Wordswoman

However, a web site devoted to pictures of cute fuzzy animals is probably not the *best* place, 'kay?

Dad's biopsy report is all bad news. The cancer is now level IV.

There isn't much to say, otherwise.

There's no space in the baby book to record "Baby's First College Visit," but it still feels like a developmental milestone to me.

(This does not mean all cancer has been removed; that's not really possible with these aggressive tumors that send invisible tendrils out into the surrounding functional brain tissue. It just means that all the obviously abnormal tissue they could remove was cleanly removed, without complications.)

Just closing up after surgery takes a long time. They never show that part in the medical shows on TV; it's not dramatic, and it's not usually the star neurosurgeon doing it. Dad wasn't closed up and moved to recovery until 3:15 p.m., and we couldn't see him for a couple of hours after that, when he was moved to the ICU.  He looked dazed and exhausted, and who could blame him? Heck, I felt dazed and exhausted myself, and I didn't have anesthesia and a hole in my head. But however tired and pained, he sounded like himself when he spoke. He even tried to nag his wife into slipping him a couple of Extra-Strength Tylenol (she wouldn't) or a Tic-Tac (eventually she did) when the nurses weren't looking. Which is totally Dad, so it was oddly reassuring.

Around 8:00 p.m. we saw Dad's surgeon heading down the hall, interns trailing him like the tail of a comet. This would be the same neurosurgeon who talked to us at 7:00 a.m. and probably made his hospital rounds before that. He seemed pleased with Dad's condition.

My brother Perry and I stayed a couple of hours more, but since we'd gotten up at 4:00 a.m. we were fading fast. So around 8:30 p.m. we called it a night, went to dinner, and got home to bed. I barely remember lying down. I think my husband had to throw a blanket over me because I hadn't had the energy to do it myself.

We'll be heading back to the hospital soon, hoping to hear more of a report from the surgeon and/or pathology.

Shine on, sunshine girl. The whole big, bright, scary, wonderful world is waiting for you, and you don't even know it yet.

I'm still a mother, but for the next 9 days I'm an off-duty one. How strange. How quiet. A sneak preview of things to come.

Monday my father undergoes his second brain surgery. But I'll think about that on Monday. These few days are the lull between, a space to breathe and think and appreciate the peace.

http://www.38lemon.com/tumor_photo/diagnosis_mri

The MRI image in that link is not my father's; it's that of a courageous cancer warrior named David Welch, whose tumor is in the frontal lobe (Dad's is in the occipital lobe). But it gives you an accurate picture of how abnormal tissue in the brain appears on an MRI. It's bright white, and on Dad's MRI yesterday it looked..well, fluffy. Strange though it is to use such a light, frivolous word in such a context.

Is it malignant regrowth of the tumor? Unfortunately, there's only one sure way to answer that question: Go in and get some. No one can say just by looking. It could be tumor, it could be scarring/damage from the treatment. Realistically, the former is probably likelier than the latter, but the doctor didn't say so outright. The probability just hung there in the room, unspoken.

All we really know for certain is that the shadow, or cloud, is substantially larger than just two months ago. So surgery, a biopsy, and "debulking" (i.e. removing as much as possible) is recommended. That'll probably happen next week.

I'm feeling very calm at the moment. It's probably an artificial calm, or a weary one. Or a waiting calm, since there's nothing to be done just yet. I'm grateful for it. It's as close to serenity as I've felt in a good long while, and I don't expect it'll last. But while it does, it's soothing as a clear blue sky.

The kind without clouds.

I'm with Scrooge on this one:
"Spirit of the Future, I fear you more than any spectre I have met tonight."

My family is journeying into a strange land, and this is its language.

Usually I love to learn new words. Not these. Nasty, slippery polysyllables--dark and coiling and menacing. Some can cure, some can kill, and if you don't keep your glossary handy you're likely to confuse the two.

Except that it wasn't.

I wish I had happier news to write about. "Malignant" is an ugly word, and an uglier reality. But it's my father's reality now. Denying or sugar-coating it is not an option if I'm going to be of any use to him in this, the final stage of his life.

Please don't think that I'm abandoning hope by calling it that so baldly. I do hope. I hope for miracles and reprieves. I hope for the best treatment medical science has devised to yield the best possible results. I hope for many things, all of them bright and beautiful and good. "Hope is the thing with feathers," Emily Dicksonson wrote, and she was right. Hope can soar, even in a storm.

But my father is 66 years old. Whether treatment is a resounding success or not, this is the final stage of his life. That stage may last 20 years (that's the hope talking) or 20 months (that's the fear). The only thing certain is that it will end.  Admitting that isn't the failure of hope, it's the shouldering of truth.

Heavy, sometimes, that truth thing. But liberating too. Truth clears your head. It cleans up your priority list. It shines a light on what matters, revealing all the trivial and petty things in life for exactly what they are: a waste of precious, precious time.

"Malignant" is an ugly word. But it's also a wake-up call.

"What are the other two?" he asked.

"In bed when you're sick," I said, pulling a stack of paperbacks out of my tote bag, "and on airplanes. But hospitals are number one. Hospitals are no place for serious literature."

Hospitals are no place for our robustly healthy father, either, but some malevolent gene or faulty biological switch decided otherwise. Thursday, as I read chicklit and my brother paged through the latest Robert B. Parker mystery, surgeons at the University of Minnesota Medical Center removed a golf-ball-sized tumor from his occipital lobe.

Adding irony to injury: Ten years ago, nearly to the day, Dad was sitting at his wife's bedside in the same hospital. My stepmother, stricken with one of the deadliest forms of leukemia, spent months in the oncology unit receiving chemotherapy, radiation, and eventually a bone marrow transplant. Day after day, night after night, week after week,  she fought the cancer in her blood while Dad sat vigil and slept in that hospital chair. He wouldn't leave. When asked to go out to dinner or take a break, his answer was always the same: "She can't leave."

It was the simplest and most profound statement of love I've ever heard.

Now he's the one in the hospital bed, she at his side. What are the chances? I can't decide whether Fate is a bitch for letting lightning strike twice, or benevolent for letting her live to take her turn in that bedside chair. I can only hope that Dad shares her talent for beating the odds.

I know this much, though: Love is a chair.

Love is being there.

This has little to do with writing, the purported subject of my blog. But it does remind me of a half-forgotten story idea about a cancer survivor. So much fiction and memoir about illness or debilitation is focused on the battle--bearing the shock of a diagnosis or sudden injury, struggling to overcome or, failing that, to accept. So little is about what happens later. The quiet after the battle. The price of the victory or loss. The going home. How one is changed. What seems important after such an experience and what no longer matters.

Not my usual fictional territory, but I'd like to write it one day.

In the meantime, my friends, family and dear ones...please know that I love you every day that dawns. Even (and especially) the days I forget to tell you so.

1. Character repeatedly getting knocked out to end a scene or chapter.
   
2. Character looking in mirror to describe self.
3. More than one character with an unusual eye color.
4. Eyes that "flash" or change color to signify emotions.
5. Characters who tell each other things they already know.
6. Improbable coincidences that get the main character out of predicaments.
7. A different word in place of "said" every time.
8. Plots that depend upon the characters never having the sense to compare notes or tell each other things.
9. A doorway to certain death. Or a bottomless pit.
10. Always specifying how people say things. Sadly, furiously, softly...in fact, most -ly words need to be stomped before they can breed.

1.
Kenny had the soul of a show-off without the skill. Once he rode his bike no-handed past Peggy Urbanski, the fifth-grade beauty, smack into the nearest lamppost. He entered the school talent contest every year only to sing off-key. In class his hand was the first to shoot into the air when the teacher asked a question, but nine times out of ten his answers were wrong.

2.
Callie Parker was a great beauty trapped in the body of a horse-faced spinster. She acted as though she saw Marilyn Monroe in the mirror every morning (the truth was closer to Olive Oyl) and dressed as though she actually had cleavage, a discernible waist, and legs someone would want to see. She strutted into parties with an air of arrogant confidence, favoring the best-looking men in the room with a look that forgave them for being speechless at the sight of her. It was startling how well this worked.

3.
Ellen, an English professor's daughter, reached for the Bard in times of stress the way some women reach for Godiva chocolates.