I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

So, contrary to what we thought, Karen's cancer is not back.

And that good news got me absolutely furious yesterday. Which clearly makes me an awful person but I'll try to explain that away in a minute.

So here's the deal. More than two weeks ago, Karen began coughing. Just a little at first but with each passing day the cough got a little worse while her energy dropped just a bit right alongside it. This unhappy tandem is pretty familiar to us--this was the same trajectory we saw when the cancer first showed up and every single time a treatment stopped working for her. Tiny cough, nap, bigger cough, longer nap, Camille-caliber cough, and so on. Granted, somewhere in these few weeks Karen developed a sinus infection but that got cleared right up with some antibiotics.

The cough, however, stubbornly remained and grew worse. This generated a series of sober conversations between the two of us about the ominous form that our summer seemed to be taking. Karen's next line of treatment (her fifth) has a fairly slim chance of working in any way for her.

Naturally, we responded to these daunting odds by packing up our terrible luck and taking the kids to Vegas for a four-day holiday shoehorned in between everyone's work, school, and chemo schedules. We had a PET scan scheduled for the day after we got back and we were expecting it to be the scissors that cut the rope to the grand piano looming three stories overhead.

The trip, however, went well in spite of this. At this point, there's a part of us that is very 'wait and see' because this disease consistently does its level best to confound us at every turn. While we tend to believe that Karen's intuition about what her body is up to is more or less fairly reliable, we know now that we really cannot count on our hunches because they haven't been 100% accurate. And it's kind of old news, in a way, the cancer coming back. We try not to panic until it's really appropriate to do so.

Vacation Photo #1

So we put all that shit aside and enjoyed Vegas as much as possible. Miranda and I drove race cars while Dash and Karen were taken on a high-speed drifting ride at the same race track. I took the kids to shoot machine guns. We ate well, slept in, and took in the seedy glories of the Strip. There were but two real hiccups during our vacation: 1) Dash and I got a hellacious chest cold that left us honking like seals and 2) when I closed the overhead luggage bin on our flight home the oxygen masks deployed and caused about an hour delay for the flight (making me especially beloved among our fellow travelers).

Vacation Photo #2

The morning after we got home, Karen had her scan and brought home our lovely souvenir DVD with all the images on it. I popped it in my PC and reviewed it. There were some spots on her liver but we've learned that a lot of the fuzziness there is due to cysts so I took note of them but discounted them. The lymph nodes in her neck were lit up more than usual which was concerning but they were small and I didn't really see any growth there. There was something going on in her esophagus but it wasn't really definitive--I figured it could be new cancer but could just as easily represent the irritation the chemo causes in her throat. So that didn't get a ton of weight.

But her right lung...that was a different story. A bright corona of something was wrapped around the lower portion of the organ and it seemed pretty clear that this was the sort of colonization we had seen in previous scans when her lungs were polluted with growth. With this representing our fifth time facing this sort of news, Karen and I took in pretty much in stride. In spite of the fact that we were facing roughly about a 10% chance the next treatment would even work. At this point, we've kind of had the panic burned out of us.

And the next day the doctor called and said everything looked good and there would be no changes in treatment and we couldn't believe it. We didn't believe it so much we went to the oncologist's to get the printed report to make sure there hadn't been some kind of clerical error. The summary of the report, which everyone kept pointing to, made no mention of what we saw on the lung while everything else I had noted was there and dismissed along virtually the same lines I detailed above. Of course, the images the office had on file at the moment completely didn't show this which left everyone wondering just what the hell we were talking about.

In the end, there was something buried in the report about her lung which dismissed it as evidence of a possible infection (she's on some new antibiotics the size of thumbs for the next two weeks to clear that up). Now, granted, I'm a professional typist of stack-ranked bulleted summaries, but it seems to me that when you're dealing with lung cancer patients it just might be worth including the actual lung discussion in the summary that everyone jumps to and depends on. Talk about burying the lede.

And this is right about when I became a terrible terrible human being.

I was mad. Actually, no, I was furious. I was furious that her cancer wasn't back and that she was, in a very relative way, quite fine.

Like I said: terrible.

The intensity of my rage caught me completely off guard and it subsided only when my self-loathing for feeling this way temporarily trumped it.

But before you join me in consigning me to into the Depository of Horrible Humans, let me try to explain it. We've always known where this awful journey is going to end. The experience is akin to being adrift in a shitty little lifeboat drifting towards the rocks that will eventually kill everyone aboard. We can't see the rocks but we know they're out there. So while you can definitely make the most of the days that are not spent actively drowning, you do so in full knowledge that sooner or later you'll be gulping in lungfuls of seawater. If you would allow me to mix metaphors for a moment, it's not unlike trying to enjoy a picnic next to a ticking bomb without a convenient timer display. Not only is this not user-friendly explosive design, it's not a terribly comfy way to live.

So when you see the rocks, you hate the rocks but at least you finally have a handle on something defined. "Hey, look! It's the end of us! Let's brace for impact." And you brace and then somehow the rock recede out of sight and you're stuck in limbo all over again. And now, you can't even trust your own eyes to get your bearings. It's hard not to feel like the cancer is sentient and actively fucking with us. And that, my friends, pissed me off something fierce.

Anyway, that was our day (and my shitty response) yesterday. We're still in the lifeboat, squinting into the distance and holding hands.