Doc Talk

I'm still trying to figure out both a voice and a rhythm for this blog. Do I want to write it as a series of short essays, or is it more of a diary? Do I want to try to write here every day, or is two or three times a week enough? Who is actually reading this thing, and what are YOUR preferences? I guess I'll just experiment a little until I find what feels right. Feedback is always appreciated.

Just got back from NYC, and my consultation/second opinion from a thoracic oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. Herbert F. Oettgen (if you want to Google him) -- a very smart guy, who basically told me exactly what I had hoped to hear: that I have very smart doctors here in Maine, who have diagnosed me correctly, and prescribed the proper course of treatment based on all the most current protocols. He did recommend an additional MRI on this "area of interest" in my lower back, which he also thinks is a distant bone metastasis (although that hasn't been confirmed since it hasn't been biopsied), and which may need a little additional radiation if it doesn't respond to chemotherapy. But that really is the "wild card" in my diagnosis. Without it, I'm basically still Stage Two; with it, I leap all the way to Stage Four.

Not that any of that really makes one whit of difference to me personally.

I imagine that a lot of people would be very upset to hear that they have a cancer that can be "treated, but not cured." What they don't really understand is that "cure" has a very specific, technical scientific meaning to an oncologist. It essentially means a course of treatment with a high and statistically reliable probability of assuring survival for a set period of time while eliminating any detectable sign of the disease in the body. "Treatment," on the other hand, basically means that they have therapies available which are effective in fighting the disease, but that there are no real guarantees of results. What you have instead is a bell curve. Probabilities, not promises.

Which is fine with me. I have a much more practical attitude toward all of this. I have lung cancer. And it is probably going to kill me someday. But I don't think it's going to kill me today. And probably not tomorrow either.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to go ahead and try to live as well as I can for as long as I can. Which is exactly what I probably would have done anyway. It's just that now my normal and ordinary sense of mortality has a much more specific focus. Which has both its advantages and its disadvantages, I suppose.

Anyway, after meeting with the Good Doctor, my Dad, brother, sister-in-law and I all went for lunch at the Round Table room in the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker and her crew used to hold forth back in the Roaring Twenties. Then today, another six and a half hours in the car back home to Portland. Now my back is killing me, and it has nothing to do with cancer. But it sure will feel good to get to bed tonight....