I’m still not 100% sure how I’m going to handle this, how much I’m going to talk about what’s going on, but for now this is up.
“When someone goes after you, the only way is to take the fight to them” – Sir Vivian Richards.
Not sure why I pulled out a Viv Richards quote, but it seems to fit after the last 72 hours. That time has been full of expletives, running around, discussions, emotions, distractions, planning, understanding, meetings, contemplation, talking, decisions and a few tears.
Everything has been so compressed, so sudden and once again first time I take a moment to breath I find friends have rallied round as soon as they heard. And they are being perfect. I’ll get onto what gets described as the tyranny of positive thinking at some other time, but once again I know I have the best friends and family there is.
The short version of events is this started about 6 weeks ago, it felt like an ear infection and I ignored it for a few days before finally going to me doctor. He looked in said “yep, text book ear infection” and prescribed some antibiotics and that was that.
The antibiotics did not do much over the next ten days, so he prescribed stronger ones and once again they did not do much. He referred me to the Ear-Nose-Throat specialist, and that appointment was Wednesday. The ENT looked in my ear, then stuck a probe up my nose and much to her credit kept a very professional bedside manner as she told me to wait while she arranged a CAT scan and MRI for Thursday morning and a follow up appointment on Friday.
Friday I arrived for my meeting to be introduced to a surgeon who asked me to sit down and immediately goes into how there is a growth behind my right ear that’s crushed the eardrum and has invaded the usually air-filled bone that makes up the base of my skull. He’s clear this is bad news and I suddenly want to throw up.
Over the next hour he talks me through the CAT scans and MRI. There are time I don’t understand what they are saying, there are othe moments when I’m just staring at the screen feeling numb. They answer my questions and then it comes to the $64,000 question we’ve both been skirting. What does it mean, and what are we going to do about it.
“The what does it mean?” part was easy, none of the three of us in the room had to say it, but he did anyway. It’s cancer, and it’s an aggressive one.
As for the second part, the “what are we going to do about it?” question, there was a moment of silence and he calmly said “We are going to shrink it, take the pressure off the brain and then we are going to cut it out.” Ever so matter-of-factly. I may go into the rest of that conversation another time, but I’m trying not to dwell on the cutting out part, that’s scaring the shit out me right now, by the current timetable it’s going to be sometime in late July.
I spent last night out with friends, they worked very hard at keeping me distracted and we ended up in Neumos in Seattle listening to Hells Belles, an all-girl AC/DC cover band who did a fine job in keeping me occupied and pretending everything was normal until late into the night.
This morning was another doctors appointment at UW, I’m not in the mood to go into that in detail, but the first round of chemo, oral this time, has been started and it looks like I can tolerate this OK. Which is good, as I’ve big plans for the next week that I really don’t want to break.
Again I will never be able to show my appreciation to the best group of friends anyone has ever had, how they were immediately there and understand the support I need by just calling to see if I’m OK rather than seeing it as a problem that’s there to be solved.
It’s ever so comfortable to have people I’ve known more than a decade just get how I am and what I need. The last three days have been brutal and I intend to write about a lot of that in some detail, but I believe in myself, in the team looking after me and maybe most importantly the people I choose to have in my life.
As I said at the beginning there has been a lot of tears and emotions, this is not straightforward, it’s been mis-diagnosed for approaching two months and this is a complication. It’s taken me a couple of hours to write this, I’ve stopped a number of times for little emotional breaks and I will get into the feelings and emotions behind those another time.
One of my friends this morning did suggest I name the tumour, and conveniently she had a name in mind for it. I’m not going to go into it here, but it’s not much of a surprise to people who know me. She finished the phone call by telling me to look forward to one day being able to say “X the bitch is gone!”
I’m open to suggestions about what it should be called; I really have the best people in my life.
