Cancer/Writing Journal #85

 This one is going to be about cancer.  Any rhymes or rhythmic patterns will be purely coincidental. (The same is surely true of my poetry but, oh well.)

I had a bone scan done this last week.  I hadn't had one since August 2021.  Then, the metastatic bones had faded some but were still cancerous.  The guy this time who did the interpretation of the scans saw something on my ribs that he said was either a broken rib or else a new cancer spot.  It's a broken rib.

Let me digress with a story I hope you will find interesting.  There is an invasive bush around here called buckthorn.  It was brought from Great Britain in hopes that it would make a good hedge.  It may have but it spread beyond the hedge, sending runners out then popping up a new shoot going all over the place.  And then it retains within its own wicked network all the ground moisture which kills off all the other plants.  It is really bad stuff.  And it has done very well on our property, enough so that you could say we have the makings of a monoculture.  Without Creeping Charlie we would be Buckthorn and not much else.   A year ago, I developed an emotional dislike for the stuff, enough so that I would daydream schemes for getting rid of it (Not including Round-Up which will work but I see the cure as worse than the disease),  I pulled a lot of it and the ones too big for pulling, I used a clipper or a buck saw on.  My son Jesse borrowed a chain saw for the really big stuff.  Pruning probably just encourages it but still, you want to let it know it's not welcome.

I blush to tell you that in 2022, indifference has overcome my antipathy.  I went out once and pulled what I found enough to tear up the skin on my hands.  Otherwise, we have what you could call a neighborly relationship.  As I say, I'm not proud of that.  And the stuff has resumed it's invading ways.

You ask, "What's that got to do with your bone scan?"  I have an answer.  Sometime last spring, I was out back where we had been cutting buckthorn last year.  I tripped over one of the sapling stumps and landed on another, my full weight coming down on my chest.  Hurt like the Dickens.  I suspected I had broken a rib when the pain hung on for weeks.  Now I am sure of it after seeing the bone scan results.  

The broken rib/new cancer spot was the only thing noted on the bone scan report.  I didn't know if that meant that things were the same as they had been during the prior scan or whether there was nothing on my bones--as in all healed up.  I sent a text to the oncology lady at Mayo, telling of the broken rib and asking what the report meant.  She said the cancer damage is all gone.

I don't know if I can say I have stage four cancer any more.  Or indeed, any kind of cancer.  I kind of want to be able to say, "Oh, yeah, stage four cancer, a really aggressive kind, #8 on the Gleason Scale." Now there's the danger that you are what you say you are.  But then I don't know that I've ever really believed that I have had cancer anyway.  I've never felt any whiff of sick.  It has had no adverse emotional impact on me except for a little bit to begin with.  All it's been is kind of fun, since then.  So I don't know that I really am all that interested being diagnosed as cancer-free.  I'm mostly joking, of course.  I'm 20% serious but no more than that.  Cancer-free is way better than cancer just as peace is way better than war.  However, there are peace time soldiers have a kind of mild regret that they were never tested in the thing that they had trained for.