It is April 14th. I am walking up 16th street calling my oldest friend Henry to wish him a happy 39th birthday, and I am pretty sure I have cancer or something.
The day before our GP, Dr. B, called with blood test results. I was scribbling things like 'blood low, plat low, red cell low' on a Skidmore note-pad that was the nearest thing at hand. That pad is now an integral part of my treatment.
Neela walked in, hearing something in my tone. I wrote extra hard 'Leukemia' on the pad above most of my scribbles, where she could see it.
Se just said 'no' and sat down, straight down onto the couch in a kind of elegant collapse that is really solid and weighty, but already with a sense that the person next to her is sick and needs to be cared for, needs to not have a body slam down on the couch next to it. In retrospect--and I think most things of value are found in retrospect--it was the beginning of the fierce protection she has already stepped into for me.
The next day, the 14th--I will get better at this blog-time-handling thing, hopefully--we spend the first of what will become many hours with Dr. R, a scattered but deeply involved hematological oncologist (blood/marrow cancer guy). His lab coat could be cleaner and his office papers could be more arranged, but at no point do I think he has any other interest than making people better.
He takes a core sample for marrow from the back of my pelvis. Neela holds my head and helps because I have been having extreme bone pain in the front of my chest and so lying on my stomache for anything is really rough. I had to lie on a blank slab of x-ray table a couple of times the day before for chest x-rays back when we were gloriously only worried I had busted a rib (oh those were the days). And was, o that point, the most pain I had felt in a long time.
So N is holding my head and Dr R is leaning most of his weight into the core thingy--like some reveler on a blanket trying to get the corkscrew deep enough into the wine bottle, except the cork is my ass. After a second try he says, heartily "well, you've got nice strong bone!" and leans into it again. N says "Oh, OK" and has to turn her head away--she's got guts of steel except when people she loves are getting hurt; we'll probably grow some callous over that.
He finally gets through to the marrow and takes his sample. He has looked at the previous day's bloodwork and thinks more Lymphoma than Leukemia, but that final diagnosis will waver back and forth until, frankly, ever.
But he knows it is a cancer of some type. He assumes we'll beat it, or at least try hard as hell, but I have cancer; it is now just semantics.
Which brings us back to me, walking up 16th street, trying to sound normal as I wish a friend a happy 39th. A friend who lost a fiance to cancer years ago.
Ah, hell.
