It started with a backache in October. It seemed like a muscle pull or pinched nerve but it wouldn’t stop hurting. I went to two noted local clinics, each of which suggested different possible causes but offered no real relief from the pain. Finally, I tried acupuncture, which alleviated the symptoms enough that I thought maybe I’d turned the corner.
Then things got scary. On December 13th, I was walking my dogs when I noticed my left foot felt weak and a little floppy. I called my physician, Dr. Warren, and got an appointment for three days later. My wife Tatine accompanied me. After a brief check of my vitals and listening to me describe my symptoms, Warren said, “You’re going to the emergency room at Methodist right now.” And so the holiday festivities began.
After an hour, I was wheeled into a CT scan and then returned to a hallway to await results. Two hours later, the ER physician came out and said, quickly, “It’s cancer. You have a small mass in your chest. We’ll need to biopsy it and see what we’re dealing with.”
Well, merry dang Christmas. Tatine and I sat for a bit, like tornado survivors in a split-open house trailer. What the hell?
The next couple of days were a blur. Family and friends came and went and I put up a smile and a thumb. I then experienced the hospital’s panoply of tubular machines that inhale your body and look at its interior. The cacophonous MRI experience was an hour of bangs and audio distortion that I’ve yet to quite understand. But the good news was that the cancer seemed isolated to a single spot.
We began a series of meetings with doctors from cardiology, neurology, and oncology. The tumor was a thumb-sized growth that had attached to the front of my spine. The plan was for the neurologists to stabilize the spine from the backside with pins, and then when that was done, a treatment protocol for the tumor — once the biopsy came back and we knew what kind of cancer we were dealing with — would be created. So, on the fifth day of Christmas, I got major back surgery and a new Franken-spine. Two days later, the biopsy results indicated that I had a “curable” stage I lymphoma that could be treated with chemo over the next few months, a gift for which I’m obviously quite thankful.
The next three days were what I’ve come to recall as my “disco dreams” period. I was in the ICU and had access to a handy little pump that would allow me to give myself a nice pain-killing sedative every hour during the night. I was taking lots of other pills and the interaction was somewhat psychedelic. My sleep was full of flashing lights and rolling trains and groove music, interrupted on the hour, every hour, sadly, by nurses giving me meds, checking my vitals, taking my blood. My night visitors kept breaking up the party.
After ICU, I was moved to another room to begin my “plugged-in” phase, wherein bleeping tubes dripped medicines into my body and other tubes removed liquids from my body and I felt like a tank being simultaneously drained and filled.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, pipes were freezing, water was being boiled, blackouts were rolling. My family was gathering for meals and holiday rituals and I was watching movies on my laptop, my choices purely whimsical: My Man Godfrey, The Tender Bar, Slap Shot, The Man in the High Castle, some Harry Potter thing. I wanted out. Christmas was coming.
Christmas Eve arrived and after my family left, it was down to my favorite nurse Vitarn and me. I was feeling melancholy. We wished each other merry merry and I turned out the lights. (It was only later that I was gently told that “Vitarn” was really Vita, who signed her name on the white board as “Vita rn.”) Anyway, Vita and I had a lovely Christmas morning together, before Dr. Warren came in, checked me over, and said if neurology approved, I could go home.
By midday, I was good to go and stepping gingerly into the front seat of our car. I will not soon forget the odd pale daylight, how strange it felt being outside for the first time in 12 days, how quiet the traffic-less stretch of Union Avenue seemed to be on this, the strangest Christmas ever.
