Carl's Good!

And here’s to the best news I’ve posted in a long, long time.  Carl’s cancer, it would appear, is gone.

They did the PSA blood test on Monday, and reported today the results was -.004 -- virtually undetectable.  It would appear that even good old water itself doesn’t get a perfect .000000 on the PSA test for prostate cancer.  

I hate to think what would have happened had Carl not had his kidney stone and met up with the good Dr. Dan Hibbert, the sneaky urologist who chances a check on the adjacent prostate while calming a raging kidney stone.  Fortunately an additional plus for Dr. Hibbert is he is unique in the area in his ability to perform the prostatectomy via robotics enabling Carl to recover considerably faster than he otherwise would have.  Further, the precision is much better than a manual surgery so damage is less likely.

Carl has always cursed his kidney stones and his propensity to create them and yet it turns out that they were blessings in disguise.  Isn’t that the way of things?  

How often we complain of the very things that ultimately we find make us strong and even save our lives.  

I thank God for this.  I am a firm believer than we will realize that there has not been a wasted moment, experience, pain, loss, or ache that has not “come together for our good.”  I believe in that kind of great economy of our God.  For example, I would have never believed that I could have loved Carl more.  But here I am, loving him more than I could have ever imagined before. 

Carl's Off The Table And Recovery Ensues

Carl is home from the hospital at last.  

He has never really had quite the assault upon his person that he has had the last five days in his whole life.  

He had stents put in his heart arteries -- a couple in the early nineties and three last July, but his insides were never quite so abused as this.  

I feel, though, that he was so blessed to have his kidney stones a couple of months ago so that Dr. Daniel Hibbert, a 6 ft. 9 in. giant could check out his prostate and PSA count and find that Carl indeed did have prostate cancer.  It’s just a little like my brother, Brent having kidney stones about this time last year and finding he had kidney cancer.  I think it’s God’s way of putting on a little sticky note to say “I don’t want you home quite yet.  Do something now right about right here.”  

Thank you, God, for both of them.

But there are some inconveniences.  

As I said in a previous blog, Carl doesn’t swear, but he does get to wear a little catheter bag for a couple of weeks and he almost cussed out the length of tubing, clamps and bag as he tried to figure the whole mess out his first day with it at home.  I wasn’t laughing to be sure as he commented that anyone who thinks catheters are funny doesn’t know what funny is.  It’s not that we think they’re funny.  We just are mighty glad it’s not us.  He's more used to it now, but he still doesn't like it.  

He hurts pretty bad still.  Not as bad as he did yesterday and not as bad as he did the days before.  I presume tomorrow will be even better.  

His surgery was the robotic laproscopic prostectomy which is much less common than the usual wide open hands-on job, but has far less hacking and hewing on the outside and is far more precise on the inside, but it still requires lots of cutting through the muscles of the stomach and still hurts like a son-of-a-gun.  

He will have a total of two weeks with the catheter and some recovery besides, including another four weeks of getting better and better, according to the good Dr. Hibbert and then after that he should feel pretty good.  Who knows how long before he's "back to normal" whatever that is.

I did mention to Dr. Hibbert that a "Dr. Hibbert" is also on the Simpsons and wondered if he gets teased a lot.  He said that those in the circles he travels in don’t watch the Simpsons much.  What?  You’d think patients of Urologists would gravitate right to the Simpsons.  I’ll let you provide the punchline yourselves.  

Nancy Lukens, Gone Much Too Young

Nancy Lukens was one  of the nicest people you’ll ever know.  She died last Saturday, much too young.  She would have been fifty-five in November.

She had been Carl’s boss before he retired from IBM and did such a good job.

Everyone liked Nancy.  She always did her best to be kind, to do a good job, to love the earth, to take care of animals, to eat well and to do her best by that which she had been entrusted.

That’s why it makes me particularly sad and disheartened that she should die so young of cervical cancer.  By the time she did die, her husband, Gary, said the only place cancer had not reached was her feet.  

She was a small woman to begin with, and as she lay in her casket, she looked so tiny.  A friend of hers who had been rafting on the Ogden River just two weeks before she was definitively diagnosed  last August said doctors had said she was suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome for two years.  That’s what she had.  IBS.  

How can that be?  Isn’t the test for cervical cancer pretty easy?  Isn’t the cervix, well, right there?  And they let it go for two years before they figured it out?  

And this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of such a thing.

Even the Mayo Clinic took a long time before they figured out that my brother-in-law, Wayne, had colon cancer.  Why?  

Twenty years ago I found a sizable lump in my breast and they did a mammogram.  The results of that was that they could see nothing on the mammogram and was I sure that what I felt was unusual?  

I’m really confused.  Why isn’t cancer one of the first things they check for and continue to check for?  

Get it early, they say, and it’s easy to save your life.  

Well, gosh.  Nancy had been trying for two years and I sure wish we still had Nancy.  

Brother Brent, Birthday Boy

Today my little brother, Tnerb, is sixty-three.  He’s been a fuss-budget for sixty-two of those years.  He looks like Lavell Edwards and really should set aside enough money to have his jeans especially tailored to accommodate his cheekless behind.  Other than that, he’s fairly perfect.  Wait.  Here’s another thing.  It is really easy to make him cry.  Aside from this list of things, he’s pretty perfect.  On Thanksgiving, I was particularly grateful that he was willing to hand-wash all the dishes notwithstanding that he had recently gone through surgery to remove one of his kidneys.  It’s one of his signature activities.  Not the surgery.  The washing.  He is a neat freak.

Brent and I go way back.  I taught him a gay, merry little tune for the poem, “If a woodchuck could chuck wood, how much wood would a wood chuck chuck?” that brought him nothing but scorn and derision from his heartless little Kindergarten buddies.  I should have been sorry.  Perhaps I was too young.  But I did teach him something about the world.  I’m sure he’s grateful.

After his surgery, he was dutifully doing his “walkies” around the hospital floor and mentioned that it was the “cancer” ward.  My heart froze.  I didn’t like the word.  What would I do without this man?  He had had one of those pesky, painful kidney stones and apparently during the scan to check it out, the noticed the cancer.  And as we all have figured out, we only need on kidney, we lucky us, Brent, has emerged almost unscathed.  A kidney and a few pounds lighter.  This was a case where likely had it gone unnoticed, he would not have lasted a year.  A little stone and some more years with us and the beautiful Millie.  

I choose to think that such serendipity is actually part of the plan to give us more of what we really need and want.  I thank God for Brent this year.  

Betty Has Cancer

I don't think I've mentioned cancer in my blog. I had it twenty years ago. Breast cancer. I had surgery, radiation and chemo. All of it.

It's all a thing of the past now. That was a long time ago. Most days I don't think of it. At least not much.

But this time, my friend, Betty, has it. Her prognosis is good. She's going to be fine. But her hair is falling out because of the chemo. She had to quit her job at a preschool because her immune system will be compromised. She cries a lot because she is really suffering from depression. Betty was my neighbor for thirty years. Then I moved away and now this.

I really wish I were there. Not really. I wish she were here. The big problem with that is, with cancer, no matter how many people are around you, you're still alone. I love Betty. I just wish I could make that matter a little more at this point in time.