If You Don’t Have Your Health
My friend Chris is getting his final leukemia diagnosis today. He ran a 10K October 6th, and went to the doctor a few days later for a possible infection. I have no idea what caused the lab to check his blood for leukemia cells, but thank god they did.
It’s been caught ridiculously early (before he had a single symptom), which means he might be able to get away with only one round of chemotherapy to get rid of it, putting it in the realm of pain-in-the-[bleep] cancer rather than just-might-kill-me cancer.
Having been through something a bit similar in 2009 (my debut novel was published in between pain-in-the-[bleep] cancer diagnoses that year), I’m sending all the good vibes to Chris that I can muster. He’s a lovely person, so I can muster quite a few good vibes for him.
And I’m impatiently waiting for the final diagnosis (the subtype determines the chemo cocktail to use), so he can get started on fighting it off, and I can get started on supporting him in his fight.
Go, Chris! [Bleep] cancer! (This is actually a John Scalzi, Wil Wheaton, and xkcd quote, so I’m sure you can figure out what the [Bleep] is replacing.)
Go Chris, beat cancer! All of us in the Spec-Fic Writer’s Group of Boise, are pulling for you.
What a lucky chance that they caught it early. I don’t know you, but Go Chris, Beat Cancer.
You’ll need a blanket, chemo makes you chilly, you can get a cool one and wear it like a cape because it takes guts to beat cancer, that makes you amazing.
The next day I was in quite a bit of pain. By the second day it hurt to breathe, I’m figuring now at this point it might be more than some bruising. So I go into to see my doctor and dang it if I don’t have stress fractures. Chemo can weaken your bones. I have had bone density tests and have been told that I have osteopenia, but that it “isn’t bad at all”. I have come to learn that when someone tells a cancer patient that “it isn’t bad at all” that this means that it is bad, it just isn’t bad given the possibilities of bad – it is like a bell curve of sorts (I think). It ranges somewhere between “you have the ‘good’ kind of cancer” (whatever the bleep that means) to “I’m sorry . . . ” (that means you have the really bad kind of cancer – as if there are good kinds). The point of all of this is that I am a success story – so far. I am alive, I am seemingly healthy. I made it through an aggressive cancer, through aggressive treatment and came out of it N.E.D. (no evidence of disease). I have even had my oncologist on occasion refer to me as “cured”. All pretty great things. So in the scheme of things, when you look at the possibilities of what could have happened (never surviving treatment, etc.) having osteopenia really “isn’t bad at all”.