First, I have to apologize.  In the last post, I mentioned "setbacks" without explaining what or how serious they were.  Several friends have expressed their concern.  One was simply that my stomach problems had seemed to abate somewhat, but Saturday we went out for sushi (rice is usually good for what ails me).  The dinner had finished, we had paid and were ready to leave, and then suddenly I had only a minute or so to find the restroom or endure some serious humiliation.  I made it and felt relieved, so to speak.  I thought everything was all right, but the moment we got into the car, the emergency struck again.  Lucikly, there wasn't much traffic and Mohamed sped a little, so we got home in time for me to "run" (I don't really move all that fast these days) into the house in time.  I hate the unpredictability, the potential embarrassment, and the debilitating effects of all this, and it was discouraging to think that the troubles hadn't really gone away.  More disturbing was that in the course of this, I did something to my right leg, the one that had the surgery.  I don't know whether I tore/sprained/strained a muscle (no, Joanne, I didn't hear a sproing!), but for the next 48 hours, my leg hurt more than at any time since the surgery.  And of course I worried that I had done something more serious.  The leg still hurts more than I would like, but it does seem to be getting better, so I think that the setback was temporary.  Thanks for your concerns, and I'm sorry to have been so indefinite.

It's been exactly one year since a doctor told me that I had cancer--one moment at a few minutes till 11 a.m. when everything in my life changed.  After I retired, I taught as an adjunct for the next year--two classes of freshman composition in the fall, one in the spring.  All the books and art from my old office had been shlepped home, and I was sharing an office with Josh, an old student, now a colleague and friend.  He, Mohamed, and I hung out there.  I would often find myself turning to the shelves to grab a book I wanted for class, only to be reminded that the bookcases were empty.  This wing of the building had once been active with classrooms and professors' offices, but it had later been turned mostly into administrative offices, so generally felt deserted.  Before my class, I went up to the second floor to use the restroom.  The corridor was empty.  My cell phone rang, and it was the doctor who had been treating me for nearly six months for a torn rotator cuff and then bursitis.  A few days before, he had said that I should have an MRI in case he had missed something, as indeed he had.  He called to tell me that I had a tumor that had destroyed part of my left scapula.  When I didn't react with anything but silence, he said, "You have cancer and you need to find a specialist immediately."  I don't think I was any more articulate after that comment.  He also asked that I keep him informed, but since he'd misdiagnosed me for so many months, I didn't really feel obligated.

In retrospect, I don't know what went through my mind.  I know that I taught my class, and I think it was normal enough.  And then on the way home, I told Mohamed.  We had a few days of denial: the doctor hadn't done a biopsy so how could he know that the tumor was malignant?  But most of the next couple of weeks consisted of confusion and frustration.  I never managed to talk to my primary doctor, whom I had considered a friend as well, each time being shunted to a nurse.  Finally I was referred to Dr. Templeton, an orthopedic surgeon at KU Med.  At that point, the assumption was that it was bone cancer.  And so, after about three weeks, I finally began the battery of tests.  The last test was on a Friday afternoon.  As we were leaving from the parking lot at the Med Center, the phone rang.  It was Dr. Templeton's nurse saying that she had some good news: although much of the scapula itself had been destroyed, the cancer hadn't spread to the surrounding muscles and tissue.  Good news was very welcome, even if it was short-lived.

Saturday morning, Dr. Templeton called me at home.  Again, I was totally unprepared for and surprised by the call.  She said that the last test had shown that the primary cancer was in the kidney and that it had metastasized to the femur, which needed immediate surgery, as well as the scapula and, to a lesser extent, to other bones.  The only response that I remember is saying, "That's not good news."  She agreed.

If everything had seemed to move in slow motion for the previous three weeks or so, events now moved extremely quickly.  The surgery was scheduled for May 22, and I was quickly admitted to the hospital.  The day before we left for Kansas City, Mohamed and I were standing on the back deck, and he asked me whether I was frightened.  If I'm not very focused on the past, so, too, I'm not very good at thinking about the future, except in making immediate, practical decisions.  (I had, for example, thought generally about leaving Topeka after retirement, but Florida had never been a consideration.  And then one day, the notion of Florida popped into my mind--I have no idea why--and I had decided that was where I wanted to retire, and that was that: I was ready to move with no second thoughts.)  I told Mohamed that no, I wasn't frightened.  I think that if I imagined anything, I thought it would be like a hip replacement, and I'd be home in a couple of days and walking normally in a couple of months.  Once at the Med Center, Dr. Templeton said that the first day, she would do an embolization. (I had to look it up).  I have great faith in her as a surgeon, but she doesn't have the world's best bedside manner.  "Well," she said, "we don't have to do it, but if we don't, chances are you'll never get up from the operating table."  So the first day was the embolization, the second was the surgery.  There were nine days in the hospital and seven weeks in the extremely constricting abduction brace.  It's probably good that I couldn't foresee the future, or I would have been really scared.  But that week events happened so quickly that I thought only about what was happening day-by-day (or hour-by-hour).  Even if I'd had the inclination, I had neither the energy nor the vision to think beyond the present.

So has passed the first year of knowingly living with cancer.  I just have to keep saying to myself, cancer, shmancer, abi gesund.  And I have to be thankful for all the love and affection that surrounds me.