another oncological update and the master of disaster

everybody went on and on about how the prep for a colonoscopy is so hard. it definitely wasn’t easy and that juice they make you drink tastes awful, but really, it was a breeze. the worst part was getting a call at 7:45am saying that my 3:20pm outpatient appointment had been rescheduled for 10:30am at the hospital and that i had to get up and slurp down the rest of that juice by 9:30am. wheeee. apparently, the scheduling snafu had something to do with my surgery from months ago and the anesthesia i had and the outpatient clinic couldn’t handle it because blah blah blah. it was 7:45am, i have brain fog, and i had to start drinking gut cleanser, so it didn’t all make sense. people also always talk about what a great nap propofol is, but for me it’s simply lights out and lights on. when the lights come on, though, i start thanking everybody in the room, over and over. during the procedure, they found a polyp and tumor in my sigmoid. a week later, the pathology report showed that the tumor was a melanoma. the tumor wasn’t unexpected, but i was still glad to find out it wasn’t some other kind of cancer like colon cancer. the current plan is to monitor it and let the immunotherapy do its thing.

as for the mri, the results were pretty good. there are no new tumors and most tumors are the same size or smaller. however, two of the tumors are significantly bigger, bleeding, and surrounded by blood. that sounds bad, and they’ve been causing some mild headaches, but the oncologist says that this a good sign that the tumors are dying. way to go marcellus wallace! so far, they’ve gamma knifed 13 tumors in my noggin; let’s hope that this latest mri is the new normal. our mantra has been “nothing new, same size or smaller.” i’m also pretty happy that the radiation oncologist reduced my seizure medication by half and i’m hoping that will help with the brain fog.

while i don’t have any new side effects from the immunotherapy (whoo hoo), the eye blob, the brain fog, and the fatigue are killing me. it makes it so hard to work or concentrate or do anything that requires thinking. and it couldn’t be at a worse time, lots of crazy time sensitive deadlines at work, i’m not able to pull my weight and that hurts a lot. i know it’s not my fault, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. even with the good mris and pet scans, the weight of all the little things is piling up and i’m starting to get depressed. my boss just moved to madrid. he said they have a phrase there “poco a poco” (little by little). “that was in reference to my learning spanish, but i feel like it applies to your situation, too.” you gotta love it when your boss makes you cry on a video call.”

master of disaster, prologue

when i was in the fifth grade, pop bought me a sweet bright yellow t-shirt emblazoned with the words “master of disaster“ in a garish red and orange font. while being mildly offended, i loved the shirt. and it wasn’t wrong, i was always getting bumps and bruises and sprains doing dumb shit around town. this shirt, however, turned out to be pretty prophetic over the next six weeks or so.

master of disaster, part 1

i had recently gotten a new bmx bike. it was white with red nobby tires, red pads on the cross bar and the gooseneck, and red handlebars. it was university of louisville colors and i was happy to represent. plus this bike had way more daredevil potential than my old bike or any of the frankenstein bikes that keith and i would stitch together out of the endless bike parts in the shed at the back of our property. the shed and the bike parts have always been a bit of a mystery to me. apparently they were in there when we bought the place in 1972 and my older brothers quickly set up shop, building bikes for kids in town. and seriously, it just seemed like the more parts you pulled out, the more there were in the shed. anyway, this new bike was fantastic, i could jump over shit without fear that the back wheel would collapse or the front forks would fall off; a real pro bike. one day a few weeks after i’d gotten the bike, i was at home after school, latch keying it, when i heard a thunderstorm rolling in. man, i didn’t want my new bike to get rained on, so i ran out back, grabbed up the bike, and headed toward the garage at top speed (i was holding the bike up in front of me and running, not riding it; don’t ask me, i don’t know why either). i was about 5 feet from the half open garage door when lightning cracked close by. it scared the shit out of me and without thinking, i just chucked the bike at the garage door. of course that was a bad idea, the bike bounced off the door right into my dumb little face. the handlebars hit me in the mouth and chipped off the bottom half of my right buck tooth! it hurt like crazy, and when i saw what was left of my pulverized tooth, a little pile of white tooth dust stuck to the red handlebars, it hurt even worse. i knew what to do because mom had prepared me well. if i was ever in trouble after school, i was supposed to go up the road to patty’s house and she’d help me out. patty was one of the town moms and she was always home after school. i left my bike and tooth dust where they were, not worrying about the coming rain and hightailed it to patty’s, cutting thru neighbors backyards and jumping fences. i got there yelling that’d i’d busted my tooth. she asked me what had happened and after i told her she laughed. she took a look at my tooth and told me i was lucky, the root wasn’t exposed and they’d be able to cap it. no problem. that made me feel better, but i was still worried what mom was going to say. mom would be getting home from work and driving past patty’s house in about 20 minutes, so we went and sat on her front porch to watch for mom and listen to the thunder. right after mom drove by, patty walked me down to my house. when we got there mom was just getting out of the car, patty had her hand on my shoulder, and told my mom that i’d had a little bike accident. i knew the “what fresh hell is this” look on mom’s face well. after i told her what had happened, she laughed too and asked if it hurt. she promised me we’d get it fixed soon and i was just glad that i wasn’t in trouble. it took me a while to realize that they both laughed at me for having a bike accident while not actually riding a bike. and that’s the craziest thing, with all the bike wrecks i had as a kid, and there were some real doozies, this was the worst i ever got hurt. fucking lightning, man. and the rain never came.

master of disaster, part 2

we made up and played a lot of weird games at eastern grade school. the dumbest was probably this sado masochistic version of whack-a-mole meets dodge ball. it was pretty simple, you’d get under one of those grey gymnastics mats, use it as a shield, and pop your head out while the other kids would chuck kickballs at your face. it occasionally led to nose bleeds, but nobody ever really got hurt. except for me, of course. i was under the mat, popping my head out, and dodging kickballs when some dummy comes running over and bellyflops right onto the mat, with me under it. the back of my head bounced off the gym floor with an audible conk. one of the teachers saw/heard it happen, came running over, yelling at me to not move and for no one to touch me. it didn’t knock me out, but apparently i flopped around like a fish for a few seconds after it happened. so the next thing you know, an ambulance is on its way. the emts put me on one of those boards, strapped my head down tight, and put me on a gurney. as they were wheeling me out the door, i heard my brother ricky’s voice. he was my emergency contact that year. he held my hand, told me i had a hard head, that everything would be ok, that he was headed to pick mom up from work and they’d see me at the dr’s office soon. the ambulance took me to dr norvell’s office. they put me in a room i’d never been in before and that had me a little worried. he poked and prodded me, ran that sharp little wheel thing across the bottoms of me feet and my hands asking if i could feel it “yeah, it hurts!”, had me squeeze his fingers, push and pull on his hands, all those neurological tests they do when you conk your head hard. finally, he said i probably had a mild concussion, that i’d be fine, and that i probably shouldn’t go to school for a couple of days. i said “sounds great, *wyatt*!” when mom and rick got there, mom looked so scared, but smiled and laughed when i yelled “i have a concussion and can’t go to school!” obviously no one ever played this game again at eastern.

master of disaster, part 3

chicks dig scars…

the bethlehem baptist church had a top notch, full court asphalt basketball court. the bethlehem gang spent a lot of time there playing basketball and a ton of weird games we made up. y’all, it can get real boring in the country. at one end of the court, on a neighboring property, there was an apple tree that partially hung over the court. in the fall, it would shit a boat load of tiny green inedible apples. if we wanted to play on that end of the court, we had to get rid of the apples. not sure what y’all’d do with all those apples, but we had apple fights. by the time the apples fell off the tree, they were pretty soft, so no matter how hard you’d get hit in the noggin, it never hurt; apple juice in your eye might sting a bit. the apple fights were really fun, but they were messy and very, very sticky. one evening we went to the court, the tree had shit a ton of apples, and we weren’t in the mood for cleaning or apple fighting and decided to just play a half court game on the other end of the court. at some point, the ball went flying and i went to chase it down. i grabbed the ball and felt something bounce off it and i yelled “no apple fights!” a second later, something hit me just above my left eye and it stung like a motherfucker. i thought somebody had hit me in the eye with an apple and the juice was getting in there, then i noticed the blood on the basketball. i reached up to feel what was going on with my face and three of my dirty little fingers touched skull and then i just started screaming. the gang came running down and i could tell it was pretty bad by the looks on their pale faces. i was just screaming, holding my hands over my eye, sort of aimlessly wandering around the gravel parking lot of the church. the preacher’s wife heard all the commotion, came running out of her house, took one look at me, said “oh my god” and then she clamped her hands on my head so hard i was sure she was going to crush it. she kept telling me “it’s not that bad” (which i didn’t believe for a second) and “everything is going to be ok” (which is always true). somehow, she got me into her house and called my mom, seemingly without ever taking her hands off of my head. we lived maybe a 100 yards from the church, so mom was there in seconds. she stayed calm, asked what had happened, and took over crushing my head from the preacher’s wife. we were all covered in blood. i told her i had no idea what had happened, just that something had hit me in the head. that’s when i heard paul jr, one of the older bethlehem kids say, through choking tears, that he was throwing rocks at the ball court trying to scare us and that he didn’t mean to hit me. the preacher’s wife came back into her kitchen with a bunch of gauze. the bleeding had slowed down a bit and they wrapped my head with gauze and i looked like a revolutionary war casualty. mom walked me home and got me out of all the bloody clothes. seriously, y’all, i’ve never seen more blood in my life. it was crazy. i had been wearing a wind breaker, a white fruit of the loom tee shirt, and jeans. the wind breaker was zipped up about a quarter of the way and there was this perfect triangle of blood on the shirt; even the fronts of my pant legs were covered. mom just threw all the clothes away. she called a doctor in new castle who could handle after hours emergencies and then she and pop rushed me over there. i ended up with 20 stitches.

fruit of the loom epilogue

the day before i bled all over bethlehem, mom had bought me a 3 pack of white fruit of the loom tee shirts. that evening, my brother spilled chocolate all over one of my new white shirts while i was wearing it. those stains were never coming out, so mom just threw the shirt away. the next night when we got back from getting me stitches, mom grabbed the third, unworn shirt and said “i’m just going to go ahead and throw this out now” and then she chucked it into the garbage. i laughed then, and i laugh about that every time i think about it.

the tooth epilogue

when i got my tooth fixed, they only gave me a temporary cap. the dentist said it’d be stupid to put a permanent cap on at this point because i would probably break it off a few times before i was out of high school. he was right. the first time i broke the cap off was at judo practice. i whipped around while wrestling and hit my mouth on some dude’s knee and the little cap went skittering across the mat. the second time it happened, i was working on the farm. we got a break every day, late in the afternoon and drinks and snacks were provided. when it was really hot, there might be popsicles or frozen candy bars. at this snack break, i chose a frozen powerhouse candy bar. mmm, chocolate, fudge, caramel, nuts, frozen. i took a big bite and was chomping away when i crunched down on the hardest nut ever. i almost cracked a molar. when i fished the frozen nut out of my mouth, i realized it was just my stupid tooth cap, done in by a frozen powerhouse.

poco a poco, y’all, and keep on keepin on.

the master of disaster