This is a mountain. It is in Montana. It is bigger than I am. It was taken by my step-father. It is bigger than he is. It is bigger than cancer. Multiple Myeloma. Precursor B Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Hemorrhoids. Whatever.
It is big. And old. And not going anywhere. At least not in a time frame that I need to give a shit about.
So here's where we are:
Phase 2 of the French Protocol for 14 year-olds that I am on is over. I don't know if I have graduated, or matriculated, or simply survived. But It's done.
Which allows for the joyous event of...wait for it...
Phase 3 (fanfare, trumpets, confetti, and free gherkins for every child in the land!)
There has been a little bit of a break to allow me to get 'healthy' enough for the Drs to start poisoning me again. It was humorously ironic in May; now it just sucks.
The break ends this coming Wednesday.
N and I will go to the hospital a little later than normal because Wednesdays are on a different schedule. I will get my blood taken as usual.
Then I get the back-to-the-future joy of going to the joy-filled and alarmingly small waiting room up on 5 in IR, where I get to once again don the here's-my-butt gown and get a LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP! full of my old-school dose of methatrexate.
Then I go back downstairs to the 3rd floor and they will hopefully have my bloodwork back and I will know if I am indeed in fine enough fettle to get a bone marrow biopsy and my first intravenous dose of methatrexate. This dose will be higher than its spinal cousin because, obviously I guess, the bloodstream has more space worth poisoning than the spinal column.
I will also get a good old intravenous dose of Vincristine...yawn. I've been on Vincristine so long it's like a morning vitamin these days (OK that's a total macho lie: Vincristine is horrible and makes your skin wax-paper and lingers like the last kid at the party who can't hold his liquor and is scared to go home because his dad beats him. Vincristine is bad. Bad.)
Then they'll send me home--possibly in a doggie bag, but home I will go. Because the next day we get to go back for a nice little needle-drip of Pegolated Aspargase--which is also something of a mean-spirited harlot who likes to spend languorous days and weeks wandering your system like an angry teen looking for just the right bottle to pick up and throw through just the right window.
Long, badly metaphored story short: Phase 3 is a bit of a kick in the pants. And it starts next week.
Phase 3 runs on eleven-day cycles, which means that the schedule we have gotten at least a little used to will have to evolve. Phase 3 is shorter--four sessions, or whatever they call them--so it will draw to a close somewhere near the beginning of October, depending on a few sliding days of chemo scheduled around weekends to avoid staying in the hospital overnight (which, we have scientifically proven, sucks).
The bone marrow biopsy is supposed to come--according to the French Docteurs who put together the protocol, at the end pf Phase 3. But our Drs think that there's no reason not to have an idea of how well or not well I am doing earlier. If there is a certain percentage of identifiable residual disease in the marrow Biopsy at this point, then we will probably have to change tacks entirely and go the marrow-transplant route. And if that's the case, why spend an extra three months on a chemo regimen that isn't working, right?
And I gotta be honest, if we have to go the transplant route, that's gonna be really, really hard.
But I'll do it. I'll do whatever I have to do. I have help. I'm not backing away from anything. And it'll get done.
But the Drs seem to think that I have been going along about as well as can be expected under the circumstances, and they don't think that they will find the percentage of residual disease that would be required to tear down the teetering world N is helping me prop up every day.
Being half-Scottish and half-Norwegian, I'll believe it when I see it, so I will spend this coming week on a pragmatic/nihilistic binge-mix of rest, eating, exercise, and unmitigated fear.
But somewhere inside I do have a sense of trust of the Drs, and I think that the marrow will come back OK. I probably won't believe it if it happens, but I think it probably will. And a few days later I'll get past my issues and be really, really happy about that.
So that's the landscape from here.
Except for one glorious addition: I SWAM!!!!!!!
A fact is a tiny thing, and it can fall through the smallest of cracks. So it should come as no surprise that the fact that I COULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING SWIMMING JUST ABOUT THIS WHOLE FUCKING TIME dropped, lithe and slippery, between two slats in the boardwalk of my surroundings, and it was only last week that I learned that I am allowed in the water.
But, as they used to say on Ally McBeal: bygones. Focus on the positive.
Swimming is amazing. It turns out gravity is my enemy. Pumping blood at the right speed to the right places, getting oxygen to blood as it passes through the lungs, not passing out when you stoop to tie your shoe then stand again: these are actions defined and lorded over by gravity.
But when I am a manatee, when I am kelp, when I am caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, gravity can kiss my lily-white barely-extant ass.
I use a kickboard. I put a swim cap over my bald head--the kind of rule-bound redundancy that makes me giggle (Like 'TCBY Yogurt,' which, if you spell out the acronym, actually stands for 'The Country's Best Yogurt Yogurt'). I wear goggles.
The first day I did 7 laps. Five months ago I could have done 7 laps in 3 minutes, maybe less. Now its more like 6. Today I did ten laps: still around 6.
It isn't speed, or musculature I haven't felt used in months. It isn't really anything concrete or specific. It is just this ache of joy.
I just started crying, and I'm OK with that.
Here is what it is: I feel like I felt before...all of this.
In the pool, breast-stroking slowly from one end to the other, breathing easy, I can forget. For little seconds. For whole strokes. For the time it takes to push off the wall, dolphin once, and kick the feet once more, together like a seal, before I come up and breathe.
For those glorious, sparkling, silvery nickels and dimes of time, I can pretend I don't have the disease. Because I feel like I used to feel.
I didn't realize how tenaciously the sense of what I used to feel like has lingered, waited, slunk beneath the weakness and the panting and the flaking crinkly skin.
I wanna be that way again. I wanna grab the me I was. I wanna be better, stronger, faster. We can do it. We can rebuild him. We have the technology: Vincristine, Methatrexate, Lumbar Puncture. Marrow Biopsy.
Time.
I've had a good cry. And so, yeah, it's bittersweet. But mostly it's sweet.
If you need me, I'll be at the hospital, getting better.
Or in the pool, weighing nothing.
Big mountains. Don't even notice us. Doesn't make them any less beautiful.
