Randomness Abounds

When I was a little kid, I didn't have much in the way of a tough male role model. As a result, I was convinced that my uncle Curt was the baddest man alive. He had a habit of chewing on the corner of his lower lip, a habit I immediately equated with toughness. One morning, I was on the bus on my way to school and there was an older kid who was staring at me. I didn't like it, so I started chewing on the corner of my bottom lip, showing him I was a bad man and not to be messed with. The kid started laughing at me, and then sucked in half of his lower lip and gnawed on it with yellowed fence post teeth. I remember being shocked that someone would use my own "I'm tough" signals back at me in a mocking manner. I immediately decided that posturing wasn't my thing.

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The last couple of days I've started going for a walk on my lunch. Yesterday, I froze without a hat and gloves, so today I came better prepared. I go across the street to a park and walk around a gravel nature trail towards the back of the property. It's a great way to spend an hour. The deer, undersized from the crowded conditions, are used to people and run more out of habit than from actual fear. The squirrels are fat and sleek, looking freshly oiled and seem to be everywhere. They say there's a good fox population, but I've never seen proof of that, and I guess I don't expect to. There's still some snow around, though there seems to be less of it today than there was yesterday. It's limited now to the fallen limbs and trees and along the piles of leaves, but has melted in the places where it had fallen on the actual ground.

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Jen got an automated call from her doctor telling her she had a message in her secure voice mail. She called up and listened to a voice mail that told her she was cancer free. The margins of the mass they removed were nice and clean, and she now has less than a week before the stitches come out.

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We've been doing some things around the house getting ready for Jen's mother's Thanksgiving visit, and our decorating is finally starting to get weird enough to make me happy. First, I got Kim Jong iLL hung up along the stairway half wall on the second floor landing. They're lower than I had planned on, and not immediately visible when you go upstairs, but they looked so great there that they had to stay. We also got some other prints up including a great shot of Madonna (Jen is a huge fan of early Madonna) completely nude (Stephen is a huge fan of early or late nudity) while hitchhiking. I know what you're thinking because I've already heard it before: "I wouldn't hang that crap in my house". That, dear friend, is why you don't live here. It makes me smile every time I see it. We also got some family photos framed and hung, so our house, after 6 years, is finallly starting to look a little homey. Well, our version of homey anyway.

Vetern's Day Cancerectomy

Yesterday I took headed out of the office around noon. Technically, I wasn't even supposed to go in yesterday, but the company I am hoping to work for soon asked if I could hang out for a bit to start work on a project, so I did. (I know that it doesn't seem to make sense that I would go in to work my job to do work for a company I don't yet work for, but in my world, it makes a certain sort of sense. Just go with it.)

So, I went to buy a coat. All of my old jackets and winter coats are three or four sizes too big, so I headed out and scored not one, but two, coats. I threw a new knit hat into the mix, so now I"m ready for winter's worst. Bring it.

After two stores, I still had some time to kill so I headed to Half Price Books over near campus. HPB isn't a place where you go in looking for a certain book because more often than not, you won't find it. It IS a place to go in and wander around for a couple of hours and get a bunch of shit you didn't realize you needed until you saw it on the shelf. That's what I did. I looked at old vinyl (the records always smell like mildew...it's comforting somehow), flipped through graphic novels, drooled over their locked collection of First Editions, and wound up spending $20 on four new books. I love that place.

Then, I picked Jen up from her office, and headed over to her doctor's office. We had been waiting for this day for almost a full month since getting the call that the mole on her chin was cancerous, and the wait was taking its toll on her. She was just ready to have the damn thing cut out, so that's exactly what they did. It took about twenty-five minutes and I got to watch them do it. Well, I watched part of it anyway. Normally, I would have been fascinated by the whole process, but it's different when it's your wife being cut. I sat at the end of the table near her feet, rubbing her ankle every once in a while, but avoiding the actual action.

I did see many blood soaked gauze squares being piled on a surgical tray. I saw the rose tattoo on the back of the assistant's neck. I saw a little half inch bleeding squiggle of cancer and skin get held to the light before being lowered into a little cup that will be shipped off to a lab for testing.

Jen was quiet for the most part, and was a trooper through the whole thing. Like I said, she was just ready for them to be done. And now they are. In two weeks the stitches come out and then we can get on with everything else. I'm not sure yet what "everything else" consists of, but I'm ready for it.

Sitting in the Waiting Room

Blogging from my phone from a hospital waiting room. My sister in law is on the table right now and they're removing more cancer that was just discovered. Her recovery time just doubled as a result. but she'll be ok. I'm not sure what to do with myself here in all this quiet.

The ceiling rises above me five stories. At the top is a balloon that got away from someone. It's a bit shrivelled and deflated making me think it has been up there a week or so.

There's no TV here but rather a monitor with patient's surgical updates displayed. Each patient is assigned a code number so there are no confidentiality issues. Nikki's code is 27313. I plan on addressing her as such from now on.

...

It's now hours later, and things have settled down. Nikki's surgery, which was supposed to be around two hours long, wound up being just over four after they found some suspicious cells along her bowel. The surgery went very well though, and they are confident that everything that could have been a problem was either removed or burned to a crisp. She's got a long recovery, but she's doing great so far. Good news pretty much across the board.

Jen and I debated going to see the Blue Jackets play tonight as it's their home opener, but decided to put it off. Watched the game on television instead and am now heading to bed. It's been a long day.

Moley Moley Mole

Jen's mole turned blue. Tucked under the jawline, it was barely noticeable among the other small moles and shadows thrown across her neck, but she saw it and asked me what I thought. While I don't know much, I have heard that moles randomly swapping shades of blue might not be the best thing, so I encouraged a doctor visit that she quickly scheduled.

I took last Friday off and we went to an appointment where they shaved the mole off the side of her neck and shipped it off to a lab. Yesterday, we get a call.

"This call is for Jennifer Merryman. You have been left a message in your secure voice mail box. Please call 1-800 blah blah blah for your results."

This is something new. You get a secure voice mail that you call and enter a code that was given to you at the time of your appointment. When the doctor gets the results, the receptionist calls and records a message for the patient. Jen's message went something like this:

"Hi Jennifer, this is Sally with Doctor Jenning's office. The results of your biopsy were received, and they were positive for Basal Cell Carcinoma. The doctor is going to want to see you soon, so please give us a call so we can schedule your next appointment. Have a great day."

We spent the rest of the morning laughing about what an odd job that must be, and how we would do it differently. "Good Morning, this is Sally with Doctor Jenning's office. The results of your biopsy were received and...well, honey I just don't even know how to say this. That mole was just ten different kinds of fucked up. I mean really, there are like twelve other kinds of cancer that are scared shitless of the stuff you have growing on your face. You best get your butt in here with a quickness."

Seriously, if you can't laugh at cancer, what can you laugh at?

And, to be fair, calling it cancer at all is an insult to the invasive horrible shit that other people have to go through. It's more like cancerish. They'll cut it off, she'll have a couple of stitches, and we'll just have to be more careful about watching for more of the same. It's a bit of a freak out the moment you hear the word cancer at first, but we're still pretty flippant about the whole thing. I imagine that will change closer to her next appointment, but it's how we deal with stuff round these parts. We poke inappropriate fun at the issue until it's actually time to get down to business.

So, in the meantime, I'll make fun of her scar by calling it her "cancer dimple" and she'll finish every outlandish inconvenient (to me) request with "But I have cancer!" We're very lucky actually. If you had to pick from a list of cancers from a menu, this is the one you would choose. We'll take it. Then, we'll get rid of it.

Vaya Con Dios, Felipe!

My sister-in-law is a nurse. That's the only reason why she was able to insist on a CAT Scan instead of the Sonogram when she was having Gallbladder troubles. The CT revealed a Gallbladder that was most likely dead along with a 7" X 4" mass that had taken over her left ovary. At first they called it a "genetic mass" and had a name for it that I've since forgotten.

Basically, it's a mass of genetic matter that has been with her since birth. Some people believe it's what's left of an unabsorbed twin. Within the mass there are sometimes teeth and hair. She felt dirty, like she was somehow flawed.

I tried to make her feel better by reminding her that people are just gross by our very nature. We're shitting, farting, seeping creatures who are nasty as a rule. She smiled, but we both knew seepage, no matter how unpleasant, isn't the same as a lump of stuff that may or may not have been a sister or brother in your belly. So instead, I named it. I figured if she had to have a growth like this, and it had hair and teeth, it might as well have a name, and so...Felipe was born.

Still freaked by the development, she pushed for further testing. Again, she's a nurse and it's probably the only reason she was accommodated so quickly. That's when they saw the shadow within the mass and said the word "cancer" for the first time. They would operate on the following Tuesday and determine exactly how bad things were from there. We prepared ourselves to say good-bye to Felipe.

Tuesday, I got to the waiting room with Jen just as my brother came into the room. They had taken her back, he said. The surgery would start any time now. We all sat down and stared at our shoes. She pulled a decent crowd, but it was a crowd that kept their heads down. Her friends, nurses who were making pests of themselves with the doctors, reported that the Gallbladder removal had started and was going well. They sat with us and we chatted.

The first surgeon came out with pictures. He explained his part of the surgery was a piece of cake, and that they were starting the removal of the mass now. I got to see Nikki's liver, and yes...I got to see Felipe. I saw no hair or teeth. To the untrained eye, Felipe looked like he belonged there. He was just another pink wad of internal mechanics that appeared to serve a purpose.

A couple hours later, the second surgery was completed and my brother was ushered into another room for the report. The cancer was confirmed, and a full hysterectomy was done. The prognosis was good though, There would be some chemotherapy, but this form of cancer was very receptive to treatment, and while there is some cleanup to do, everything looked great. This was a bit of spin of course. No direct lies were told, but they didn't go into the details that they disclosed today.

And still we don't know everything yet. The Pathology report is expected later today and that will tell the rest of the story. That will be the point that they are able to start discussing stages of the cancer and then get a specialist involved. And so we wait. There is always some piece of information that is out there on the horizon, and we are just now realizing that this is something we're going to have to deal with for a long time to come.

When it's all over though, I'm sure we'll have great stories to tell. These are the things that define families and relationships for a while, and that part of it I'm not concerned about. It will just intensify what we already have between us, and what is there is good stuff.