Tag: cancer

In which I’m not dying

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Another “not much going on” day, and if I wasn’t sure it was summertime before, the way I can’t find anything interesting to say about anything very well might be the clearest evidence I’ve seen yet.

Oh, wait, I do have something.

So, yeah, I don’t have liver cancer.

Not that I really thought I had liver cancer, but it’s been a possible-but-not-especially-likely future that’s kind of been floating over my head for the last few weeks. I had a liver ultrasound in May to confirm that some bloodwork abnormalities were because of fatty liver syndrome(*), and the ultrasound found a lesion on my liver. This is one of those “this is common, and not a big deal, but we’re going to check it out in case it’s a big deal, because if it’s a big deal, and it’s not a big deal, but if it’s a big deal it’s a big deal” type of things, where it’s almost definitely not liver cancer but hey dude, uh, go schedule a CT scan just to be sure?

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a CT scan before. I hadn’t, so I went in kind of not knowing what to expect other than that I was going to be fed into a large doughnut-shaped machine. They’d told me not to eat for four hours before the procedure, but as it was at 8:25 in the morning, that wasn’t a challenge. What they didn’t tell me, and I’m not sure if this is the case for every CT scan or not, was that I’d be on an IV briefly during the procedure, so I probably should have had a gallon of water or so before going in. My veins are utter bastards under the best of circumstances– I have grown used to telling people trying to draw blood to go directly to the back of my hand and not even to try the crook of my arm– and “slightly dehydrated” is not the best of circumstances. Two people, four sticks, and the bruises on my arm right now are impressive.

At any rate, the IV was to feed something into my veins that would dilate them to make them show up more easily on the scan. NBD, right? I was impressed at the length and detail involved in their explanation of what I was going to experience during the “minute to a minute and a half” that the chemical was going to be active in my veins. Namely, everything heated up, starting with my ears, which were abruptly twenty degrees warmer than the rest of my body, followed by my face, and then everything else.

I was warned that I might think I was wetting myself, and guaranteed that I was not. I was also warned that I might feel like I had an erection and that that also would not be happening, and my immediate and complete crackdown on the urge to make some sort of terrible joke made me kind of proud of myself. At any rate, I didn’t really experience either, although I can kind of see how people might feel like a spreading pool of warmth in their lap might be alarming. The sensation in general came right up to the edge of unpleasant and then receded as quickly as it came, and then I was done. I had the results this afternoon; I have a “tiny,” their words, cyst on my liver, perfectly normal and either highly unlikely or actually unable to turn into anything alarming.

(I am unsure, and I’ll talk to my doctor about this, if this is something I should keep an eye on in the future, or if I have, as my wife put it, “a new liver friend,” but they’re definitely not worrying about it now, and I can stop mentally appending “… so long as I don’t have liver cancer” to every discussion of anything happening in the future.)

Oh, and then once I was done the nurse went to take the blanket off of me, and abruptly stopped and said “Wait, do you still have your pants down?”, which, yes, I do, because lady you can see my hands, and I did not use the muscles in my ass to pull my pants back up, so … gimme a second, here. I also refrained from wisecracking at that, so I genuinely deserve some sort of prize here for my restraint and class.

(*) They were. This is also not especially alarming, although I need to do some reading on exactly what it means other than that my liver is as fat as the rest of me.

RIP, Rachel Caine

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Reading4 Comments

Rachel Caine passed away last night. I have twenty-three books by her in the house, with one preordered (what I assume will be the final book in the excellent Stillhouse Lake series) and three more freshly ordered and on the way, as I decided to get off my ass about finishing the Great Library books. That’s without having read anything from what’s probably her best-known work, the fifteen-book Morganville Vampires series. And once those incoming four are all in the house I might have half of her books; the total is approaching sixty, many of them bestsellers.

She is, by any measure, one of my favorite authors– I probably have more books by Stephen King and I might have more books by Seanan McGuire, who is similarly prolific– but that’s it.(*) Rachel had already survived a battle with breast cancer earlier in her life and was diagnosed … last year? Earlier this year? Fairly recently, one way or another, with an aggressive soft-tissue sarcoma that finally took her away from us last night. She’d been open on her various social media feeds about the cancer and the toll it was taking but was writing until very close to the end; recent tweets from her still refer to the forthcoming Stillhouse book as the “newest” in the series and not the “last.” Hell, for all I know she’s written three more of them and they’re just waiting to be published. She was fast enough; it wouldn’t really be a surprise. Various surgeries and chemotherapy didn’t work, and I suspect by the end she was going through something very similarly to what my mom had to endure for the last months of her life, where the wounds from ostensibly lifesaving surgery simply wouldn’t close up and heal. Her assistant more or less officially took over her Twitter feed on Friday, letting us all know that it wouldn’t be long, and the official notice that she was gone came this morning.

I never met Rachel; she was reasonably active on the con circuit so if she hadn’t gotten sick it probably would have happened eventually, but you can’t read eight thousand pages of someone’s work and not feel like you know them on at least some level. I think we would have gotten along pretty well, and one way or another, she will be missed.

Fuck cancer.

(*) It is literally hours later, and because this is exactly the type of nerd I am I eventually found myself unable to not determine this for sure. Total number of Seanan McGuire books: eighteen. First count of Stephen King books: at least 38, but his are spread throughout the house and are in a bunch of different types of editions and there are a few titles that we have more than one copy of because before marrying me my wife occasionally bought books on her own. I would not be surprised to discover that I missed as many as half a dozen, but that would probably be cancelled out by the ones we have duplicates of, so let’s say “around 40,” call it a day, and hope that my brain doesn’t demand further clarification at 4:00 in the morning.

RIP, Chadwick Boseman

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I took a moment last night, before I told my wife what had happened, to hold my breath and double-check that the news of Chadwick Boseman’s death wasn’t a cruel fucking hoax. I found out on Twitter, which is where I find out when anyone dies nowadays, and it was amazing how my timeline went from whatever it’s usually about to 100% Chadwick Boseman in a matter of two or three minutes.

I don’t know what I would have said yesterday if you’d asked me how old I thought he was. I’m weird about celebrities; I tend to assume that anyone who isn’t obviously a teenager is older than me even if that doesn’t quite make sense. Chadwick Boseman was 43; a little bit over a year younger than me. And he has been battling colon cancer for basically as long as I’ve known he existed. And no one knew about it.

He had colon cancer while he was filming Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame and three or four other movies that I haven’t seen and no one knew about it. There were some recent pictures circulating where he’d clearly lost an unhealthy amount of weight; I hadn’t seen any of them, and whatever speculation might have been floating around never crossed my radar, so this was a bolt out of the blue.

It hit me harder than I might have guessed it would, and my head was all over the place to the point where I took one of my emergency Bad Brain Day pills before going to bed. Just one more way in which 2020 has been awful. This will be all my students want to talk about on Monday, too, and I feel terrible for my black students in particular, who have just had one of their genuine heroes torn away from them.

… he had cancer the whole fucking time, guys. I can’t wrap my head around that. The whole. fucking. time. And he’s younger than me. And no one even knew he was sick.

I just … I still can’t cope with it. Fuck this. Fuck cancer, and fuck 2020, and fuck cancer again.

Rest in power, sir.

Fuck cancer

On By Luther M. SilerIn life7 Comments

(A note, before I begin: there is going to be a nonzero number of you who know me in Real Life and also knew Becky. Her parents, who I know, and sister, who I really don’t, are on Facebook and have been monitoring her page. She followed Luther, but was not friends with his account. If her family sees this, they see it, but I would appreciate it if no one goes out of their way to bring it to their attention. I am, as will probably become clear pretty quickly, writing it for me, not for them, if that makes any sense. Thank you.)

Becky Arney died yesterday. She used to pull my hair in fifth grade, and now she’s gone.

She was two months younger than me, and had been fighting cancer for nine Goddamned years. She spent most of the last month of her life in the hospital until her family finally decided she’d had enough and brought her home.

Nine damn years. The cancer started off as a small-cell cervical cancer that, as far as I ever understood, had a five-year life expectancy just north of “you’re kidding, right?” and she managed nine years. I think it was actually liver failure that got her in the end; the cancer was in remission for a while but then popped up in a bunch of other organs and that was the essential body part that gave out first.

The biggest problem I’ve ever had in my life is being able to see my feet past my ample fucking gut and this badass bitch got handed a life where she had to beat the shit out of cancer on a daily basis for nine fucking years in her thirties and forties. And frankly she did not lead the sort of life prior to getting cancer that was going to lead to gold-plated health insurance, either. She worked in the arts. She worked in prop design. I can only imagine the extent of the medical bills.

She was my first real crush, in fifth grade. If you look at my fourth grade yearbook there’s one particular girl whose picture I drew a green box around, but I don’t remember anything about falling for her. My unrequited thing for Becky lasted two or three years, at least. It was a Thing for a While. She knew; I’m sure she did. There was one particular field trip in sixth grade to a museum in Chicago where she spent the whole day letting me take her picture next to dinosaur bones and then sat behind me and intermittently pulled my hair the whole way home. She knew. By high school we were friends; we drifted apart when I left for college and then reconnected via Facebook just after I moved home and got married.

The last time I saw her, I was with my wife and son at Bob Evans, of all the goddamn places, and she just happened to be there with her grandmother. It was the only time she ever met my son; my wife was a couple of years behind us in high school so they already knew each other. When I killed my personal Facebook account, she didn’t send Luther a friend request, but she continued to follow the page, and I got updates from my wife.

She lived with her grandmother after she got sick. Imagine that. Imagine being old enough to be a grandmother to someone in their forties and you eventually have to bury them. I can’t do it.

There is not going to be a funeral, which is good, because I am generally not good at funerals at the best of times and I think there’s a good chance that “absolutely everyone from high school is there!” will not qualify as The Best of Times. She was that person who had every single person from our graduating class she could find and a sizable number of the kids from within a couple of years of us on her friends list. The eventual “celebration of life” that her obituary alludes to will be a de facto high school reunion. I have already skipped three high school reunions. I don’t know that I can make myself go to this one. We’ll see.

I’m not old enough to have to be writing this shit yet. She wasn’t old enough that I should have been writing this about her. She should have been raising the kids she never got to have, or doing whatever else the hell she wanted to do if she didn’t want to have kids. I can only assume that a cancer diagnosis at 33 can tend to alter your plans.

I used to tell people that I wasn’t really scared of anything, other than blindness, which was my greatest fear for most of my life. But for the last few days, which have been spent mostly restraining the urge to ask my wife to check Facebook again to see if her family has posted any updates, I’ve gotten this cold sort of existential horror in my gut every time I’ve looked at my son. Because apparently I’ve reached the age where people my age start dying of fucking cancer and so that’s a thing I need to start worrying about. About leaving him behind, before either of us is ready. About, hell, something happening to him. Because she was young, but it ain’t like cancer is especially discriminating, now, is it? And it’s not like this has been unique to the last few days– she had had cancer for two years before my son was even born, and one thing every parent becomes familiar with very quickly after their first child is born is the notion of their own mortality.

(This is what I meant when I said I was writing this for me, by the way.)

I don’t know. I don’t have a cute or clever way to end this, so I’m just going to stop writing.

Fuck cancer.