I have tried to hear good things from doctors as if they are stock tips from a spurious relative. That is harder than you might imagine: if you starved for good news, conditioned to desire it, when you believe you hear it you tune in mightily to every phoneme. I can barely tell you the rather pedestrian list of instructions I get from Dr. Dayton, the conditions and the musts anchor in me lightly. I try to folow them, but really, at this point 100% compliance seems beside the point. Yet when he says something good, I can quote him like digital recorder.
Lately, I'm dealing with the fall out of my tragic impulse to slaver, all Pavlovian and unthinking, over positivity. My last scan which I wrote about was truly awesome--the best news I could possibly get--and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. One week later, what did I find? A chest wall tumor which flattened out and disappeared when I started Erbitux has started to redevelop. No one knows why.
Considering I'm still on Erbitux and MTX weekly, this does not appear good to Dr. Dayton, and not to me. I've nicknamed the damn thing Vesuvius, because it has a habit of erupting at odd times, leaving a crust of schmutz and blood on my chest--and I never feel it. You see, this slap has a kiss in the middle of it: it doesn't hurt. It's a bit sensitve, and as it grows (now it's about an inch tall), it gets a bit ouchy in a tight shirt, but its burps of material and organic matter? If they didn't dry around the caldera, I'd never know they happened.
This little bugger sent me, this week, to the Wound Care Center of IU Health--rack up another new office in my ever expanding medical universe. I give them a 10 for effort, though--I had throrough attention from three nurses and one doctor with a great sense of humor. I have been prodded, and salted with an anti-biotic dust, sent home with special bandages, even a body bandage that women often use when they have mastectomies to keep tape off sensitve or painful areas of skin. These people are serious about wound care and do not mess around with nothingness.
Better yet, when I told the wound care doctor that my experience of cancer was kiss and slap, she required no explanation of what I meant.
As no one knows what is causing this growth to re-occur, I am allowed to indulge hopeful scenarios--that because I'm like a 5'11" tall walking bacterial pool, that somehow they are now constructing a diving board, on what's left of my left pectoral. This theory is workable only if you suspend disbelief at how an anti-growth agent like Erbitux might have effected bacterial growth before, when that's not really its job or function, but hey, sometimes the suspension of disbelief is the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.
The slap: no, it's truly likely this is a redevelopment, or a new development of cancer. The slap: they were right, I'm in the fight for the long haul, for the rest of my life. There will always be new cancer, it will always require new strategy. I will always and forever be wiggling and straning to make sure I have insurance coverage, that I can copay, that I can communicate, that I can survive. There is no easy way.
A kiss: I am now on the permanent tack of weight maintenance and weight gain, up to 148 as of yesterday. Surely something is going right in there if I can do that, all the while take three different antibiotics and completely destroying any notion of gut flora I ever had! The slap: even fat asses have cancer.
So, I've proposed to begin a steady exit from the kiss and slap cycle by walking in the harsh light of reality as much as possible. To make it less harsh by allowing it to shadow what I write in here and offer more depth than I'm able to, to make things a bit more documentary than docudrama.
My first step: the changed body, me, as I am today. 25 pounds heavier than six months ago, a long way to go. My left side now a battle zone for a redeveloping tumor, my right side scheduled at some point to fix the hole in my neck...it will be flattened out as the left. Hanging in the middle of me the hated feeding tube, always an annoyance. Me, as I am, waiting for the next monster to emerge, waiting for the next St. George, waiting.
Good luck, old man!
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