It had been over 18 years since my last brush with melanoma - 18 active, healthy years. I told people I was a cancer survivor and that my life had been hard but that it had taught me to be resilient and strong. The thought of ever having cancer again never came up in any of my thoughts, not even when I was lying in the emergency room getting a life-saving blood transfusion.
Then on Valentine's Day 2014, I swallowed a pill camera as both a colonoscopy and endoscopy showed nothing abnormal. But the pill camera definitely showed something in my small intestine which needed surgery right away.
Did you know that the small intestine is one of the favorite hiding places for melanoma - that and the brain? I didn't know these things when 30 inches of my small intestine was removed during surgery in early March - I didn't know oncologists call melanoma the Sleeping Baby of cancers. I didn't know any of this as I was perfectly healthy and went to a dermatologist religiously and eat well and exercised and took naps and took my vitamins and had a physical every year and ate cherry pie and drank Patz Hall wines and why the fuck was 30 inches of my small intestine removed??
We should wear green I told my wife, for "Good Luck!" I said. It was St. Patrick's Day and we definitely looked lucky sitting in the busy waiting room. Once in my surgeon and I immediately got to the bullshit and funny stuff because we all liked each other like that and what else do you talk about while someone's pulling staples from your abdomen? But then the file folder that he had placed on the counter was opened, and the room got very still and quiet and then you know what's coming and you just want to run out the door and out of the building and just keep running and running and running.....
I've been in a lot of really quiet rooms these days - it's a tough place to be. The room feels hot the air smells funny and your clothes suddenly feel very uncomfortable. I remember hearing Stage 4 and Melanoma and something about a lymph gland and that's when everybody in the room starts crying. Softly, slowly, but then the sobbing and shaking kind of crying - everyone - me, my wife the surgeon the nurse.... quite possibly the saddest and scariest moment of my life.
I've been in a lot of really quiet rooms these days - it's a tough place to be. The room feels hot the air smells funny and your clothes suddenly feel very uncomfortable. I remember hearing Stage 4 and Melanoma and something about a lymph gland and that's when everybody in the room starts crying. Softly, slowly, but then the sobbing and shaking kind of crying - everyone - me, my wife the surgeon the nurse.... quite possibly the saddest and scariest moment of my life.
I was still crying in the parking lot, holding my wife tightly as cars drove around us, telling her over and over again that I was sorry and that I never wanted to let her down like this. We just sobbed in each other's arms and had nothing more to say because really, does anyone know what to say when you've just been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer?? Not really. But you do know that you really, really wish that you didn't ever have cancer - not now, or 20 years ago.
