Off to Mayo

Off to Mayo

Well, I am off to my 5-year-anniversary check-up at the Mayo Clinic…a seven-hour drive from Chicago. This will be…let’s see…my 15th trip since being released from my cancer treatments in September of 2003. And since every single check-up has been fine, I have absolutely no reason to expect that this one will be any different. But that has not stopped me the past 14 times from worrying that this time there may be a problem. It’s the old “other shoe” syndrome, and I guess it is human nature. Yet every time, having worried and fretted for a couple of days before the exam, when it comes out fine I wonder why I’d wasted all that time and energy for nothing. I do hope that will be my reaction this time as well.

I’m to have a PET scan…a 3-dimensional x-ray which can spot cancer cells anywhere in the body. The last time I had one, they only scanned my head and neck. I sincerely hope they will do a head-to-toe scan this time, but who knows?

Looking back from a point five years removed…actually, almost exactly five years and ten months since the night I bit my tongue in my sleep…the entire experience has a surreal quality. I still don’t know, and never will, whether biting my tongue somehow triggered the cancer, or whether my body was trying to alert me to the fact that something was wrong. At any rate, my hesitation to act more aggressively or to insist my doctor do so, resulted in the cancer being a stage 4 when it was finally diagnosed. There is no stage 5. I was so incredibly, incredibly lucky to have things turn out as they did.

But I think part of the reason it did work out was that I never for one second entertained the thought that I might die. The treatments I underwent, the five-day-a-week, 20-minute (as I recall) radiation sessions, were simply the norm. Seven weeks of radiation, three “industrial strength” chemotherapy sessions (which I scarcely noticed in that I had absolutely no ill effects from them), having a stomach tube inserted when it became impossible for me to swallow, and subsequently subsisting entirely on liquid for seven months were all taken more or less in stride.

If I have any unhappiness with my treatment, it was that no one warned me of what was to follow. Had I known (and I probably should have, had I thought of it) that my jaws would all but atrophy closed from not opening them to chew, that my neck muscles would tighten to the point they felt (and still feel largely) like wood; that then cutting those muscles to remove my lymph glands would combine to inexorably pull my head forward and down to the point where I cannot tilt it back far enough to drain a glass or a can of pop, or that I would be unable to turn my head more than 15 degrees in either direction, I think there were steps that I could have and should have to lessen the effects of the damage. I’d have worked my mouth, opening widely, sticking my tongue out, turning my head constantly back and forth, and perhaps getting a back-neck brace to counter the forward-and-downward pull.

I am not the person I was, and I miss me terribly. I cannot do so much I once took so much for granted, or enjoy a bag of popcorn or a good steak, or have my evening Manhattan (alcohol burns)…well, so very many things. And I know this sounds either like a dive from the high tower into the Pity Pool, or an embarrassing bid for sympathy. Please believe me when I say it is neither. It is merely life being life, and the fact remains…the only fact that matters…is that I am alive and infinitely grateful for that fact. And my purpose in putting all this out in front of you is simply to encourage you to give serious thought to, and to really, fully appreciate, everything you have.

As they say, life isn’t always easy, but it’s better than the alternative.

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This blog is from Dorien's ebook of blogs, Short Circuits, available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com; it's also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. You can find information about Dorien's books at his web site:  www.doriengrey.com: