My Own Fucking Fault

It is my fault I got cancer. I don’t mean that I did it deliberately or that I wanted it to happen, but cancer is a glitch in the body’s normal system of cell division. The resulting cancer was as much a part of me as my lungs, my eyes or my heart.

My body, my fault.

This is a thought that occurred to me sometime about halfway through the chemo when I was looking for someone to blame. Best guess is that the medication I was taking for my Crohn’s Disease may have triggered the cancer, but ultimately I was aware that there was a one in a thousand chance of developing cancer associated with the drug and I took it anyway.

My fault.

Then I began to think of everything else that had gone wrong in my life and kept coming back to the same conclusion; I could blame other people and make all the excuses I wanted, but ultimately it comes down to one very simple thing …

It was my own fucking fault.

When we’re babies almost nothing is our fault. We at the mercy of our caregivers, our environment and a world we cannot hope to understand yet. As we grow we take on more and more responsibilities until sometime in your late teens when pretty much everything in your life is now your responsibility. That is not to say you won’t make some colossally stupid decisions along the way, but that is okay; screwing up is a crucial part of growing up. Fuck, it’s a crucial part of being a human being. We don’t ever stop making mistakes.

But if you are truly honest with yourself, almost everything that happens to you is your own fucking fault. Whining that it was someone else’s responsibility or screw up is useless at best and sheer cowardliness at worst. Either way, nothing gets done.

It sounds bleak, but there is a very powerful upside: if it is your fault, you can fix it. And if you can’t fix it, at least you will learn from it, which is the whole point of fucking up in the first place.

The Incomplete Diver

In retrospect I was probably a terrible diver. I could never quite figure out the correct weight I needed for buoyancy in salt water and as a result, I usually ended up slowly sinking to the bottom. It might not sound like much, but buoyancy is a critical skill for divers, both for the prevention of stuff like the bends, and for the protection of the plants and animals that don’t appreciate some idiot in a hundred pounds of gear crashing down on their heads.

But I love the smell of neoprene and salt water and had I had always planned to getting into it more seriously. I was getting close too; through ebay, kijiji and some generous donations, I had almost a complete kit. The only thing left was a couple of good tanks and then I could go whenever I wanted and all I’d need was an air-fill.

And therein lies the rub.

Chemotherapy fucks you up. My hair didn’t even start coming back until two months after my last session. It’s coming back gray and I’ve still got some bald patches that only my wife knows about. My thumbnails look like they’ve been run over by a bulldozer and by the end of the day my feet and hands feel like they’ve been hooked up to a car battery. Nothing too serious, but I GOTTA get a decent pair of shoes.

But it also took a weed-whacker through my lungs. I’m now at a permanent risk for pulmonary fibrosis and oxygen toxicity; my lungs can turn to tissue paper at any time or cause a buildup of oxygen in my tissues leading to everything from delusionary euphoria to being dead.  As a result, breathing compressed air is not such a good idea and the doctor even recommended I get a medical alert bracelet, which makes me wonder how often she thinks I like to suck on a hose.

I sold the last of my diving kit this morning. It was hard to let it go. Harder than I thought it would be. If you've ever thought about trying it, I cannot recommend it enough. I've had some amazing times and met some incredible people, and then I realize all the amazing things and unfufilled plans that I will now never get to see or do. It sucks and it is not fair. But cancer sucks and as for fairness well, spend some time on a cancer ward, or any hospital for a day and talk to talk about life being fair. It will leave scars, and I’m not just talking about the zipper strip down my chest or my extra belly-button.

Fuck it, there is no sense hanging on to the things you will never use. I can’t dive, but from a certain perspective that seems like a fair trade-off to not dying.

Besides, I kept the wet-suit. Next summer I am thinking about taking up surfing.

The fine line between replicating cells and cancer,

expained. via io9

My New Bellybutton.

The surgery was not nearly as fun as the made it look in the brochure. I actually do have a brochure; it is what they give you nowadays instead of having a surgeon actually come out and talk to you. There is large rack in the surgical ward filled with similar brochures covering everything from appendicitis to open heart surgery and eye-removal.

I don’t remember much, just them jamming the epidural between my shoulder blades and the anaesthesiologist saying goodbye, but from all reports everything went spectacularly well. They pulled Kuato screaming into the daylight and sliced him up on a laboratory plate. He measured about the size of my fist and according to the report, contained muscle, lung and keratin fibres. Extreme teratomas have also been known to have hair and proto-teeth, which makes them fun fodder for freak-o-the-week medical shows, but if Kuato said anything about his treatment, they didn’t tell me.

As one friend said, it doesn’t matter if he contained pure plutonium, what matters is that they got him out clean. That they did and the worst case post-surgery scenarios (not being able to talk properly, partial paralysis of my diaphragm and the tumour having invaded nearby organs, etc) are now behind me. I do now have an extra bellybutton, which was not a scenario they covered in the brochure.

I’m not 100% out of the woods yet though; they are going to run the mangled pieces of Kuato under the microscope to check the location and percentage of the remaining active cancer cells. Depending on those tests, they may determine that I need another round or two of chemo just to make sure that no active cancer escaped during the surgery. Even if I get the chemo it is more of precaution, but I would really rather not. It seems a shame to go through all that again just as my hair is starting to come back in.

In the meantime, it’s been almost a month since the surgery and also two since I’ve finished chemo and I’m starting to climb the walls at home. The list of do’s and don’ts after the surgery was pretty long because they don’t want me pulling at the rabbit wire they used to knit my sternum back into place: I’m not allowed to lift anything, pick anything up, let the cats sit on me, walk the dog, drive, mow the lawn, sleep on my side or take a bath for at least six weeks. I’ve never felt so much like a sick person in my life than watching my wife and mother-in law garden all weekend while I sat on a chair like Grandpa at Shady Pines.

Chemo's Last Laugh

I stink. I don’t mean just because I just walked the dog wearing four layers of clothing on a warm spring morning (I get cold), but there seems to have been a fundamental shift in my body chemistry. I don’t smell like myself anymore.

The chemo had one last laugh sometime between the end of my treatments and the surgery. Nothing serious, but my thumbnails now look like troll claws, I lost the remaining hair under my arms and the chemical stink oozing out of my pores means I’m showering as often as possible and wearing out deodorant sticks at a furious pace. When I came out of surgery I had thought the smell was coming off the hospital issued gowns and slips of paper they call bedsheets, but alas, the first night home in my own bed confirmed that it was in fact, coming from me.

Cuz Clowns are Scary Too

The circus really begins tomorrow with the arrival of my parents in town, just in time for me to get a last minute transfusion to top up my platelets before the big show. Friday morning I am getting a Transternal Resection, or a Sternotomy … or in laymen’s terms, open heart surgery.

Actually, I’m not sure that is technically the right term for it as I don’t think they will be directly exposing my heart, even with the ribs open the heart is in a big bag called the pericardium sack. Anyway, they aren’t interested in my heart; they are going in after Kuato, the cancer that has been squatting in my chest the past year or so.

We did find out, through a conversation with a very friendly, if gigantic Russian doctor, that the chemo pounded the little fucker down from 13.2cm to 9.1cm. It’s nice to hear that I didn’t go through three months of hell for nothing. Big Russian Doctor btw, is the guy who’ll be giving me my drugs because in Russia, drugs do you. Its cool though, he’s the same guy who hooked me up when they yanked out my gallbladder and I didn’t feel a frackin' thing! The guy actually cutting me open has a wing of the hospital named after his family. I choose to be encouraged by that and not suspect nepotism or a large endowment of any kind.

Can’t say I’m not nervous about this, but I’m a little excited too. If all goes well, it represents the beginning of the end of this, rather unexpected chapter of my life.

Here goes … everything!

For the less squeamish, here is some youtube footage of how they are going in after the little fucker.

The Post Chemo Blues

I had my last scheduled chemotherapy last Friday. I’d have posted sooner, but I find that I’m not really in the mood to celebrate, mostly because there was the wave of side effects to get through first.

The chemo did another number on my blood cell counts. Not enough to require another transfusion, but enough to push them to the borderline which meant getting up very early on a Saturday and trudging all the way downtown for a simple follow-up blood test. In more productive testing news, Monday morning I had my post-chemo CAT scan to see if the treatments have had any effect on the size of the tumour (I find out the results next week). They had to put an IV line in to inject some dye, but when the test was over and they removed the line, they didn’t put enough pressure and I didn’t pay enough attention. Thanks to my low platelets, I ended up bleeding all over the floor of the CT room which I though was pretty funny, but that may have been the lack of blood.

Then right on schedule the wave of side-effects hit me yesterday. My brain was filled with chemo-fog and my body felt like it weighed twice what it should. There isn’t much you can do on those days besides nap and feel useless.

Cancer is easy to understand, or at least mine was. There is a tumour so you fry it in chemo then cut it out. It is the side effects of the chemo that scare me. I can’t look down at my swollen, discoloured fingers and wonder what scars the treatments might have permanently left me with. They told me going in that I’ll never scuba dive again or be able to have children. Both took some getting used to, but in the end they seemed a reasonable trade off for saving my life.

What they don’t tell you are the side effects they can’t predict. Everyone gets their own unique set and they can’t tell you how long it will take for them to fade away, or even if they ever will. Will I ever be able to walk barefoot on a hardwood floor without cringing or climb a flight of stairs without wheezing? Swimming through high school and university had left me with a pretty solid set of lungs, but now I get winded after a vigorous shower. If I push it too far, I can feel my body sucking in breaths in ways it never did before and it terrifies me. They are going to be cutting into my chest soon and there are risks associated there as well, so will I ever get back to where I was? Almost forty is a tough time to be starting over.

I’m not really depressed or anything, just venting. On the good days I try to get ahead and plan for the future. On the bad, I do what I can and listen to a lot of Warren Zevon, Today I feel better than yesterday. Tomorrow I’ll take as it comes.