This is the sixth of Penny’s Cancerland essays. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in February, 2016. Following emergency surgery in February and 12 biweekly chemotherapy infusions beginning in April, Penny was starting to feel good again, recovered from surgery and recovering from the biweekly medicinal poisoning. But the routine tests following chemotherapy indicated that Penny’s case was not going to be routine.
I hate crying. Your eyes puff up. Your nose runs. No really crying person looks like those Hollywood moments, where the single tear glistens as it trickles down the cheekbone of the heroine with the perfect complexion. In my real world, if crying lasts more than a few minutes, then your nose gets plugged up, and if this happens within two hours of bedtime, you’re doomed to a poor night’s sleep. I’ve had many restless, pain-filled nights in the past year spent in different parts of Cancerland. I’ve had only one bad night due to the sniveling and blocked breathing of a long cry.
In the 5 weeks after the end of my chemotherapy, I had pretty much undergone all the types of scans and blood tests that I had ever heard of. The blood work indicated growing cancer but the scans couldn’t find it. When a scan came back “negative,” we thought that was good news. Actually, the negative results just meant the cancer was deeper, less contained, trickier to deal with, and demanding more invasive solutions. In this same period, I started feeling good. No chemo, working with a trainer to build strength, sleeping well – all added up to better days.
When the doctor called, half my family had already left for a party. I answered the phone and got the bad news: cancer was growing inside the abdomen, most likely in the lining called the peritoneum. It was growing fast. She recommended surgery to explore the extent of the tumors, to remove them, to do a hot-chemo wash of the entire area, and to remove any unnecessary and affected organs or intestines. Yes, this surgery would be maximally invasive with a long recovery. The prognosis with surgery was unclear because they didn’t know what they would find until they got inside. The prognosis without surgery was grim: months, maybe a year.
Death walks beside us with a whisper-thin veil in between. It takes so little to push us through to that other side. He’s always there but we only seldom see him. Once in a while the veil is pulled back and we get that glimpse, like when the doctor gives us the sobering news.
That night I learned: Death has no face. When he gets close enough and tilts back that hood or the fedora, what you see is a reflection of your own face, expressionless with cold, lifeless eyes. When our bodies are embraced by Death, regardless of beliefs about souls or life-forces, or spirits, the people we walked with lose us. That night I cried for the things of life that I had presumed would be mine but which now seemed unlikely. I cried just as much for the loss that my family would have to deal with. I cried because my children were young enough to have never thought about Death wearing the face of a parent; at the same time they were old enough to be glimpsing that very image as we told them the news. That night I cried too long, and then unable to breathe through my nose, I tossed and turned until morning.
The next two weeks filled up with doctor appointments, pre-op tests, and organizing our lives at work and home to brace for the disruption. We toyed only briefly with the idea of not going through with surgery. Is surgery with six months of misery that results in only six more months of life worth it? The doctor assured us that there would be a better payoff than 1 for 1. We had just found a new normal after the first surgery, only to be told in no uncertain terms that this second surgery would be many times worse. What’s it worth to you: to see your child graduate from high school, or to be there to celebrate your daughter’s marriage, or to hold a grandchild even if they will have no memory of you that is their own?
In the end, we latched onto advice from a friend. The do-nothing prognosis was bad and that journey wouldn’t end with some magically painless slumber into Gloryland. So if the next year held several challenging months of pain and misery in either case, we might as well go for broke.
With that decision, I let the veil fall back into place. Rand and I grabbed hands and turned to forge onward. I’m quite sure that as we turned away from staring at Death and took that first step, Rand gave him a good punch in the gut.
I was included in the part of the family who attended the farewell party for our pastor and his family. Andrew and I were helping to set up a photo booth and take canddid photos during the event, so we went early. While there, I received a phone call. It was Penny. She had just gotten off the phone with the doctor and talked me through what she could remember from the conversation. Someone, the pastor I think, saw me slip away to answer the phone and asked about it when I slipped back in. “It was Penny. We just got some bad news,” was all I said.
Penny encouraged me to remain at the party. Her mother, who was living with us, was home, so she was not alone. “We can talk when you get home.” No one else knew about the phone call. We only barely knew what was coming.
“The Big Surgery”, as we came to call it, happened less than two weeks later.
Today is six months since the end of Penny’s residence in Cancerland. Dr. Assifi, the primary doctor for the Big Surgery, eventually told us that Penny was the longest surviving patient she had had who underwent that surgery. We certainly did better than 1-for-1 in the exchange. Penny attended college graduations for all three kids and two of their weddings. She didn’t get to meet any grandchildren, but her niece Paige came with her youngest grandnephew, Camden, while she was in hospice.
The day I proposed, Penny showed me a poem she had written sometime earlier. In her poem she imagined growing old and gray together. I managed to get to the gray part, but we didn’t really arrive at “old”.
Cancerland is not a joyless place – and we did our best to find joy where it could be found. We laughed more than we cried. But it is not a pleasant place to live either: pain, discomfort, uncertainty, limitations, and challenging decisions are always nearby. As is the unavoidable awareness that the horizon of your future is much closer than you had once imagined.