An Un-Brief Update

No more cancer! We think! At least for now!

First: mea MAXIMA culpa to your inbox. Two months without a message from me?! In troubling times like these, why must we suffer more? Rest assured, that drought ends today.

Second:

The news you care about

At 8:30 p.m. last night, my surgeon called to tell me that You Do Not Have Cancer. Well, At Least In Your Abdomen/Pelvis Where You Got A CT Scan On Monday.

This is good news! The only wet-blanket problem about good news post-cancer is that it’s often nuanced, which is a mature way of saying “annoying.”

Allow me to explain

In order for us to go Back to the Future, we actually have to go Back to the Past (which was, in fact, the head-scratching premise of the final film in the trilogy, set in 1885). Since I’ve been nursing post-cancer exhaustion and low-level existential angst for the past few months & haven’t written, we’re going to do a brief fly-over of Spring 2024.

While we’re weirdly on the side subject of 80s film classics, was this not the slickest travel summary motif? Indiana Jones could even make maps cool.

March

Per my previous email, I had surgery to remove my fallopian tubes on the Ides. Surgery itself went fine, minus the discovery of a golf-ball-sized cyst on one ovary.¹ When surgeons discover something “interesting,” they always want to “investigate further,” whereas the patient wants to “sleep” and “dissociate.” We compromised on follow-up scans & bloodwork.

Surgery was totally triggering for my kids, who—go figure!—do not like seeing their mother bandaged and in bed. God help the next person who tells me the kids are doing so great because, like normal humans, they hate watching someone they love go through cancer. I shall save that soapbox for another day; lucky you.

AND I DIGRESS.²

I got to keep my ovaries, which sounds like a lucky win in a shady Vegas deal. But this might give me another decade on this planet, since estrogen is a big deal and yanking it out of a body takes a major toll on brain, heart, lungs, bones, basically everything. Who knew? Certainly not most of us, because “women’s health” is a specialty subset and not, you know, HALF THE HUMAN POPULATION.³ Another soapbox for later!

The salpingectomy (extremely cool medical term for tube removal) brought a clean pathology report, which is fantastic news for someone with a genetic mutation AND family history of ovarian cancer. I believe we celebrated with Dairy Queen per our non-existent contractual obligation, but I can’t remember most of March.

Someone compiled all the flight sequences in Indiana Jones 1-4. Why am I surprised.

April

After a month of recovery from surgery in which the doctor ordered that I blessedly could not do dishes, laundry, or vacuum, I decided I was Now A Normal Person.⁴ This was stupid but fun (like most of my twenties). Therefore I:

1. Dragged my family on a cross-country road trip to see the eclipse. Life-altering, mind-bending, classic-cliché. Who wants to walk the Camino with me in 2026 when the next total eclipse passes over Spain, I’m actually not kidding.

2. Traveled to the Festival of Faith and Writing in Michigan. As a fanatic of both faith and writing, I wanted to meet a bunch of my writer friends in person, which brought exactly the kind of fan-girl elation we expected. Also got to hear Anthony Doerr, Tracy K. Smith, Christian Wiman, Kaveh Akbar, and many more who collectively blew my authorly mind.

3. Jetted right after to Mexico, to go on a writers’ retreat in Cabo with (in)courage. Met amazing women, rekindled my love for ecumenical gatherings, ate guacamole in an oceanside cabana, talked books and Jesus for hours. 10/10 would recommend.

But. After moonlighting as A Normal Person for the month, I quickly learned my lesson and became a house hobbit again because no. I cannot extrovert from dawn till dusk, and naps are now a semi-permanent lifestyle.

May

The month where we live in “interesting times” once again.

Me staring at my test results.

Let’s recap a terrible visit to Mayo! Post-surgery bloodwork for ovarian cancer screening came back…not great.⁵ So I had an ultrasound. Which revealed the golf-ball cyst was gone, praise be. But the surgeon Still Didn’t Like What Was Going On.

So this week I went back to Mayo. Chugged⁶ a couple bottles of barium-laced-water, hopped in the futuristic CT scan machine, and dutifully followed the robotic instructions to HOLD YOUR BREATH…BREATHE…HOLD YOUR BREATH, etc.

Live footage of me exiting the CT scan machine.

Then spent the delightful dreadful interminable interim between scan-and-results in which you are 97% sure you are going to die. Thankfully Ms. Swift recently released a new album whose ethos is catharsis, so I scream-sobbed a few hundred miles between home and Mayo and decided if she could take on Kim Kardashian again, I could go another round with cancer if I had to.

Which brings us to last night. The surgeon affirming the clean scan report, my exhausted body crawling back to bed where I’ve been all week, a new day dawning cancer-free.

Great news! And yet here’s the rub. Neither the surgeon nor my oncologist can figure out what’s going on. My cancer antigen marker is too high. My red blood cell counts are too low. I’m also anemic. Is this a body exhausted and depleted by cancer and chemo? Could very well be. Is it something else? Could also be.⁷

Perhaps this is simply a revolution of the blood, which would be a great title for anyone who writes thrillers. But I’m splashing around in memoir waters these days and would love a book title like Everything Worked Out and She Was Fine.

But you know. That myth of interesting times.⁸

Tl;dr

This stands for “too long; didn’t read;” internet slang for “keep it simple, stupid.”

Right now I don’t have cancer. I think.

This is good news. That my anxious, worn-out body fails to believe. I’ll have more bloodwork & potentially more scans later this month. Will report back.

Thank you, as ever, for your prayers. They are, quite simply, everything.

1. Do less-sports-obsessed cultures compare odd bodily findings to other classes of objects? Do they spend money on actual education versus sports facilities in their local schools? Am I always a supporter of public school funding except when my local district continues to prioritize hockey arenas over classroom sizes and teacher salaries? Am I still cranky about that one terrible levy like every bitter boomer in our area Facebook groups? Is this just my basketball-arena-sized bias toward education-over-athletics talking? This footnote, like 98% of Facebook posts, is a wandering rant with no purpose.

2. Working subtitle for this Substack.

3. A brief illustration of my justified rage: this article from Purdue that leads with DOGS OVER WOMEN in reporting the—incredibly important!—finding that keeping one’s ovaries has a huge impact on overall health. “Taken together, the emerging message for dogs and women seems to be that when it comes to longevity, it pays to keep your ovaries.” $%&@#*$

4. Among the many reasons this was a delusional stance: I’m still getting immunotherapy infusions every 3 weeks. Aka I am still in ACTIVE CANCER TREATMENT, even though I do not have active cancer. A puzzling paradox but more importantly, a la Dierks Bentley, what was I thinking. People who get infusions need naps, not trips.

5. Continuing an unplanned sub-theme, such findings could accurately be summarized with either quintessential Back to the Future catchphrase: “Great Scott! “(Doc Brown) or “This is heavy” (Marty McFly).

6. For any of you involved in the wider social scene of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, circa 1999-2003, I am proud to report that I still got it, baby.

7. Friendly reminder! These are rhetorical questions! No need to reply! I am grateful to each and every one of you for reading, but I do not take medical advice from online comments. So please save your energy and instead invest it into praying for others & working toward the easing of their suffering. Like the amazing Compassion Brigade that you are.

If you want to answer a question, tell me your favorite 80s action/adventure movie & let’s also discuss why Chicago was the epicenter of that era’s cult classic film settings.

8. To bring this missive full circle, let us return to the finale of Back to the Future. Which character am I: the sweet girlfriend Jennifer, unfolding the note from the future that’s now blank, learning that “your future hasn’t been written yet”? Or the wild-eyed mad scientist Doc, who declares he’s not going back to the future, because he’s “already been there”? Only time will tell. Stay tuned…