Testing, testing...

15 YEARS AGO, the X-rays confirmed Dr. Wilson’s hunch.

There were masses in my neck and chest. Now that they were pointed out, I noticed the swelling at the base of the neck and in the underarms. The doc poked under my arm – Ow! – noting it shouldn’t hurt that much.

The mass in the chest cavity was a major concern. Aside from likely being a malignancy, it was also restricting my breathing. If it kept growing, it could suffocate me.

Mid-January was a blur of tests, most done at various departments of the hospital.

One of the first was a biopsy. A surgeon had to take out a swollen lymph node to examine and find out A) if this was lymphoma, and B) whether it was Hodgkins or non-Hodgkins. It was a fairly simple outpatient procedure, and had to be done with local anesthetic. With my restricted breathing I could easily die on the table under general anesthesia.

I don’t do well with medical stuff as it is, and it seemed to take forever for the anesthetic to kick in, then for the doctors and nurses to do their thing. I sat there as they poked around a hole in the side of my neck, and I started feeling woozy. They insisted – and I could sense a note of fear in their voices – that I stay conscious. Gwen was there for moral support, lending words of encouragement. She has much more of a stomach for these things, and said later that the procedure was, for her, very interesting to watch.

Well, bully for her.

Other tests were to see if and how much this cancer had spread. That meant checking my bone marrow. That meant taking a medical corkscrew to my lower back. This is a very painful procedure, so they gave me some VERY good drugs. It wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t feel the pain, but that I wouldn’t remember it. Or most of the nonsense I babbled.

Gwen was there, and found the whole incident quite entertaining (aside from the painful-corkscrew part). Since she’s the one with the memory of it, perhaps she’ll post or comment here and fill in the gap.

I also had a full-body cat scan. Since they needed to see if there was any cancer in the gastrointestinal tract, that meant I had to line it with a barium solution – the nastiest stuff I have and will likely ever taste. Just the memory of it means I probably won’t be able to hold it down again. Thank goodness I only had to do that once.

The scan went fairly well, once I was in the big metal tube. Took quite a while, but I managed to be patient. Just before leaving, though, I discovered why the substance I had to drink earlier is called the “barium enema.” I don’t know if I wasn’t paying attention when somebody mentioned the side-effects, or no one warned me. Either way, it was a surprise when I got to the toilet just in time for everything I had probably ever eaten up to that point to immediately evacuate my body.

One test gave encouraging results. I had to breathe into a sophisticated piece of equipment that measured my lung capacity. Normally, it would be used as part of the physical for the Arkansas Razorback athletes, so I was in pretty cool company there. The doctors and I were pleasantly surprised to find that my lungs were in excellent shape, not damaged at all by the encroaching cancer. The problem was getting the air to those lungs, my airway was pinched to less than half its diameter.

Finally I had my diagnosis: Stage two Hodgkins lymphoma. Stage one would be just up in the neck and upper-chest area, stage two is also in the chest; stage three, I think, is where it goes beyond the lymph nodes and starts to affect other organs directly. The stages progress until it gets into the bone marrow, which is likely terminal.

I was told that the best thing was that the disease was caught above the diaphragm. Such stages have a 70 percent survival rate. Once it gets to the lymph nodes and organs below the diaphragm, the numbers reverse and the survival rate is 30 percent at best.

In fact, in stage one Hodgkins, it’s possible that insurance would be hesitant to authorize immediate treatment, the doctor said. A person could be in stage one for years. But I had no problem justifying aggressive treatment as soon as possible. The mass was taking up two thirds of the chest cavity, and slowly strangling my esophagus.

No doubt about it, I was about to undergo chemotherapy.

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