Holiday Letter 2007
I am not much for wasting time. I mean there is only so much of it and so many things beyond our control interfere with what little we have. So this year when breast cancer stepped front and center, I was not prepared to put the year on hold. Charlotte took the whole process in stride, and cancelled our travel plans.
Diseases have a life of their own. They unfold in a progression of discovery, diagnosis and treatment. Each of the above can be broken down into steps and since this is what I do for a living I am intimately aware of the process.
First comes discovery. Some one takes your blood, exposes you to radiation and horrors of all horrors, finds something. You were fine before they found it and chances are you feel no different afterwards, but now you enter a different realm. Of course you can ignore it--what do doctors know anyhow--but deep inside you have changed.
When you finally see your dour physician and are informed of your fate, the end of speculation usually comes as a relief. After the initial shock, a plan of action is presented. Frustration, tears and denial may follow the pronouncement and you may go home and sleep on it, but pretty much most people decide aye or nay in fifteen minutes.
Diagnosis is the next step. This entails a visit to your friendly neighborhood surgeon. I have found that surgeons love their work and that they try hard not to lick-their-chops at your predicament. They love nothing better than to have the chance to sample whatever little gremlin may be residing in you.
Once the extent of the malady is known it is time to start treatment. Sometimes just the act of removing the offending agent may be the cure, but then again it may not, and this necessitates a trip to the “ologist”.
As I alluded to above, you are changed by the diagnosis and because of this, you are in danger of becoming overwhelmed by it. Pain, both physical and psychological, accompanies the disease. Some people fight, some are resigned and some get on with life. The latter describes Charlotte’s reaction.
Pain is shared, unequally of course, by the recipient, by family and friends, and by the community as a whole. Just think of the colored ribbons adorning lapels, and the walks and runs that detour us all summer.
Now on to treatment, and here I will be more specific to our case. By the time you read this, the drugs and radiation will be a memory. A year is a terrible thing to waste, but then it was not really wasted, more like diverted for another purpose.
Chemotherapy consists of extremely toxic drugs kept in check by only slightly less toxic ones. There is a certain pattern to the months of treatment. To me it felt like great swells on the ocean with an occasional breaking sea.
Thankfully our boat was never swamped. She rose to meet the peak of the waves and glided steadily down their backside. The period of the waves was three weeks, and three weeks times eight doses of varying concoctions adds up to six months on the high seas, quite an accomplishment.
Radiation resembles the choppy waters of the Great Lakes. Being a daily event there is no time for reflection, the time being used up in scheduling and commuting. Charlotte describes this phase of therapy as being abducted by aliens. Massive, weird machines sequestered deep in the bowels of the hospital, aiming unseen beams of exotic particles at tattooed marks on soft flesh. Pretty creepy I agree.
So where does this leave us at the end of a year, better I think. Certainly more focused on the finite world we live in, with an appreciation for all that we have and all that we have to look forward to, with a palpable sense of the fragility and the tenacity of life, and finally, not with a year on hold, but a year of inner discovery.
