Cancer Survivor: Is It In You? (Part I)
It was nearly midnight when I regained consciousness after the 13-hour surgery that had radically dissected my neck yet saved my life. A squamous cell carcinoma tumor had bloomed from my tonsil and threatened to choke the carotid artery that fed blood to my brain. Without surgery, a daring procedure, my death was inevitable.
As I awoke from anesthesia, I saw one of my surgeons standing at the foot of my bed and heard him say, “It went great. Just great.” Maybe for him, I thought. He was nattily dressed. Despite the late hour, he could walk out of there and get a hamburger slathered in mustard and relish and wash it down with a cold beer. Or, more likely, go home and kiss his newborn child goodnight.
I, on the other hand, was going nowhere. A bevy of nurses wiped me down, redressed my moist, limp body and then all but harnessed me to a bed in the hospital’s intensive care unit. My right arm was in a cast and immobile because an oval of skin and tissue had been cut from the underbelly of my forearm to reconstruct my throat, where the tumor had been gouged out. I was instructed to refrain from moving my right leg because skin had been removed from my thigh to cover the deficit in my forearm. My lower legs were rendered useless because both were wrapped in tight harnesses that deliberately inflated and deflated, a method of mechanical massage designed to stave off deadly blood clots.
And then, of course, there was my neck. A long surgical cut that scythed from behind my left ear to a point slightly above my Adam’s apple was stapled closed. That side of my neck swelled, making me look like a blowfish from the lab of Dr. Frankenstein. Since my throat was swollen tight from the surgery, I breathed through a tracheal tube that had the nauseating habit of clogging with thick, stubborn mucous. The same mucous that clung to my lungs, where pneumonia soon took up residence with a rude, piercing pain.
I lay there wondering: How will I survive this?
For five days, I stared at the ICU clock or watched the nurses pace and fret, because despite readily accessible meds I rarely slept for more than 45 minutes at a stretch. I was forced to be in the moment. Every moment. There was no escape. I was too weary to think of the past and knew nothing of the future. I didn’t know, for example, that my voice would be an earthy, inarticulate growl for months to come. Nor did I foresee that in barely more than a year, I would be physically stable but emotionally bankrupt.
Yet I soon learned an essential truth, one that all those suffering from a health trauma eventually embrace if they are to survive. The revelation occurred days later when finally I was transferred from ICU to a private room. I paced the hallways dragging my portable IV, peeked into the rooms of strangers, saw myself in their suffering, and realized: Others are in far worse shape than I.
It is now almost three years since my surgery. I have not had a relapse of cancer, my health is generally good to great, and once again I am a productive member of society (a nice way of saying I work for a living). Doctors measure cure in years. If there is no relapse within two years you have a 95% chance of going five years without relapse. If you make it to five years, consider yourself cured.
Sometimes it feels strange to be alive – a miracle, really, since the cancer had developed to the third of four stages. But life is a miracle regardless of cancer.
Sometimes I’ve afraid that I’m being stalked by the boogey man. I look over my shoulder often, and fear another health calamity dwells in every ache and pain. But we’re all being stalked by mortality.
I don’t know why I’m alive now. No one does, because there is no cure for cancer, or so they say. Even so, I know what has helped keep me alive, despite the stress and uncertainty, throughout these last three years.
I have awakened.
It’s hard to stay conscious throughout life. So many things can blind-side us, numb our senses, scare us into retreat, or cause simply what I call self-amnesia – we forget ourselves. Our better selves. When the self is neglected it creates a vacancy within. Guess what fills the void?
Cancer and other diseases can be a blessing if they wake up the sleeper. The awakening doesn’t guarantee a long life. Nor can it alone necessarily vanquish a deadly disease. It can, in my experience, make the remaining days and years vivid, lucid, and profoundly fulfilling.
But it takes courage. I began asking questions of myself. I didn’t always like the answers. I didn’t always have the strength to stare into the vacancy I had created and gather the malnourished pieces of me I had once appreciated.
Also, I am not done probing for answers and searching for deeper experiences of the awakened life, because the dawning must be perpetual if a life is to be long and worth living.
Copyright 2007