Let me lead with the good news:
They have stuck cameras into Horyon's digestive tract (ew), scanned every part of her body with all sorts of machines, tested her blood, taken core samples (biopsies, if you're a stickler for details) and read her tea leaves: there is no sign that it has spread to other parts of her body. Being on the receiving end of all this was unpleasant at times, but you need to know whether the news is good or bad. This was good news.
The doctors were just guessing, but this week they made it official: Horyon has early stage 1 breast cancer. The earlier you catch it, the better, and this is not just as early as you can expect to find it, but earlier.
The Story of How we Caught it Before It should have been Possible to Catch
I joined the story just as it was starting: Horyon came to me worried. She put my hand on one side of her chest, and said, "Feel this." I felt both sides. On her right, it felt like a half-flattened marble sticking out, that wasn't there on the left. The word you never want to hear about someone's breast. A lump. "Should I do something?"
"Yes."
The next day she went to the nurse teacher at the high school where she works, who also said, "Yes. Do something. Today. NOW."
So Horyon went to a small clinic, where they took the first biopsy. The biopsy needle has to be big, to get enough tissue to make into slides. She told me it hurt pretty badly, though she recovered from that pain in just a couple of days.
But she was confused: they had put the needle in a good three inches lower than where we had felt that lump. Yes, she's almost 50, and things aren't as perky as they used to be. But she would have had to been hanging by her knees from a trapeze to be off by that much. (True confession time: she wasn't.) So she asked the doctor what happened.
The doctor explained that what she was feeling, and what I had felt, was just a bone abnormality. One rib with a little protrusion that isn't there on the other. Nothing to worry about, perfectly normal.
This is the point in the story in which your faith is staring to make noise, whatever direction it runs in. So choose whichever paragraph you find most suitable:
A) It's a miracle! God rewarded our faith and prayers and Christian life! He spared us from the ravages of late-stage breast cancer, and is the ultimate doctor in this story!
B) We defied statistics on this one. The universe is an endless table, with dice being thrown constantly, and we just came up lucky 7s like, a dozen times in a row. It's not impossible, just not very likely. Nowhere near the improbability of a whale appearing out of nowhere high in the atmosphere, of course.
C) We have generated good karma by being kind to others, and the universe is bringing that back around to us. There will be balance.
D) It is a miracle of the statistical fluke variety. It is not a reward for good behavior, just as the cancer is not a punishment for bad. It might have been the difference between life and death. Or it might have provided a wider gap between "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Maybe the brokenness of the world was sinking its claws into my wife when God stepped in and gave Horyon a little taste of the fear from her own future.
I can talk, and theorize, and dance around it all day long, but in the end the word "miracle" just won't leave my mind, and I won't stop using it. It's the same kind of miracle that brought Horyon and I together. I won't be offended if you can't buy into that, or even if you push back on it. To me, this is like every other major miracle God has worked in my life: obviously so to those who are looking for miracles, and easily dismissed by those who can't or won't see. You can tell me that we got lucky, or that we were blessed.
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One strange thing about what we are going through is that right now Horyon is not really suffering much. She is starting to feel some physical pain from the biggest tumor, but she says it's barely noticeable. There is a sense of dread that is slowly settling over us, but it's like a wispy fog of dread that doesn't block our sight. It just makes life a little bit harder to see.
I started writing this a week ago, and I've noticed that it takes up a chunk of my processing power all the time. I am slower than usual to come up with the words I need, the next bit of the lesson to teach, the motivation to do anything.
At first there were times when I didn't think about what was coming at all. Those stretches have been shrinking, though. I told Horyon the other day that this feels like moving to a foreign country did when I was young: I knew it was coming with some part of my head, but I didn't really feel like I was moving sometimes until I was in the airport saying goodbye. As I got older, that threshold pushed back into the packing stage, and even the ticket-holding stage. But at some level, my thick, slow brain just refuses to accept reality until it is dropped into the deep end, kicking and screaming.
But cancer is a very intrusive reality. We learned this week that the cancer has not spread through her body, but it has pretty much fully claimed her right breast.Some things I learned in the wake of this:
1. The breast tissue must be taken out, but the skin, including the nipple, can be almost completely saved if you use robot surgery.
2. "Robot breast removal surgery" is a real thing. I want to know more, but that motivation thing I mentioned earlier has effectively blocked me from learning whether it looks more like R2D2 or a Terminator. Or Johnny Five, for that matter. I suspect that when I do find the truth, it will be somewhat of a letdown. This may be part of my motivation for not learning more.
3. When you catch breast cancer this early, the treatment routine is mostly standardized, can be highly refined, and no longer has the ring of death that came with "The Big C" while I was growing up in the 70s and 80s.
5. Women who are facing a full mastectomy do not take much comfort from the legend of the Amazonian Warrior Women who all had their right breasts removed to make it easier to draw a bow. (Full disclosure, some women may appreciate this, but not mine.)
6. Four is a bad luck number, because the Chinese character for the number 4 resembles the character for death. That is why older buildings don't have a fourth floor, and that's why I skipped it in this list. Although, to be fair, I learned this a long time ago. Pretty sure it's come up in the Roblog before.
7. I am even more prone to mental wandering than usual. Just take a look back at this list.
There's another weird thing: I feel more like I'm observing myself than usual. You know the feeling like your life is a movie that you are watching, rather than living? I haven't been that deep into it, but it's had small stretches like that.
Well, it did last week. This post has been in the pipeline for eight days now, and that has kind of passed. Or I've gotten so used to it that I don't notice. Now I am in an emotionally and mentally tired space. It's like I don't have any down time, because when I do my brain knows exactly where to go: the cancer treadmill. I haven't slept well, can't get work done, can't carry on a conversation without getting stuck on simple words, and can't balance a sentence well enough to keep my readers from feeling like they need to take a breath by the time they get to the end of one.
I know that Horyon is going through some of this, but her naturally driven personality has kept her very busy, even though she hasn't been at school for the past week and a bit. She can't just let go of her job completely, because she will feel bad if she abandons her students, so she writes review questions, and has recorded a few lessons from home.
She has hired a cleaning lady to come once a week, and the first day is tomorrow. She has given us all lists of things to do, that basically involve cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes. Needless to say, I will not be accomplishing everything on that list.
And with that, I will hit publish.
