"Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?" --Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet I start this difficult post with words from the criminally unknown Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran. My first exposure to Gibran came from a quote my grandmother gave one time, and his wisdom has helped me understand the world in a clearer way. At this point, I'm clinging to this idea that all will eventually be well… I should back up. Gayle's recovery from the surgery has been far better than we anticipated. Her body is still healing from being sliced open and parts removed, so it isn't any surprise that she's in pain, even a week later. However, the pain has never been so intense that she's needed to rely on the narcotics the doctor prescribed. This is really good, as Gayle's interactions with these heavier drugs have left her nauseated. Managing the pain with Tylenol and ibuprofen has been its own little miracle. We met with the oncologist on Friday afternoon. When we first met with him, he explained that because it was such a slow-growing cancer, he didn't think that chemotherapy would be a necessary option. Our plan was to remove the tumor and treat the site with radiation for a few weeks. However, despite the success of the surgery, the tests indicating that Gayle was at low risk for the cancer returning, and all of the other positive steps forward, there were two factors that, upon review, changed the oncologist's mind: The size of the tumor and the fact that it had spread to one of the lymph nodes. None of the other lymph nodes were cancerous, which is a good thing. Nevertheless, the best chance we have for preventing cancer's reunion tour with Gayle's body is to ensure that every potential cell is killed off. Despite our earlier plan, Gayle will be starting chemotherapy at the beginning of the new year. Gayle is, understandably, quite upset. She's sad that she won't get to teach her students as much--that's one of the things she's most upset about--and the worry about how much this is going to affect her overall health is high. After all, Gayle's pregnancy never went smoothly, with her being really sick for at least half of each one, if not longer. There is a correlation between the side effects of chemotherapy and women like Gayle. With our second child, Gayle ended up with so much enamel erosion on her teeth from frequent talks with the porcelain throne that she ended up having nine cavities that had to be fixed. But it's more than just the inconveniences of the side effects, or the larger trials of losing her hair and not knowing exactly how we'll schedule our work around the chemo. It's the feeling of thinking one thing only to have that turn out to be completely wrong. That sounds petty. I understand that science isn't a precise science, that prognoses and projections are only as accurate as the amount of data available in the moment, and as more data come out, those prognoses and projections can change. There can be a lot of reliable information and assumptions, sure, but there's always a caveat, an asterisk that needs to be kept in mind. I, however, failed to notice the asterisk, instead investing my hopes in the earlier predictions. See, the lump was almost three centimeters (for those looking for specifics, it was 2.8 cm) and the cancer had spread. Though they extracted all of the cancerous cells, the surgery alone only gives Gayle a 79% chance of surviving the next 15 years. By adding in the hormone therapy that we were planning on, it increases Gayle's survivability by six percent. Radiation will bump it up a little, too (the doctor didn't have a percentage for that part of the calculation). And chemotherapy? It adds a 4% likelihood of survival. By taking all of these actions together, we get almost a 90% chance that the next decade and a half will close and Gayle will still be cancer-free. Four percent doesn't sound like a lot to me, particularly when I'm having a hard time seeing past the half-year or so of chemotherapy that Gayle will go through. An immense amount of hardship for such little reassurance is hard for me to swallow. The prospect of losing Gayle to something preventable, however, is much harder to go along with. And yet… Part of this stems from how we depict cancer in our media and how we talk about it as a society. Chemotherapy is associated with emaciated people, weakly saying goodbye as their families sob by their hospital beds. It's in stories of tear-filled moments as clumps of hair fall out of the cancer victim's head. It's the boogeyman of our medical system, only slightly less ominous than the looming bankruptcy that many people (in the United States, at least) struggle with on top of the trials of treatment. Overcoming those emotional responses to the news has been really hard for me. Gayle's trying to be optimistic, pointing out some of the more positive things that we'll get because of this. One silver-lining, she says, is that we won't have to worry about her hair clogging up the drains or choking the vacuum for a while. While true, these aren't enough to balance the scales. This year has been a misery for the entire world, forcing all of us to find comparative comforts rather than any sort of real closure. There have been two other times in my life when I felt that I had reached a low-point that was this abysmal, and they were in 2007 and 2010, during which time we had to fight to keep our oldest child in this world. Our half-hearted warrior is still with us and is fumbling through teenagedom and online learning--a blessing that I know I take for granted, and proof that things can turn out for the best. Aside from those moments, my greatest struggle has been my own battle with dysthymia--a minor thing when drawn against heart surgeries or chemotherapy. So when Gayle makes her silver-lining observations, I have a hard time relying on them as anything more than comparative consolations. We call silver-linings in the night sky stars, but navigating by starlight doesn't banish the darkness. So there's your update: We have to let the doctor know this Tuesday if we're going to accept his recommendations and swallow our fears of the process. I don't know why we wouldn't. Returning to Gibran, though I do believe this will be the fire for our future cups of wine, I'm still struggling with why we must. Comments are closed.
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July 2021
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