From Ground Zero to Here
Sometime in May a friend in Frisco, TX requested that I speak at a Saturday evening event, to which I gladly said yes. Meanwhile, in the back of my mind my entire head is being dominated by what I think is a wicked bad thermo-nuclear attack by airborne allergens. After all, it had been snowing cottonwood allergens here in Dallas for what seemed like a month and I’m hoping that this evil miasma of fluffy white will have dissipated by then.
Well, the sinuses go from evil to malevolent, with spontaneous nosebleeds to spice up the usual inability to breathe normally, so it’s off to the doctor for a check up. Several months earlier I had some blood work done, which came back normal and in November I had a complete hip replacement and a cyst on my femur removed where I was scanned with everything but a live cat and rayed by every letter designated particle in the atomic spectrum. All negative.
Upon further consultation I am off to an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor, who is in total agreement regarding evil allergens, cauterizes some veins in the proboscis and sends me on my merry way.
Well, two days later, not only am I not any better but my face has taken on the color of purple sage. I look like John Cougar Freakin’ Melonhead, with a face color that harks back to Jimi Hendrix and 1966 for cryin’ out loud.
Ear, nose and throat doctor number two pokes about a bit, comments on my unusual flesh tone and suggest that I get a CAT scan of head, sinuses and throat. Tubular devices here I come.
This time the CAT scan catches not only a tumor atop my right lung, but a metastasized spot on the medulla. That was May 29th, 2009, just two weeks and four centuries ago.
The same day I am in the office of my trusted and loved internist of seventeen years willing to let go of whatever it is I think should happen next. She notes that “this is not good” but places a call to an oncology team that she said she would call if in the same situation. It is now sometime near 3:00 pm in the afternoon and I am shunted off to Medical City Hospital here in Dallas. By 4:30 pm I am in the largest single bed hospital room I could have ever imagined and being introduced to my first sure fire cancer doctor named Dr. Wait. Who, well, doesn’t want to wait? “We have to find out what kind of beast this is don’t we?” An apparently rhetorical question if I’ve every heard one. “When was the last time you ate” she asked, and when I said the day before she whipped up a team of five, equipment, some kick-ass drugs and did a bronchostomy right in my very room so she could typecast the tumor.
By Saturday the tumor is typecast, by Sunday I’ve been dosed with my first round of chemo, followed by additional MRI’s and full-body bone scans that do not find cancer anywhere else. By Monday I am released, fully mapped for the radiation therapy that will follow for the next 7 weeks, 5 days a week for the coming month plus and regrouping at home.
In any event, I met my speaking engagement, although it was not the canned, “ha-ha I can’t believe that you really did that” kind of talk, but it was the most cathartic event I’ve had in some time, and I have not even touched upon the love and support I have been the recipient of for the last week, not only from family and friends but from total strangers. My fervent hope is to give some back.
I resolve to allow my tongue to savor the roughness of a strawberry before its sweetness on a hot summer’s day, I promise to run through the meadow in my mind’s eye to feel the rain pummel my face during the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral, I am desparate to feel the love in your hug and taste it in your kiss.
Onward to the future…