Thursday, October 10, 2019

An Unexpected Reprieve

My taped wound is healing. 
They said it was the size of a grapefruit or a small cantaloupe. Why must tumors always invoke fruit? I can sit at a computer now without much pain. I have a vertical scar down my abdomen at the scene of the attempted cellular coup. I spent five days recovering at the new California Pacific Hospital on Van Ness in San Francisco where my skilled surgeon, Dr. Lejla Delic works her magic. It is a great state-of the art new hospital where all rooms are singles and many have amazing views of the city.

My primary care doctor discovered this growth during a routine physical. After an ultrasound, PET scan and blood tests the results were terrifyingly routine. The mass was large and seemed solid. It was surrounded by fluid and giving me symptoms that I thought were related to irritable bowel. It wasn't a fibroid and my CA 125 levels (an antigen used as a cancer marker) were through the roof. Is this a metastasis of the melanoma I had twenty-eight years ago? My doctors agreed and my own research came to the same conclusion. I had ovarian cancer, like my mother and so many Ashkenazi Jewish relatives who proceeded me. I found Dr. Delic, a gynecological oncologist, and pushed for the soonest surgery date she could give me.

A friend dropped me off and another friend met me at the hospital that morning. We were wheeled into a curtained room in the surgery waiting area. She had brought with her a special prayer to the Virgen de Guadeloupe that she said always works. She held my hand. I had so many people praying for me and sending me healing energy, I'm embarrassed by the riches. Before I was wheeled into the operating room my doctor stopped by. She said, "It's ovarian cancer, we just need to take it out and stage it." They installed a fusion port in my neck in case I needed an early start on chemotherapy.

When I was wheeled into the intensive care recovery room, three friends were there waiting. My doctors told me that, unbelievably, it was not cancer. The tumor was fibrous inside and most certainly benign. I was heavily drugged still but still aware enough to be overwhelmed by the news. They had said the chances of malignancy were 95 to 98%. I have never won anything. How I slipped into a statistical category of 2-5%,  I'll never know.

All things considered, it's been quite an ordeal. I'm still not back emotionally, but physically I'm feeling okay.  I felt I was in a game of musical chairs without a seat at the moment the music stopped. I was totally prepared to begin fighting for my life.Not that cancer is an automatic death sentence, but it's always a challenging reminder of impermanence as an opportunity for spiritual growth as well as simple all-out panic. Now that I have returned temporarily to the land of the living, I'm trying to keep my focus on the myriad of possibilities before me.  I hope to make good use of the extra time I've been given. I don't know what form this rebirth will take. Opportunity beckons and I am at its center. Like spokes of a wheel, its paths stretch outward in all directions.