My Bout with Cancer

We got home from a day and a night in Overlake Hospital in Bellevue Sunday afternoon, the third hospital and fifth or sixth medical facility this year—the year is only two months old.

Coincidentally, our three-year-old granddaughter who is far too young to understand, spent the same night in another hospital with Parainfluenza and Coronavirus OC43.

I never knew much about the ins and outs of fighting cancer other than that chemo and radiation are rough. But now I’m learning oh so quickly. Some cancers are mild, some devastating, some deadly. What I have is skin cancer inside the nose. It’s a rare form of the disease that doctors know little about because there are too few cases to study—around 2,000 cases worldwide one doctor said (or maybe just in America, a drop in the bucket, anyway).

One of the first people I knew who succumbed to cancer was the artist Louise Williams. I wrote about her art on numerous occasions, and we swapped paintings. I still have two on my walls that I treasure. Louise was exciting and excitable, and an outstanding painter. I regret that I didn’t get to see her more and get to know her better during her lifetime. We visited her once and only once after she announced she had ovarian cancer. I should have visited her more. Perhaps being that close to impending death was too unsettling.

In the book Louise Rae Williams: Her Life and Work 1947-2004. I counted 96 full-color reproductions of her paintings. The art is grouped chronologically and is interspersed with writings about her life, her children and grandchildren, her friends in the art community and the causes and concerns that often haunted her—love, sex, death, motherhood; the treatment of women and children in a male-dominated world; and her keen interest in mental illness (she had a son who was mentally ill).

Holly Hunt just today announced that chemo was not working for her and she’s going into hospice. I never got to meet Holly in person, but we’re friends on Facebook. We got to know each other because of the writer Jack Butler, who was quoted on the back of one of my books. Holly was one of his students. Despite never meeting her, I felt drawn to her.

Another Facebook post, different person: “Today is Nikki McCoy’s last shift at the Brotherhood (3-9), 10 years of sharing her awesomeness with all of us! To say she will be missed is a serious understatement . . .” I worked with Nikki when we were both freelancers for the Weekly Volcano, and when I became editor of OLY ARTS, I hired her to write for us. I recently saw a year-old photo of her, hairless from chemo, next to a more recent photo of her with gorgeous hair. Sometimes chemo works, and sometimes it works and then it doesn’t.

After I was diagnosed, I told Nikki I’d like to share cancer stories with her. She said she’d love to, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t know why I felt a special love for these people with cancer even before I found out that I had it too. It was as if my body was prescient when my mind wasn’t.

The first thing they did to me when I went in for surgery was slice into my nose and find a three-and-a-half centimeter tumor (so 1.378 inches) in there and cut it out. Pretty much all of the left side of my nose was gone. I got to look in there when the nurse changed the bandage. It’s a sight nobody should have to see. They also took out cancerous cells in my sinus, and my left tear duct.

At least the cancer was gone. At least the doctor said he was pretty sure it was. He cleaned it out, bandaged it, and sent me four days later to a plastic surgeon in a different hospital, who started the first step in reconstructing my nose.

On January 27^th the new doc cut out a piece of skin in my forehead about three inches long and an eighth of an inch deep, pointed at either end and rounder in the middle, like a boat. He called it a finger and a flap (his PA called it a lump) between my eyebrows and wrapped in gauze. Its purpose is to feed blood to the graft of skin that he cut from higher up at the top of my head. he closed that place at the top of my head by stitching it up with a line of metal staples. Ouch.

I hope I got that description of the process at least halfway right

Next comes the rebuilding of the tip of the nose and the nostrils, which right now sit at a severe angle. Our housemate Maddie says I look like a boxer who lost a few too many bouts.

What a day or day and a half that was. We left home at 4 o’clock in the morning with our housemate Maddie driving [thank you!] and got to the hospital in Bellevue in time for a 5:30 a.m. check-in. The operation went quickly, and they wheeled me into a room where I had to spend the night, not for medical reasons but to satisfy insurance requirements. My head was tightly wrapped in gauze. I looked like a Civil War soldier in a tent hospital, and it hurt like hell.

Maddie drove home and took care of our cat. Gabi stayed with me until visiting hours ended and then spent the night with friends in Bellevue. I tried to watch TV, but couldn’t see well enough because the bandage between my eyes made it difficult to put my glasses on, and I couldn’t hear because the head covering made it impossible to wear my hearing aids.

Lying miserably in bed, my mind went to a section in the after-care pamphlet the hospital supplied that warned about dire consequences of getting a sore throat. It didn’t, however, say anything about how to prevent a sore throat. I think it said you could completely lose your ability to speak. I was getting a sore throat. I could feel it coming on. I was beginning to panic. I tried to go to sleep, put it out of my mind. To distract my rambling thoughts, I imagined writing a story about the 2014 Superbowl. Seattle Seahawks vs. Denver Broncos. Seattle’s most glorious moment. The story was such a hit that I became, in my imagination, a popular sports writer. Next I wrote a story comparing Russell Wilson and Patrick Mahomes.

But my mind kept darting back to getting a sore throat and losing my voice. I remembered that my father lost his voice when he had a laryngectomy. What little voice he had was a strained whispery croak. And he refused to get or couldn’t afford to get a computer-enhanced voice box like Stephen Hawking. My insurance probably wouldn’t cover it. My dad had been a gentle and fun-loving man. His many grandchildren loved visiting him. But my children, the youngest of the grandchildren, had never heard his real voice, and his whispery screech scared them. I didn’t want to end up like that. Finally, at about four o’clock in the morning, it dawned on me that the reason my throat was sore was because of the tightly wound gauze that wrapped around my neck. It comes off in another day.

Stay tuned for Part Two.