It’s been a sobering period of weeks. As far as I can tell from my calendar, May 12, 2021 was my last day of treatment for Stage 3 lung cancer. That was followed by about 2 months of nothing-too-much, which swiftly changed into about 7+ months of Holy Crap! interspersed with long moments of Are you friggin’ kidding me???? Then a brain blip, but in the year since then, mostly calm, punctuated by stretches of intense grief and/or anger, typically arising around a scan-plus-doctor visit.
Unbeknownst to me– or, the conscious me– some new internal reckoning has taken place. Take this cavalcade of circumstances.
- Today, we received news that one of the people in an online lung cancer community I belong to has passed away. The months leading up to this, almost a year, have not been easy for him, but his simple good spirit was a sweet anchor. He does not live in the U.S., but in a country with nationalized medicine; I believe his treatment was flawed and probably shortened his life.
- Two people in my local lung cancer group are dealing with recurrences. (The medical lingo is “progression”, but ain’t no way a brain metastasis is progress.) One young man, who’s had a bazillion– OK, like, 30– gamma knife procedures to his brain, was fine last summer. At our meeting two weeks ago, he reported that one of the previously treated spots in his brain was active, plus he has this new lump in his neck. He had more gamma knife a few days ago; all went well. Now he’s waiting to hear about the neck biopsy.
- Then there’s a woman, 9 years stable, who started heavy-duty chemo this week for a recurrence and is already dealing with the side effects.
Yet we also spent a fair amount of time laughing (about stuff only lung cancer people would find amusing), and talking about how we cope with the dark moments. I’m stealing the simplest strategy: “I take a nap.” I emerged from the meeting buoyed up– it would be very, very hard to go through the always-ness of lung cancer alone.
The other thing that happened was a visit with Dr. Radiology about my brain MRI. It was a different kind of meeting. First, I already knew everything looked stable in the scans. Second, we had a plane to catch, so the appointment was just one of a series of events of the afternoon.
The appointment itself had a different tone. It started with me saying, “It’s as if I don’t have lung cancer,” and ended with a discussion about her kid’s college options and bicycling. In between, we looked at my brain and talked turkey about leptomeningeal disease— what my online friend died with. Leptomeningeal disease, AKA lepto or LMD, is every bit as bad as I thought. Dr. Radiology hates to do whole brain radiation; she does it to buy patients more time to get their affairs in order. OK then. (Not much else to say to that, is there?) And, more immediately relevant, I don’t have to go back for 3 months. Wahoo!
I’m OK. I’m OK with all of it. Recurrence, suffering, death, a long weekend away, some laughter, the dailiness of daily life– maybe I’ve found a way for lung cancer to exist in my life but not hog all the space in my psyche.
Thanks for reading. Here’s hoping you’ve discovered some sweet new space in your psyche.
