The Knives are Out

They’re going to take out my primary. 

Not my primary school, or my primary reason for living, or my primary degree. 

My little Initiator, the source of all ills. The bowel cancer bit. 

It’s been sitting there happily for ten months (plus however long it was there before I knew about it.) It’s been doing its thing, which, as far as I can see, is not much. It doesn’t do anything very impressive in terms of symptoms, or bleeding, or expanding. It’s just there. In fact it’s a bit smaller than it was before, because it didn’t like the old chemo and shrivelled away a bit from it. It only glowed a little bit on my PET scan. It’s trying to fight a good fight, but it’s a bit puny. And now the boyos are going to scoop it out with their little camera-assisted cauterising pronger thingies. Heh heh. Seeya buddy.

Surgeon A is going to do that part. Surgeon B is going to pop in while I’m panned out and slice a corner off my liver, just the part that’s handy like. 

The thing about keyhole surgery is that I’ve never been able to figure out how they get the big thing out of the small hole. (You can tell I’ve only ever delivered by C-section.) And I’ve seen it done - gallbladders full of stones being squezzed through a 1cm opening. But I still find it hard to believe that our bodies are so stretchy. 

Anyway. 

Once they cut out these bits and pieces, they are going to zap me again with chemo, to try and blast the last few stubborn bits in my liver. Another PET-glower is sitting next to some hepatic artery or other. The rest of the “deposits” (if only it were a bank) are shadows of their former selves, quiet, cold, calcified, but still potentially scheming away in the background to regroup and fire up again. So we have to powerhose their ambitions with fluorouracil and oxaliplatin and god knows what else. 

Where I’m at now is about a billion times better than where I was a year ago. Not a single person really believed that I would have this much less cancer now than I did back then. They all - we all - thought sure we’ll have an ol’ go at fixing this but let’s face it chaps, it is a fair mountain to climb. 

Ha.