this? Cost? Doubtful, I don't think the teaching hospitals are any more expensive for those of us who are insured. (And they are more likely to take on the uninsured.)
Suburbitis? (You know, too many black folks in the waiting rooms at those big downtown hospitals...) Maybe, but that's not me. The doctors? My guy at Suburb
Hospital, which itself has a terrific reputation, said it is comprised mainly of docs from Barnes (Washington University, actually) who don't want to teach. So they play more golf? OK, fine, but to me... unimportant.
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* Up with this I will not put! - WC
** "We" ain't royal. We is me and Mrs. Strays.
*** The
Epliglottic Fold sounds, to me, like a place where
Jabba the Hutt might hang out.
