Other people’s lymphoma
It seems like only yesterday, to me, that I was still staring down the barrel of the gun vis-a-vis cancer. The red scar across my throat is a vivid reminder that my biopsy wasn’t that long ago, or that everyone in the medical community was pretty much convinced I had lymphoma. The first time anyone even suggested it wasn’t was when I did the lung capacity test the day before my operation. The technician said she’d thought it was possible it could be some sort of fungus, which brings up fairly strange visions for what treatment would have been like, in that case.
Had it been cancer, this blog would have been started in earnest earlier (and probably with me begging for a lot more help from my boy Jonah, let’s be honest).
Today, I saw a blog from someone whose biopsy (I can’t remember the name of the operation still, other than “medial thera-something-oscopy,” damn you, morphine!) didn’t turn out to be sarcoidosis. As was expected for me, she turns out to have a form of Hodgkin’s Disease, and other than being a woman, the thoughts and issues she has are very similar to what I was already privately flashing forward to myself:
There isn’t any reason that I should have cancer. I’ve never been a smoker, I’ve been a vegetarian since I was twelve, and I didn’t grow up near a nuclear plant or spend summer days baking in the sun. At 24 years old I don’t look like a typical cancer patient. The men and women I sit with each week in the oncology division at Mass. Gen. are old and tired – the experience of lives lived has worn them out. I feel like I’m bursting with opportunity of experiences yet to have, places yet to go and people yet to meet.
The survival rate for my type of cancer at the stage I was originally diagnosed is roughly 90%. Those are great odds … fabulous odds. “If you have to have cancer,� said my oncologist at my first visit, “this is the one to get.� He’s right of course. But, one out of 10 aren’t the chances I want when I’m talking about my life. With 10 cups in front of me, one of them poison, who would choose to drink? Unlike Russian roulette however, with cancer you don’t have a choice … you have to play the game.
My thoughts exactly. I remember sitting in the radiology waiting room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Apple Valley, listening to the elderly ladies, all of whom were in their late 70s or older, watch TV Land and saying that there were no more wholesome shows like “I Dream of Jeannie” on any more. (For the record, ladies, I’m pretty sure you can find lots of shows about half-dressed submissives and their kooky “serving Master” adventures on TV. You probably just need pay cable stations.)
I’m angry that this has disrupted my life and made my friends and family feel helpless. Being a cancer patient or cancer survivor doesn’t make someone a hero. You do the treatments because you have to and you’re sick because you have to be … it’s not some admirable sacrifice. It is what it is … an affliction of mostly nameless, faceless, masses of people. It doesn’t discriminate and it doesn’t pick and choose. It’s not karma or punishment for some forgotten sin. It’s a disease … not my life and definitely not my death.
Reading the blog, it’s striking in how many ways, the experience is different for a woman, even in ways that wouldn’t have occured to me. Of course harvesting eggs prior to chemo would be more difficult than sperm donation, which is merely awkward. And while men have Michael Jordan making baldness cool (especially for the “my hair is falling out in weird clumps, so I’m going to take command of this and go pre-emptively bald” crew), and I could almost certainly get away with being a cueball without much more irritation than the danger of a sunburn up here in the High Desert, bald-as-a-woman hasn’t really worked out well for anyone other than Sinéad.
Yes, obviously, living through all of this is still a better deal than dying, but the indignities and frustrations just feel like malice.
“Ha ha, we got you! Cancer and now walk around with a scarf on your head, chickie! Cancer and idiots staring at you in the grocery store!”
On this side of the table, where I rolled the natural 20, I appear to be going symptomatic again on sarcoidosis, if some of the blips over the past few days continue to grow in frequency and duration. But for the most part, the people I’ve come in contact with have been very cool, giving me my space. And I only tell people what the red scar they’re staring at is if they ask me, and only two or three people have done that.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
