Hospital - Finding Out

August 13, 2014, Seton Hospital, Austin Texas

Branches and roots, each as over-come as the other, one in the liver covering both lobes thus making it impossible to cut out, and the other in the pancreas--“Not as serious”--according to the boot-wearing doctor with the easy demeanor and disarming smile. His student, Melinda, at the foot of the bed would be telling me if choledochal cysts are genetic in the morning. “Thanks, because I have three children.” (FYI these cysts can exist for years without being noticed and can live on many different organs. I had one on my gall bladder too. Doctors cut it out when I was 7.)

The morning it all began.
My socks were made for giant fatties.

The severity of my particular tumor conveys with the inability to “resect” it, or cut it out. Can’t do that because I have to have some part of my liver to live and the branches are well matured through both left and right sides. We have to shoot it and me full of chemotherapy to try to shrink it first. Then we can consider our next steps. 

Deb and I have been waiting all day, or actually two days, for this information. It keeps growing darker. The first glimpse was just a growth outside the duodenum that was causing a stricture. Then the famous line this morning from Dr. Binh Pham, “No, I am not 98% sure this is cancer. I am more sure than that.” His biopsy turned out to be false, as in not cancer. 

But five days ago, Friday August 8, I had an MRI done on my abdomen. Dr. Rob Fuller looked at it today. His suspicion is a double-sided dose of devil’s breath. He won’t know for sure until tomorrow or the day after, or the day after that. But it’s apparently a pretty damning image he’s looking at. By the way, it’s the first time I have worn my wedding ring in an MRI machine. It hopped and buzzed on my thin finger in rhythm with each magnetic pulse.

Tomorrow, we go back under for the radiologist to do what they should have done the first time, which is get a sample of the suspicious material. Then we send the samples to a lab somewhere, and there a very official-looking technician will run some dyes and tests and pronounce, “carcinoma.” And my life will have irrevocably changed in some faraway place that the technician doesn’t even consider.

What will this hold for me?  To be sure, some terrible nights. To be sure, some terrible days. I wonder about the other people around me at the clinic. What will they be like? Will they be stalwart and brave, or sallow and defeated? Will they be like Lance Armstrong, kicking cancer’s ass? Or like a cow led walking to suspicions of doom?

I will … be … who knows? I will be stalwart for sure. I will be liked by my friendly tormentors. I will make them laugh. I will know their names, and if I remember to do it, I will write their kids’ names in my phone and so I will remember those too. I really hope they’re likable. I need to remember to remember that I will see them a lot, and so avoid the potential to say something mean to them.