ever-fixed mark

The whole family and I are in the car, and Husband and I are having a conversation about religion. One of us ends a sentence with “…people who believe in God.”

Aitch: You know, I believe in God.

Me: You do?

Husband: Which god do you believe in?

Aitch: Thor.

Husband: Well, then, Thursday is your Sabbath day, isn’t it?

Happy Thursday, Thor-shippers.

Two noisy birds have taken up residence in the tree outside our home. While craning my neck to see if I could locate their nest, I realized I was standing there with my mouth agape like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

“That’s funny,” I thought, and tried to close my piehole, to no avail. “Did my mouth always hang open like this when I moved my head back?” Then I remembered: oh, yeah. Surgery.

With this big slot in my neck, and a mouth that yawns open every time my head tilts back, I resemble nothing so much as a Pez dispenser.

Minutes before I was about to be wheeled into the operating room, my surgeon came by to say hello. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m fine but the important thing is how are YOU feeling?” I asked him. After all, how he currently felt would determine how I might feel in the future. Had he slept well? Breakfasted abundantly? Was he satisfied with his long-distance carrier?

“I’m thinking about a change in plan,” he said. Let me assure you, this is not something you want to hear at that juncture.

Basically, when you have this kind of cancer, there is a continuum of options. At one end of the continuum, you could do nothing and hope that you die of old age before the cancer spreads. This might be a perfectly valid option; unfortunately there are no studies giving you your chances. At the other end of the continuum, you can take out the whole thyroid and all the lymph nodes in the neck area, eliminating all the places the cancer is likely to have metastasized in the early going. This increases the chance that you will get all the cancer but you risk cutting unnecessarily; the cancer from the left side of your thyroid might never have gotten to the lymph node under your right jaw anyway.

All along the continuum are other options: Take out half the thyroid; half the thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side; the whole thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side; the whole thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side and center (our original plan). How do you choose a course of action? It seems to be a gut instinct. If a lot of lymph nodes light up on a scan, or if the biomarkers for the cancer are high, you might assume that the cancer has spread, and you need a more aggressive approach, but on the other hand the metastases might be microscopic and won’t show up until you take the nodes out and do a path report, or the biomarker may not be indicative of the size and spread of the tumors.

My surgeon didn’t find much evidence of metastases on the scans, and my biomarkers were relatively low, but my surgeon just saw this as a chance to “cut for a cure.” He proposed changing from the “more aggressive” to the “most aggressive” surgical intervention, which would mean breaking the surgery into two parts: one surgery now, and another in six to eight weeks.

Deep sigh.

So, I’m currently in possession of half my thyroid and neck lymph nodes, which meant I was in surgery for a slightly shorter time than expected (4 hours, instead of the predicted 5). I am still generating thyroid hormone, so I feel relatively normal. It hurts a lot less to have your neck cut open and sewn back together than you would think. On the visual analog scale, my neck pain is barely registering, whereas the place they put the IV is an “oh my God you sadistic nurse how the hell could this STILL hurt a week later?”

But, hey, all in all, it’s a thumbs up. I even went running on Wednesday, one week after the surgery, and banged out three miles without too much trouble, so I guess that means I am All Better. The stitches did feel a bit weird when I was running, like I had been decapitated and had my head stuck back on with masking tape. That is, in fact, what it looks like thanks to the rank-looking steri-strips still closing the wound.

I keep trying NOT to think about the guy with the neck wound in Cold Mountain:

:At the hospital, the doctors looked at him and said there was not much they could do. He might live or he might not. They gave him but a grey rag and a little basin to clean his own wound. Those first few days, when he broke consciousness enough to do it, he wiped at his neck with the rag until the water in the basin was the color of the comb on a turkey-cock. But mainly the wound had wanted to clean itself. Before it started scabbing, it spit out a number of things: a collar button and a piece of wool collar from the shirt he had been wearing when he was hit, a shard of soft grey metal as big as a quarter dollar piece, and, unaccountably, something that closely resembled a peach pit. That last he set on the nightstand and studied for some days. He could never settle his mind on whether it was a part of him or not. He finally threw it out the window but then had troubling dreams that it had taken root and grown, like Jack’s bean, into something monstrous.

I’m curious about what will come out of my neck when the tape finally falls off. Silly Bandz and dog hair, no doubt.

Last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times about his recent cancer scare and how it improved his outlook on life: “A brush with mortality turns out to be the best way to appreciate how blue the sky is, how sensuous grass feels underfoot, how melodious kids’ voices are.”

This has not been my experience.

Maybe it’s because Kristof’s test turned out negative, whereas I actually have cancer, but I think it’s due more to the fact that I appreciated life sufficiently before my diagnosis, thank you very much. I mean, I’m not a moron; I read books; I have an imagination; I know that even with cancer my life is more privileged than 99.99% of humanity’s. So while Kristof is fondling the grass with his insteps, I’ve just been staggering around, gobsmacked.

I should state up front that this disease, a relatively rare (I prefer “elite”) type of cancer called medullary thyroid cancer, is not immediately life-threatening. There are roughly four types of thyroid cancer. Anaplastic is a death sentence. Papillary and follicular are more or less “cancer vacations”: they are highly curable and, because treatment involves radioiodine, rendering you a biohazard to those around you, sufferers often spend a week in a hotel during recovery, ordering room service and watching round-the-clock pay-per-view.

Medullary is somewhere between the two. It metastasizes quickly to the lymph nodes around the neck, but progresses indolently from there. Thus, surgery is the standard of care, and chemo and radiation are given only in advanced cases. Radioiodine doesn’t work, because technically it’s the C cells, not the thyroid cells, that are affected. There are a few biomarkers that give an indication of how far the disease has progressed. In my case, it does not seem to have progressed very far.

It was discovered during a routine physical by my new primary care physician. I had switched doctors because of a persistent cough that homeopathic guy wasn’t helping to solve, and the new doctor found the nodule the first time she saw me. On Wednesday, I’m having a total thyroidectomy and “modified radical neck dissection” (isn’t “modified radical” an oxymoron? And will they put my neck back together after they dissect it?). After that, there’s little to do but measure the biomarkers in my blood and be on the alert for new metastases which, with any luck, could never occur.

I shared the news only with a few close friends early on. One friend, wanting to inquire discreetly about my health in front of other people who didn’t know the story, asked me, “How’s your little project going?” For some reason, that just cracks me up. My project is doing very well, thanks for asking! We’re on time, under budget, and hitting our quality targets! Just don’t use the term “deadline”!

Since then, that’s how it’s struck me: Not as a goad to more contemplative living, but as an unwanted project draining time and resources while I’m still expected to do all the rest of my work — you know, the kind I get paid for.

Or, to use another analogy: Since I got the initial diagnosis from the endocrinologist (over the phone, during a meeting with my manager and VP, after which I had to give a presentation), I’ve felt like a computer running an extra program. On my desktop are all the usual applications: commute, kids, breakfast, work, lunch, work, commute, kids, dinner, and so on. But in the background the “cancer app” is weighing all the various cancer-specific alternatives to whatever is being discussed in the foreground. Vacation plans: Will I need to reschedule them? An off-site meeting in July: Will I be able to drive by then? A new assignment: Will I be heading into a second surgery by the time it hits?

In the morning, it doesn’t bother me too much. By the time I get into the car at the end of the day, though, I feel like the cancer program has sucked up all my CPU. Every day at sundown, I crash, and I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with this. Physically, I feel wonderful, and I expect to recover quickly. Mentally, I want to stop the world, but it just keeps going ’round in its orbit, and I’m resentful as hell. I don’t know what’s worse: being sick, or being angry at myself for not handling it all better.

You know, as a kid, I was a huge fan of all those terminal illness stories. Remember Eric? Death be Not Proud? A Summer to Die? (If every time you get a nosebleed, you think “cancer,” then you’ve probably read one or more of these books.) I always thought that if I became a tragic heroine, I’d be a lot more heroic.

On Sunday afternoon, watching Aitch’s t-ball game, I experienced a profound sense of deja vu. One might think it could be explained away by the fact that it was my fourth game that week, but no — it was something else. The easy grounders sailing through the Colossus stances of multiple kids; the entire infield pursuing an errant ball into the outfield; the one skilled kid on the team leaving his position at second base to catch a pop fly headed toward the inattentive first baseman: I had seen it all before, but where? As the strains of “March of the Toreadors” played in my head, it hit me: The Bad News Bears!

As a child, I was no baseball fan, but like the rest of America I was intrigued by the foul-mouthed kids in the trailers, so I saw the movie in the theater, and I loved it. I was exactly the same age as Tatum O’Neal’s character and absolutely coveted her hair, her clothes, and her ride on Kelly Leak’s motorcycle. Husband also had fond memories of the film, so on Sunday night we rented it to see if it stood the test of time. It did, but I found my perception of it had really changed.

First, I had remembered the rivalry between the Bears and the other teams in the league as a kind of class warfare; the Bears, I had thought, came from the other side of the tracks. That wasn’t strictly the case; as a kid, I had missed references to a lawsuit filed by a city councilman as a reaction to the league’s cutting of the poorest athletes. The Bears were so bad, initially, because the team was made up of the worst athletes in the league.

Having missed that, I didn’t really appreciate the change in Walter Matthau’s character: at first he cares too little about winning, then too much. By the end he achieves some kind of equilibrium, but the movie makes you think about where that point is, which is an interesting mental tug-of-war if you’re a parent of a little athlete. If you make your kid practice and attend every game, if you enforce discipline even if your child would rather be picking daisies in the outfield, are you enabling his fullest potential or just being kind of an asshole?

On this viewing, I also appreciated the subtlety of the final playoff between the Bears and the Yankees. (All the teams in the league had mascots; the teams in Aitch’s league are just called by their sponsors’ names, making cheers difficult.) Each team made good plays and errors; each team played dirty; each team showed hustle and had bad luck. Vic Morrow was clearly the bad guy, but even when he lost his temper and beat up his own son (the kid from “Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” another chlldhood favorite of mine — now that I’ve raised that see if you can get the theme song out of your head), it was largely because his kid had intentionally beaned a batter (although it might have been because he gave up a walk with the bases loaded).

As an eleven-year-old, I had been shocked by the racial and ethnic slurs slung by one of the thirty-five tow-headed kids on the team, and by Jackie Earle Haley smoking cigarettes on his Harley. As an adult, I was most horrified by the team riding around town perched on the trunk of Walter Matthau’s convertible. Seven kids and no seatbelts! They could never get that movie greenlighted today.

I’m already behind schedule. Where was I? Skiing!

So, sometime after Christmas I decided that I wasn’t going to let another winter pass without getting the whole family on skis. Husband and I like to ski — we met in a ski club in Chicago, in fact — and we’ve missed it. Sadly, neither of the boys was very enthusiastic about skiing, and Aitch outright refused to take lessons. I decided to concentrate my efforts on Minor, who was a bit more tractable. Reader, I bribed him. Over the course of five ski lessons the kid ate so many nacho cheese Doritos that his sclera turned orange. Finally, weary of standing in the rental line, I bought Minor his own skis, and as soon as Aitch saw them he decided he wanted to ski, too.

Well, once Aitch twigged to the concept — speed! bumps! Teenage ski instructors, like Gods walking among us! — this huge self-satisfied smile appeared, as if he were thinking, “I have found my métier, and it is SNOW.” Oh, he was a total diva, and refused to take direction from anyone, and threw a fit when the ski school wanted to move him up a level, because he wanted to stay with the hot instructor, but the kid could ski. He basically taught himself; he fooled around— first pizza, then french fries, then crouching at full speed; now edging, now flat-footed, now skiing backward down the hill, now leaning back his butt perched on his skis— until he found what worked. He distinguished not between downhill and freestyle; it was all kif-kif to him. Within a few weeks he was carving parallel turns (wide-set, but real parallel turns with edges) down black diamonds and doing tricks in the terrain park. At one point he went off a jump and over the side of the slope into a ravine; his skis came off and none of the adults noticed he was missing until he had climbed out of the ditch and walked down the mountain. His ski name was “Hot Dog.”

Minor’s progress was more stately. His ski name was “Ketchup.” At one point Husband begged me to ski with him, because “no human can ski that slowly.” Minor, in fact, skis a lot like me, making numerous, slow, cautious turns, resorting to snowplow in hairy terrain. (My ski name is “Escargot.”) At first, he rarely experimented with anything he hadn’t learned in class; as Shakespeare might have said, he skied by th’ book. He was a surprisingly good sport, though. Minor is doughy, uncoordinated, and overly sensitive to changes in temperature, spatial orientation, and atmospheric pressure, but he was wonderfully game. When Aitch was intimidated by the chairlift, he begged to go first (”I want to go on the snow rollercoaster!”). A few times we ventured beyond his abilities, taking him on longer or harder runs than he could handle, and he frequently fell and ended up crying on the mountain. Yet the next time we said, “Hey, you want to try that slope again?” he was up for it, as long as we threw in a package of Doritos. He may be the only child who ever gained weight skiing.

On our last weekend, we had the two boys ski a few green runs together, and as Minor followed Aitch he started imitating his movements. Something clicked, and he started skiing better and faster. We took him to the top of the mountain, and after a few runs I was suddenly the slowest skier in the family.

The northeast got a huge dumping of snow mid-season, which was fortunate because the snowpack lasted through the subsequent monsoon and heatwave:

If there’s anything better than spring skiing in a t-shirt with the scent of sunscreen in the air, I don’t want to know what it is.

I certainly have taken a long hiatus from this here blog thingy. What’s my excuse? A hint: it’s one of the developments below, each of which I’ll treat at length during my first week back-to-blog. In no particular order:

• I’ve lost twenty-five pounds. As it happens, lots of things taste better than being thin feels. More on Monday.
• I took on a new role at work. What happens when an erstwhile “individual contributor” becomes a “people manager”? Not much that’s bloggable, if you’re at all ethical, but I’ll attempt some general musings on Tuesday.
• I got both boys skiing. It sounds like an afternoon’s amusement but was actually a months-long campaign against their apathy, bizarre weather, and my better instincts. Details on Wednesday.
• I got a Kindle. On Thursday: the good, the bad, and why I won’t be trading it in for an iPad.
• I got cancer. That will have to wait until Friday, but no worries; I’ll still be around.

Husband took the boys on a whale watch this weekend, so I planned a solo lunch and kayak trip for myself. I have many friends who would do anything to avoid eating alone in public, but it’s one of my favorite things to do, as long as I have something to read. So I gathered up the Sunday paper and went down to the diner. It was crowded, so I sat at the counter, at the end. I gave my order and settled down with the paper.

The cashier approached me and handed me a business card. “This isn’t mine,” I said.

“The gentleman up by the register told me to give it to you.”

The card had a man’s name and the profession “antiques dealer” in Boston and southern Maine. I didn’t recognize the name. “I think you’ve got the wrong person,” I said. She looked irritated and tossed the card on the counter. I figured it was a lame marketing ploy. I ate my lunch and left, leaving the card on the table.

As I was waiting for the kayak tour to start, my curiosity got the better of me, and I Googled the name to see just what he was peddling. The first hit that came up was on a site called dontdatehimgirl.com. It’s a site where women can go to complain about their ex-boyfriends, ostensibly for the benefit of other women. The post said that “John Doe” had been verbally abusive and had conned the complainant out of cash, and that she didn’t know he was married until he appeared at the hearing where she obtained a restraining order against him. “Ladies of Massachusetts and Maine, beware!”

I would normally not give credence to an anonymous tale like this. Still, the man had sent the waitress over to me with his card, like some randy conventioneer at a Marriott bar. Was it an indication that he was looking for his next meal ticket? And that he thought I, une femme pushing un certain age, looked lonely, desperate, and solvent enough to be a likely candidate? YUCK.

I’m not sure I approve of dontdatehimgirl.com. The whole concept of ratting out your ex seems rife for abuse. And even if the information is accurate, don’t you already have friends who can tell you whether or not your new boyfriend is a jerk?

A lovely little coda to this experience occurred just as I was telling Husband the story over dinner that evening. We were dining at yet another Port City bistro. A young woman was sitting across the room from us, dining solo. I noticed her because, as I said above, I know that many women don’t like to eat out alone, and it’s fairly rare to see someone eating alone at 9:30 at night at what passes for an upscale restaurant in Port City. We passed her on the way out; she looked up from the paper she was writing on and made some remark about being the last to leave.

“What are you writing?” Husband asked. “A letter?”

“To my boyfriend,” she said.

“Is he in the military?” I asked, thinking that was one of the few situations that would require a hand-written letter.

“No, he’s incarcerated,” she said.

“What’s he in for?” burst out Husband. I imagine Emily Post would consider that a rude question but, hey, I say she opened the door to that line of inquiry.

“Assault and battery,” she said.

Here is a woman whose friends were not doing their job. Let me try:

Oh, honey. Unless he is a prisoner of conscience, and Amnesty International is launching a letter-writing campaign on his behalf, an incarcerated beau is probably a really bad bet. There are so many fish in the sea; why tie yourself down to one in an aquarium?

I took Minor to the children’s museum in Dover this weekend, and at lunch I amused myself with this copy of the Rochester, NH Times:

Happy Ramadhan, Seacoast Muslims! Have some bacon.

The editor’s ham-fistedness (get it?) was more than offset, though, by the flair evidenced elsewhere in the paper. Prepare to admire the narrative stylings of the Police Blotter:

Monday, Aug. 10

11:02 a.m. Rite Aid on Wakefield Street reports getting a false Oxycodone presciption.

7:38 p.m. On Chamberlain Street, one neighbor is in another neighbor’s face. A cat is thrown from a second-floor window, and obscenities are also in the air.

7:49 p.m. At Rite Aid, a man tries to pick up his forged prescription. No cruisers are available.

8:25 p.m. On Chestnut, a boy would like to show his mother a cat in the road, but is slapped by a woman. This is followed by half a dozen calls describing people yelling and flipping.

8:36 p.m. Music blasts on Chestnut Street, possibly to drown out the yelling and flipping.

10:12 p.m. Choice words are used after a quartet of drinkers is nudged off Congress Street steps.

Tuesday, Aug. 11

3:56 On Crown Point Road a “rooster problem” is reported.

6:11 p.m. A Copper Lane citizen has had his e-mail account hacked. E-mails have been sent out asking everyone on his address book to send money to England.

7:22 p.m. A dirt biker, “whipping along Autumn Street” is counseled.

10:04 p.m. A Moores Court door is egged and the “N” word is also hurled around.

Wednesday, Dec. [sic] 12

3:54 p.m. Near the Salvation Army, a lady is on the ground appealing for help, while a gentleman punches her in the face.

8:05 p.m. A Washington Street woman has found a very pornographic photo of a juvenile on her lawn.

Thursday, Dec. [sic] 13

3:27 p.m. At the station, a man reports the theft of a jewelry box “within the last year” and knows who did it.

7:22 p.m. With the prospect of a yelling match, a large crowd gathers on Congress Street.

Friday, Dec. [sic] 14

11:50 a.m. The District Court bathroom has been toilet-papered, but officials are flushed with success — they have a handle on the culprits.

7:48 p.m. At McDuffee Brook Place six people are reportedly arguing, including a gentleman with his new girlfriend and an annoyed old girlfriend.

10:00 p.m. Several people are battling at the end of Congress. Police have to guess which end.

Aitch is very impressed with the fact that he is now Six, and he expects you to be impressed, too. He is continually buttonholing (took me a few minutes to light on that, after rejecting pigeon-holing? Punch-holing?Corn-holing?) people with the information: “Did you know, I’m Six now?” Happily for him, they tend to respond with the required shock and awe: “What? No way! You’re Six? That’s wonderful!” etc.

Sometimes, though, there is no one of Aitch’s acquaintance in the vicinity, and he resorts to impressing strangers. His modus operandi is to sidle up to a random person on the street; turn to me, all faux-casual, remarking loudly, “You know, now that I’m SIX…”; and then look for the stranger’s gobsmacked reaction, as if he had said, “My Super Bowl ring is pinching me today,” or “This is the exact shade of blue my helicopter is painted.”

This has only worked once, on a teenage girl who was disposed to look kindly on small children. The rest of the time, sadly, he has been ignored. They say that intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful, though. I expect he’ll continue to try until he’s Seven.