JULY 12, 2009
Had to sit on this for a day, which was no easy thing.
Phone rings at about 5:30 or 6 p.m. Saturday. It’s Jeanne, former girlfriend, hands down the woman I’ve loved most in my life. The fact that we couldn’t make a permanent, long-term go of it despite a couple of valiant tries, I attribute mainly to me and my follow-through shortcomings, mentioned elsewhere. But fourteen years on, here we are, good friends, probably better friends because of it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s become part of the family, my folks adore her and always have and it’s just one of those things.
Short version is, last couple of times I saw her (her business brings her to Dover once a week or so), she has mentioned losing sensation on her left side, particularly her left hand. It was not behaving the way that her head believed it was — she would think she was holding onto a drinking glass, say, when in fact she had dropped it and did not know. Her brain would tell her that the glass was still securely in her hand.
She works with wood and power tools a lot in her job, a furniture repair franchise, and knowing what both hands are up to is fairly crucial to the task. Not to mention just ordinary, everyday functioning.
Thursday evening, there was some sort of episode. At home, she’s telling the dogs that it’s time for them to get into their beds but, instead of words, out comes gibberish — and she knew it was gibberish. The volition to speak was there, the idea to be expressed was there, but it did not come out as words.
Friday, she went to the doctor, who, after hearing all the symptoms described, sent her to the hospital, it being a Friday in the summertime. If they didn’t get her in that day, when everybody’s clearing out for the beach, then she would not get in until this week — and what if some other episode, a worse one, were to occur over the weekend?
So in she goes, and immediately the tests begin.
Last night she called me to challenge me to a race to the finish line.
She has cancer in half of one lung and four spots in her brain. Two of the brain lesions are enormous, compared to mine — 35 and 65 millimeters, somewhere in the right frontal lobe, where left-side motor function resides. The others are tiny. However, the big ones also show signs of the edema and swelling that makes them a much bigger problem. It’s the swelling that can lead to other, very serious complications.
I told her I don’t want to race anymore.
If I understand it correctly, though, there may be one small consolation. The size of the tumors might actually make her a better candidate for this stereotactic radiation — the cyberknife thing — than I am at this point.
Her biopsy is scheduled for Monday morning. Just as mine was, it’s a formality to some extent — they know generally what they’re dealing with already, but this will classify it and give it a name and, let’s hope, a direction in which to pursue treatment.
In Saturday’s conversation, we decided that I’d drop the bomb on Mom and Dad when they came by today. Which I did. Again, no easy thing. All of us now very shaken. We’ll buck up and muddle on through and do what we must. There is unquestionably no justice to any of it, of course, and it feels as though this cloud of cancer is surrounding us all now with some sort of gleeful malevolence. There is no making sense of it, and even the hate feels empty, futile. You feel relentlessly outgunned.
In the end, none of us get out alive and nobody gets special dispensation. I make the mistake of thinking like a human being, of believing that at some point enough is enough. But the thing we’re dealing with isn’t human, and doesn’t think. It’s doing the one and only thing it’s designed to do.
