One month ago tomorrow, Emily and I were driving up from Fresno and talking about life and her family. We’d just spent a restful New Year’s weekend with a partial incarnation of the Garin Clan and noticed that her Mom seemed to be finally accepting aspects of aging and the need to slow down a little. Both her Mom and my Dad have always been people who push themselves to the brink and it’s always unsettling to have a parent who doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on their limits as they get older.
The next day, we got a phone call which revealed that the routine colonoscopy she’d been scheduled for had justified the practice of getting periodic colonoscopies. She had colon cancer.
We reeled. For a long time, we had little or no information – not because anyone was concealing anything, but because the information would simply take time to discern. How long had she had cancer? What stage was it in? Had it metastasized? Would she need chemo? What was the general outlook?
We chose not to share most of these questions and dilemmas with others outside the family, mostly because we daily dealt with how miserable it was to wonder and not to know. By roughly half-weekly installments from additional doctor’s visits, we got a few tiles to throw into our mostly empty mosaic. About two years. Probably not metastasized, but inconclusive. Surgery was the immediate course of action and then we’ll see.
More waiting. An effort to keep life on an even keel, to not cower in the wake of this visceral confronting of mortality and larger questions and something that, in cliché but nevertheless essential fashion, eviscerated all the importance that had illusorily appeared in prior concerns.
Emily went down to Fresno last Monday night.
A week ago today, her mother went into surgery to remove the cancer. The surgery took about 90 minutes and a third of her large intestine. And apparently, as a two-day wait revealed thereafter, all of the cancer. The biopsy was clean. There will be routine monitoring and she had to spend a week in the hospital, but it looks like not even a little chemo will be necessary. Early detection saves lives.
The relief at such a diagnosis is indescribable. Guarded, surely, because nothing is ever 100%, but guarded euphoria is euphoria nonetheless. The surgery recovery has gone smoothly and all indications are that something like normal life will be back very soon.
One month later.
As someone who years ago started predicting that everyone in my generation who makes it to sixty will get several cancers, representing massive increases in both the incidence and survival rates of the disease, I guess this whole experience shouldn’t be as stunning as it feels. But even for someone living on a sine curve, this kind of roller coaster is overwhelming. There may be no more widely feared word in the language than “cancer” (perhaps “terrorist”) – the word seems to connote a death sentence no matter what the options wind up being. And to get cancer without needing any chemo at all is transcendently remarkable.
Of course the initial fear was tempered with a little hope, just as the current relief is tempered with a little concern. Such is how quickly things change these days and how much of every emotion and experience seems to be mixed. It’s hard to find a more unassailably positive thing to cling to than a wildly successful cancer surgery, though.
May this relief last. And may all your cancers go as well.
