C-Notes

 

Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash

I won’t dwell here on the scatological details that sent me in an ambulance to the Presbyterian Hospital except to say that the drive was preceded by a loss of blood, a lot of blood, and a couple of episodes of abject misery in which I didn’t only think I was dying, I wanted to.

While hospitalized, a CT scan found a benign growth in my colon and a malignant one in my lung.

“It’s in the upper part of your right lung,” the doctor said. “Because of its location and your COPD, the mass is inoperable.”

That meant chemo and radiation treatments.

I surprised myself with the lack of anxiety I felt on hearing the news. I had thought that getting a cancer diagnosis was a death warrant. Though a blood transfusion or two and some hospital-strength drugs had reduced the misery to a shadow of itself, I remained yet alert to the meaning of the doctor’s words. Instead of foreseeing the gloom of financial issues, side effects, the commitment of large blocks of time, I saw myself writing about the experience. For some time, my blog had seen an occasional post about whatever interested me at the moment, but it carried no consistency and no theme. Every post was a writing experiment, and every post followed a long period of staring at the blank page. I occasionally submitted work to online content mills and literary magazines, but the blog remained a place for sporadic and too-often unrelated material.

Now, I thought, it has a purpose. Finally.

Now I can write here with a theme, a plan, and a service to those 1,700,000 who might follow me to the radiation and chemo labs over the next twelve months.

A visit to an oncologist laid out the early stages of a plan. First, an intravenous dose of iron to beat back the anemia that resulted from blood loss and from cancer, then, a class to educate me on the procedures I will undergo, and finally, the radiologist. There will be more, so much more, but that is the plan at this moment.

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