Spring 2023 Update

 It is June 11th, 2023, and the last few months have been very eventful. I have neglected Roblog to the point that child health care services is starting to breath down my neck. I will try to hit the major points of the first half of 2023 in a single paragraph each, in the hopes that this unclogs my brain, freeing up the old pipes to unleash my wit (or whatever) on the page.

I took the kids to Kansas for 5 weeks, mid-January to mid-February. It was not quite long enough, but circumstances squeezed the trip at both ends. In the past, I've been ready to return to Korea, but this time I was not. I treasured the time spent with my parents in a way that I haven't before, in part because I am more aware of how old they are. It is a natural part of the arc of life to outlive one's parents, much preferable to the alternative. But that does not make it easy to contemplate. I am fortunate that they are both active, and in good health for people pushing 80. I am proud of the work they do in the church and community, from the homeless shelter to the prison to the library to a thousand little construction projects over the years. (It might sound like an exaggeration, but if my father has done fewer than a thousand projects, I would be surprised.)

Also on the trip Maxine and I started to seriously consider the idea of her moving to America on her own at some point. We visited the Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) campus in Leavenworth, and she actually found it inviting and maybe even a little appealing. The teachers and admins we met were also very friendly, and the facility itself looks like a great place to learn.

Horyon returned to work in February of this year, after a year and three months of medical leave. It has been a difficult transition, in part because she is now the 4th oldest teacher out of 25 in the school. She had been a homeroom teacher for many years, and now she is not. Her list of duties and responsibilities is shorter, and she doesn't have to stay into the evening more than a couple of times a month, rather than three or four times a week. But the pay is lower, and she feels less relevant. 

We are still reeling financially, so I asked for and received overtime this semester. I went from teaching 12 hours per week to 18, and discovered that I am no longer as young as I once was. I pour a lot of myself into my teaching, interacting with students and encouraging them both individually and as entire classes. I dislike grading, both the process and the idea of it, though I understand the need. Soon I will be administering final exams, then putting numbers on a screen which tell students how much they are worth. Ugh.

Maxine is absorbed in being a high school senior. Her school does a pair of big projects for their senior year: a drama that the class produces, and individual presentations on topics of their choice. This has taken a lot of her attention, and having a steady boyfriend (her 2nd, more than a year now!) and a tight circle of friends means that we don't see her much at home.

Quinten is in 8th grade, so the last year of middle school. They also do a set of projects like the seniors, only smaller. They did their individual presentations a couple of weeks ago, which had him staying up late at night and seriously stressing out. He did a fantastic job, and his presentation was clearly the best of the six students in his class. I know this, even though I do not understand Korean well enough to follow any of them, and was starting to sink under the first waves of Covid on that day. Quinten is getting tall, and may soon be taller than me. It will be nice to have someone else who can get stuff off the top shelf.

Yes, I finally got Covid. I managed to be quarantined during literally the last week that Korea was quarantining people with Covid. I never had much of a fever, and only a mild cough, but damn it made me tired. For about three days I could barely concentrate. Standing up to go the bathroom wiped me out, and I was sleeping for 12 hours a day. I am three weeks out, and still find myself making more mistakes than usual, thinking more slowly than I am used to, and unable to make thematically and structurally consistent lists of three that do not rely on a third point that is basically a synthesis of the first two.

I've played two concerts this semester, and been sick three times, including the covid. I both love my job and wish that I didn't have to spend so much time on it. I've watched too much Netflix for my own good, and spend too much time sitting in front of my computer. I haven't been on my bike in a very long time, and am afraid to get back on, knowing how much it will hurt. I don't think I have been out for a ride since Horyon was diagnosed with breast cancer in October of 2021. Maybe I just didn't want to do anything risky. Honestly, I'm not sure that I had a motive for not doing it. Laziness is usually sufficient motive for me to avoid damn near anything.

I have started to let myself become a part of the church I've been going to. My long-time friend Rick is now the pastor there, which helps. It has taken me a long time to pull back from cursing the very idea of church to wanting to be a part of it again. I have a better understanding of people who never make the return. And just a few days ago I had a new RICC-related experience: I started to mourn the loss of it. Reading from Psalm 124, 

"If the LORD had not been on our side when people attacked us,

they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us, 

the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, 

the raging waters would have swept us away."

I read it and in my heart I heard, "my anger would have swallowed me alive, and I would have invited in the raging waters, looking forward to being swept away." And something broke inside, and I cried. And they were my first tears for RICC since I was invited to take my talents elsewhere. 

I was surprised at how good it felt to be sad about it, rather than angry. I believe that it is the beginning of mourning for RICC, and my loss of it. It is messy emotion that these words do not work, they don't show the truth of it, because I don't know exactly what it is that I am mourning. But I will dwell in it, and I am grateful for it. 

There is more to this semester, but much of it escapes my addled brain at this late hour. It is just after one a.m., and I have spent less than an hour and a half writing this. Usually I would set aside a Roblog piece for a day or two, then reread, maybe run it past someone else. But this one is going out raw. 

End of 2022 Cancer Update

[I am publishing this without Horyon's go ahead. So it may get modified in the future where my memory has failed me.]

December always ends up being a messy month, and December of 2022 was no exception. 

But it had one piece of fantastic news: Horyon is officially in remission from breast cancer! 

I do need to back up to summer, though. Horyon had planned to go back to teaching in the fall semester of 2022. It was a neat little plan that she had made as soon as she found out that she wouldn't need the harsh radiation or chemotherapy treatments for her cancer, just surgery and long-term hormone suppression treatments. (Which, by the way, she will continue to take four times a year in 2023, as well as official tests twice a year.)

To go back to her job, she needed an official document from her doctors in Seoul, so she went to an appointment in July and asked for it. The doctor told her that he would not give her the document, because she was still in treatment. The stress from working would make it much more likely that she would get cancer again. If her financial situation was that desperate, he would give a provisional paper which acknowledged that her risk of cancer was increased, likely screwing up future insurance claims if she did get it.

When she told me about this, I was sure that it would be a struggle for her to accept. I thought that she would look for loopholes, try to get the doctor to change his mind. I thought she might even just insist on getting the provisional paper.

But she didn't do any of that. She conceded immediately. It didn't even take her more than a day to get over the decision. I found this remarkable, To understand why, I will briefly revisit the first year of our marriage:

The year is 2001, which used to seem like the far future to me, the year of the Space Odyssey, when we would have colonies on the moon and commercial space flights and the first manned expedition to Jupiter would be just around the corner. We got married on February 17th of 2001, and both of us had given notice at our respective jobs in the weeks before. Right after the wedding finished, while we were having photos taken, Rick VanManen told me that when I got back from my honeymoon I should come interview at Kosin University. I did, and they hired me, and I went right to work in March (without a proper visa, which they delayed doing the paperwork on for... never mind).

Horyon decided to be a housewife. At the time it seemed like a fine idea: my salary was enough for us to live well enough in the furnished apartment that Kosin provided. Horyon bought her first sewing machine and quickly moved from hobby to obsession. After about three months of this, she was going a bit stir-crazy. Taking care of a home and sewing just wasn't enough for this woman that had been working non-stop since before middle school. She had to have something less squishy than me to focus on. So she got a job at a hagwon, prepping students for big English tests. She was good at it, though she didn't enjoy it very much. And it was in an inconvenient neighborhood for coming home late at night. After a few months of that, we quit. And by we, I mean that I went with her to her manager and told him that I didn't want her to work there anymore. It was the most bizarre cultural adaptation thing I have ever done, and I used to live in Nepal.

She went job hunting, and started back at a middle school the next spring. Her experiment with unemployment was finished, and the results were conclusive: she couldn't do it.

Horyon actually reminds me of my parents. They both retired from their regular jobs years ago, but they are constantly busy with one thing or another. Mom is in a number of groups that work to make the community better, Dad is always working on a small (or large) construction project to help someone who needs it, and they both spend a few hours a week at church, with choir practice and different committee meetings. 

Whereas I, if left to my own devices, will spend the day compressing the seat of my desk chair. I'll do some writing on a good day (and hey, it's New Year's Day 2023, so why not resolve to do that more? So far so good!), and taking in some video on even better days. (I must recommend "Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery. Top tier story telling. Very entertaining.)

Horyon spent the year much better than I would have: she took up yoga, overhauled her (and our family's) diet, spent a lot of time with friends, and eventually...

She took a job teaching English at the kids' school. The school lost a couple of English teachers, and asked us to fill in. She taught about five hours a week, which is not a huge number of hours, but it was elementary and Waldorf and totally outside of her wheelhouse. Of course, she dove in, spent hours preparing, and knocked it out of the park. It was nowhere near the time she would have spent as a high school teacher, but it wasn't exactly relaxing around the house, either.

Speaking of not being relaxing around the house, for about 10 years, we had been accustomed to Horyon having only a couple of weeks off during summer and again in the winter. Those were exciting vacations, the time that we could drive to Kyungju, have special meals, do family stuff. We all got used to it. Having her around all the time has required a rebalance of our lives, one which we have now grown accustomed to. And we will all have to get accustomed to a new/old balance again. Because as of January 1st, 2023 Horyon is back in the employment of Dongsung Boys High School. Soon she will go back to work. 

Cancer Update

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.

--------------

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.

Our Next Trial

 The next Sack family ordeal is now on the calendar.

Eight days ago (October 17th) Horyon noticed a lump in her breast. The next day she talked to the nurse at her school, who recommended, insisted, that she go to a clinic the same day.

Horyon went to a clinic on Monday, where they took a biopsy, and guessed it was cancer. (Spoiler alert: they were right.) They also took blood, and made a follow-up appointment for Thursday (Oct. 21st). 

The next day, Horyon started talking to an uncle who is a doctor in Seoul. Busan is a big city, with good hospitals and clinics, but Seoul is where the talent focuses in Korea. She made a couple of appointments in Seoul for October 25th, 

They confirmed that it was cancer. One lump is about 1.2 cm (that's less than half an inch), and they found two smaller lumps in the same breast. Nothing in the other, but couldn't tell us much beyond that. This is still the discovery phase, and Seoul is the place to go for more detail.

We had not talked with our friends about it at this point. We hadn't even told the kids, though I'm sure they noticed that we were both more tired than usual. We told them Thursday night, at my insistence. They had a few questions, and there was some crying, but they took it well. The next day Maxine asked what stage it was, so she had clearly done some research at school. At that point, we had no answer.

On Sunday we told our church friends after the service. There was a lot of praying, and crying, and sympathy, and offers of help in the times ahead. It was a huge relief to share the news. It's unbelievable how tempting it is to just not talk to anyone when something like this happens. It's not even a conscious decision, you just don't want to tell people about it. I explained it three times to different groups of friends, then couldn't do it anymore. 

We had lunch with my friend, Tim Taylor. His wife died of lung cancer less than a year ago, and he had a lot to offer us, besides Thai food for lunch. (Which, for the record, was very, very good!)

 She told me yesterday that she was starting to feel pain where there was none before.

This morning (Monday, October 25th) I drove Horyon to the train station for a 5:30 train to Seoul. She had some more tests done, all the standard cancer diagnostics, and another biopsy. I came home, got the kids off to school, and taught my one hour of Monday classes in a more scattered state than usual.

Then I got a message from Horyon: she will go back to Seoul November 9th for a sonogram, then again for the results before the surgery, which is scheduled for November 26th. A month from today. The doctor told her that it looks like early stage cancer, and she did well to find it and act on it so quickly.

In short, we still have a tough hill to climb. I am not a worrier, but this has been a test of my faith. I am not looking forward to seeing how God will grow me through this. I suspect that God is planning a major renovation in our lives, and like most renovations it will be messy while it happens, but worth it when it's finished.

The rest of this post is a political slant on our story. If you would rather not have your ideas challenged, feel free to skip it.

A big piece of good news for us is that we live in a country (South Korea) that has basically socialized medicine. The national insurance (a government run provider) will pay 95% of the costs. You see, socialized medicine is really, really bad news for some people: the people who make money off of health insurance. The health conglomerates that charge incredible rates to insurance companies that use those rates to justify the hefty premiums you pay, and squeeze you for whatever they can. Horyon just showed up, gave them her info, and it was done. She got a series of 10 tests done today, total cost about US$260, and that's before insurance!* It costs what it actually costs, and the health insurance pays most of it!

*Big correction! I misunderstood Horyon's message. The $260 price tag was after national health insurance paid. The pre-insurance cost was closer to $800. Still, at $800 for a complete series of tests like this feels very cheap to most Americans!

I have never been so relieved, even happy, to not live in the United States. I love my home country, but I know that some Americans will read this and call me a liar or a shill or an idiot. Have I bought into socialized medicine? HELL YES. Don't believe everything rich people tell you. If we had stayed in the States, on my teacher salary and her working out of our home, this would have been a heavy blow. There is not much point in speculating about it, but in our four years living there I paid so much in health insurance, and still ended up using free clinics because I couldn't afford the premiums.

Allow me to elaborate on the phrase "basically socialized medicine." A few years ago, Horyon started to worry about getting cancer, as there is a history in her family. So she got cancer insurance. (I can't get it until I lose a fair bit of weight, but that is another blog post.) It is a monthly expense that proved to be a wise investment. This insurance paid out immediately on her diagnosis, a chunk of cash that will cover traveling back and forth to Seoul, that missing 5%, and other things that will make this whole thing so much less stressful.

You see, you can get better insurance if you want. And for people without insurance, you can still go to hospitals and clinics. It's expensive, but it costs what it costs, not what the companies think they can squeeze out of you.

But enough soap boxing. Feel free to email me if you want to continue the conversation. Or unfriend me on Facebook if you would rather feel good than be informed.