I chose the title before I started writing. That was November 29th, so "Early December" proved to be wildly optimistic.
On November 26th Horyon had surgery, and came through it well. Afterwards she told me that she was so afraid going in, cold, alone, and vulnerable on the table. But then she noticed writing on the ceiling, where someone flat on their back would easily see it. The writing said, "Do not fear, for I am with you." She read those words over and over, and the fear left her.
The words were from Isaiah 41:10, which reads in full,
"fear not, for I am with you;
be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you,
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." *
I talked to her on the phone, both before and after the surgery. It was hard not being there with her, but it simply was not an option: due to Corona restrictions, people can't just go in and out of the hospital. Once you have had a negative Covid test, you have to stay. Go out, and you need to get another test. Which means you sleep on a little cot in the room with the patients.
Patients, because we can't afford a single occupant room. Horyon was in a room with four other people, though she has since moved to a three-person room.
She sent me a couple of photos of the view out the window.
It's a very nice view. Helped her pass the days. She told me that looking out the window, watching people pass by, made her realize that just a month ago we were living like that: walking around, living normal lives.
Then our lives lost the semblance of control that we had before. Our original plan was for Horyon to move from the surgery hospital to a cancer recovery clinic. She was going to stay there for about three weeks, depending on her recovery speed and post-surgical treatment. They specialize in healthy food (in which Koreans put a lot of stock), post-surgical care, and care through chemotherapy and radiation. They are a bit expensive, but we decided that it would be worth it.
However, Horyon is a hot lady. By which I mean that not only is she very attractive to me, she also has a slightly high normal body temperature. When the recovery center found out this bit of trivia, they told her that she would have to get COVID tested every three days, at her own expense. She noped out of that: the nose swabbing is stressful, and the test without insurance is expensive.
So she stayed at the hospital for a few more days, then moved to stay with her aunt (mother's sister). The next day she had to go into quarantine, because someone who had been staying in her crowded hospital room had tested positive for COVID. She and her mother, aunt and uncle all had to get tested and hunker down in their home for a week.
Fortunately, their tests came back negative (which means they passed, right?), so their quarantine lasted less than a week.
I'm going to drop out of the narrative for a minute here, and confess something: I started writing this post in November, got bits and pieces done, then abandoned it. I'm now reconstructing what has happened since the beginning of December, and finding my memory to be even more unreliable than usual. In other words, I am not sure about what exactly happened and when. And I hate to write something when I'm not sure about it. Not only that, but ever since we got the original diagnosis, my mental processes have been running slow. They are coming back now, but I've sort of lost a lot of details of the past couple of months. I will try to hit the important details. But enough about me, back to Horyon's story:
The first, and perhaps coolest detail, is that Horyon's surgery was done by robot. That, to me, was so science fictional that I couldn't quite believe it. And in fact, "robot" proved to be not quite the right word. Rather, it was a miniature machine controlled by a doctor, so more of a waldo than a robot.
As I've mentioned before, Horyon had previously purchased cancer insurance, on top of her regular national health insurance. When the doctors scanned her body, they found that the cancer was only in her right breast, but that it had metastasized into at least 14 tumors. Keeping in mind that her previous exam was in July, this is a crazy rate of growth. They ran 13 or 14 different tests on her, including bone scans of her entire skeleton, blood work, biopsies, ultrasounds, and the machine that goes, "ping!" The cancer had pretty much taken over that one organ, but not managed to escape into the rest of her body. Even now, at the end of January 2022, he has continued to have tests done every couple of weeks, and there is still no sign that it migrated.
[a quick editorial note: I can see that the previous paragraph is a bit of a mess, and lacking in focus, but i am not going to try to fix it. It stands as is.]
The only solution the doctors had for her was a complete mastectomy. I don't think that I, as a man, can ever completely understand the impact of that judgment. I've been told that it might be comparable to having to lose a testicle, or the whole cast of underwear characters [nope. not gonna try to fix it.] The best I could do was to back up her every decision, offer sympathy, and not make suggestions about how she could take up archery like an Amazonian Warrior.
They did give her a choice of how to do the mastectomy, though: the cheap option was a complete removal by hand, like the warrior women only in a modern hospital. The standard health insurance would cover almost all of the costs, but typically most of the skin is lost, including the nipple. And that insurance doesn't cover reconstruction, which can be a long, painful process. Also, a few friends warned me that they had heard of Korean doctors doing this operation and not removing all of the breast tissue, leading to remission.
Option two was Robot Surgery: top-of-the-line machine, run by top-of-the-line doctors. Not covered by national health, but well within our cancer insurance budget. I found an article about the first surgery of this type being performed in the U.S.A. in 2018. [Back-up research? No thank you. It's just a Roblog post, not an article in a medical journal.] So this is cutting edge medical technology.
When Horyon presented me with the choice: modern surgery that uses a big chunk of our insurance money, or old-fashioned surgery and pocketing the change, I told her that I wanted whatever she wanted to do. But in my heart, I was begging for the robot surgery. And that's what we went with.
The doctors were confident: they had caught it early, they were at a state-of-the-art hospital using cutting edge technology to do a surgery that they had likely performed hundreds of times. It went well, and they went right into the reconstruction surgery, which also went well.
A week or so later, she came back to Busan. We decided that she needed to stay with her parents, which she did for about three weeks. She stayed with us Christmas Eve, but we weren't quite ready to make it permanent: her mother could focus on healthy meals for her, and her father could help make her comfortable, and she did not have to do anything but heal.
Our home, under the best of circumstances, is chaotic. A month of just me and the kids did not lessen the chaos, except for one thing: the week before Horyon's surgery we hired a cleaning service. It's an agency that sends out a woman to clean for four hours. She cleans the floors, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and does some dusting. And, as anyone who uses a cleaning service will tell you, it inspires you to do some basic housekeeping before they arrive. So we have this time once a week when everyone cleans up whatever stuff they have spread out in the living room or dining room table. I wish we had started doing this years ago.
Since the surgery, Horyon has had appointments every week or two with the hospital in Seoul. They've checked how the surgery scars are healing (mostly well, though they were worried about one patch of skin for a while), and doing follow-up scans and tests, to make sure that the cancer had not migrated to other parts of her body.
The most expensive test was so state-of-the-art that they had to send samples to The States. It was an optional test that cost us about four million Korean won, which is about $3,320. The options were to either skip this test and go right into mild chemotherapy, or let the test determine whether to have mild chemotherapy... or no chemotherapy.
For the uninitiated, chemotherapy is pumping poison into your body to kill cancer cells that you can't find with tests, or get to using surgery. It is also used when it is suspected that the cancer has spread, and may pop up again in the near future. It is a nasty business, like killing rats in your house with a shotgun: it takes the rats out for sure, but leaves your house in need of repair. The side effects of chemotherapy
Because the test was optional, it was not covered by the national health insurance. Fortunately, Horyon's cancer insurance paid out a large sum that we could spend however we wanted to. And we chose to do this.
The doctors sent two samples, which came back with two scores. They told her that between 15 and 20, chemotherapy was optional, depending on what the patient and doctor to decide. From 21 up chemo is definitely called for. Her scores were 14 and 10. The doctor said she doesn't need chemo.
And this is my wife: her first response is, "Are you sure?" Doctor: "Yes. You don't need it."
"But 14 is right next to 15!" Doctor, sarcastically: "Do you want to have chemotherapy?"
Then it started to sink in: she didn't need chemotherapy. Really.
She spent a couple of weeks living at her parents' home, being pampered, not having to move. She took walks and did her physical therapy. Rested. We wanted her at home, but two weeks into just me and the kids, we knew she couldn't do it: we were managing okay, but too many things were just barely getting done at home, and I couldn't take care of her. So she waited until she could take care of herself.
She moved back here just before new year's eve. By then she was able to prepare her own food for breakfast (steamed vegetables: purple and white cabbage, sweet potato, pumpkin, plus fried tomatoes and a hard-boiled egg). The kids and I cooked for ourselves, and did the dishes.
She slept in our bed for one night, but it was too stressful for both of us: my snoring makes it hard for her to sleep, when I roll from one side to the other it bounces her around, and I constantly worry that I will roll over and hurt her (which gave me flashbacks to sleeping with baby Maxine on the bed). So she sleeps on a floor mattress in her room, and we both sleep better.
She gradually got her strength back, and is now cooking some meals for the family. We are all eating the healthy breakfast, and more vegetables in general.
A friend of mine reminded me that all of us are in constant, low-level, border skirmish battles with cancer throughout our bodies. From time to time, a cell will decide that it is going to stop doing the work it should be doing, take whatever it can get, and make copies of itself. Our immune system usually figures out what's going on and puts a stop to it.
Horyon is determined to not let cancer take hold again. She is taking this semester off, and has steered the family towards a healthier diet. She and I both eat a big plate of steamed vegetables for breakfast almost every day: cabbage (white and purple), broccoli, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and a chestnut or two (which is one or two too many if you ask me), with some carrot slices and tomato briefly cooked in a little olive oil, and a hard-boiled egg. There is one more that is difficult to describe, or even name: it is a kind of single-clove Korean garlic that is slow cooked until it has a very thick consistency, almost like fudge, but stickier. It tastes similar to garlic, but it is also sweet. It tastes like it would be good with... something. I just can't figure out what. It's not really a good match for anything else on the plate. I don't dislike it, but if I never ate it again I would still be puzzling out what it tastes like.
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And on that appropriately obscure, wandering note, I will close this entry.
