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. 

How to Leave a Church pt. 1

[A quick note: in the original post, I included the first name of the pastor at RICC. A friend suggested that it might be taken as a personal attack, which is not my intention at all. But safer to remove his name, so it is now gone. I do not usually edit Roblog posts so much, but it's important to me to get this one right.  January 5th, 2023]

If you are looking for actual instructions for leaving a church, I am sorry. This is not a how-to guide. It's really more of a memoir. And honestly, it isn't even really part one, at least chronologically speaking. It's a chapter out of the middle of my story. The most important chapter, I think. But I am completely unwilling to "Episode 4" you on this, to discourage readers from starting with the prequels. 

The easiest way to leave a church is to move your home to someplace far away. I've done this a few times. It hurts, but everybody both gets it and gets over it quickly. Generally there are no hard feelings. If you are a 45 minute drive away, people are happily surprised when you show up at your old church, and they don't expect you to attend regularly. All the more so if you leave the country.

Another way to leave a church is to storm out. I sort of tried this many years ago, and the regret has colored my view of church ever since. I wasn't happy with a major leadership decision and found myself unable to focus on God whenever the aforementioned leader was leading the service. Which happened most Sundays. I didn't cause much of a storm, really. I simply took my services elsewhere. (Sorry. I didn't mean for the pun-ishment to spillover onto you, my dear reader.)

In 2022 I explored a new way to leave a church. I left the church I had been with for 10 years after serving in many capacities, giving a number of sermons (around a dozen, I think), and making and saying goodbye to many friends. But it was clear that it was time for me to go.

I should admit from the start that this is a difficult subject for me to write about. I have made a lot of progress on the road of forgiveness, but I am still on the journey. I know that I was not rejected as a person, but because of my ideas. Both popular psychology and the Bible agree that I should not take it personally.

But it hurt like hell. And I was mad as hell. I felt betrayed and belittled. Not only did I not want to be at RICC, I could not imagine being there at all.

You know what I hate? Online recipes. I Google a recipe for roasted pumpkin because I have a pumpkin and I want to know what temperature to set my oven at. But first I have to read paragraph after paragraph about how wonderful fall is, and how plentiful pumpkins are, and how easy they are to cook, and how they brighten your dinner table, and how the author's mother taught them to cook this simple, comforting, hearty food and it warms the cockles of the author's heart to share the secret with us. The hope that we will teach this recipe to our children is expressed. The whole thing is lovely. Touching. Almost cinematic. Cut to the chase, please. What oven temperature do I need?

I am skipping right to the solution to my problem. (Well, it would have been a bit more of a skip without the pumpkin recipe rant, I know. But those darn recipes, am I right?) The problem itself will have to wait for another post. Part 2 is already in the works, but it meanders even worse than part 1.

Early in July, just a few months after I had left RICC, my friend Tim came back to Korea to take care of some business. (He had moved to Vietnam long before any of this went down.) He was attending RICC that morning, and asked me to join him for lunch. So I went back to RICC for the church service that morning. Afterwards we talked, and he got a sense for how disturbed I was*. He suggested a meeting between me and RICC's pastor, offering to mediate. We did just that a few days later. It was a raw conversation.

*What he said was, "I have never seen you so angry, Rob. You must do something about this."

(In hindsight, as I'm writing this, it is striking that this meeting did not seem to be such a big deal for the pastor. He was not defensive, and apologized for how he had handled my situation. But there was no move towards reconciliation, other than expressing hope that it would happen. He seemed very sad through the whole process. Sad and reluctant, but ultimately ready to make the sacrifice for his church.)

At the end of that meeting, Tim suggested that I should attend RICC and pray every week in person for the pastor. I knew that anger was consuming me, and that I had not been able to dispose of it properly on my own. Tim's idea felt Holy Spirit-led to me, and so I committed to it, with no idea of how long it would last.

So I resumed both attending RICC and praying with the pastor before the service. I had used to pray like this for him before our falling out, and considered it a good thing for both of us and the church. I would pray for his sermon preparation, and that the message he delivered would draw the congregation closer to God. I can't speak for him, but my pre-service prayers took on a new meaning and purpose for me, this time around: my topics were pretty much the same, and I still wanted God to use the pastor to reach the people. The difference was that there was anger in my heart towards him. I thought this would make it hard for me to pray for him, but it really didn't. Instead, I found that God's love moved through me in my prayers for him, and perforated the anger in my heart. Over the next few weeks, prayer not only softened my anger, but wore it away.

Before praying regularly for the pastor, I was having trouble being in any church service, anywhere. I thought that I could just shake the dust off of my sandals and leave RICC behind. But sitting in other services at other churches, my mind kept going back. The anger in my heart was an anchor with an elastic chain that kept pulling my head back to all the things that frustrated me about RICC. It wasn't every moment, but it happened a lot.

I am no spring chicken. I know that forgiveness is an important, if not the most important aspect of Christianity. Maybe even the whole world. And I thought I was working on it. I had met the pastor (once), and told him that I forgave him, and meant it. I really did.

Or at least I thought I did. Maybe I just intended to forgive him. Or maybe I just forgave what I could but there was still a lot left to forgive. I am absolutely sure that I forgave him for the style and method in which he dropped me like a diseased turd, even if I didn't forgive him for the act of dropping me. At some level I must have known that it would be a process, and that it would not happen overnight. But there was always that anger in my heart, whispering to me, like an addiction. "Go on, pick me up! It will feel good, and you can put me back down any time."

The funny thing is, that when I started attending again, and praying for him before the service, the forgiveness started to flow. I could not hold onto my grudge while I was praying for him. I did pick it up again from time to time, but always to find that it had gotten lighter. 

As we continued, I found that I did not need to pick up my grudge as often as before. I sometimes looked around during the week to find that I wasn't carrying it at all. Of course, there were also times when I would suddenly feel my grudge jump onto my back, like the proverbial monkey. But at least it was no longer a gorilla.

"Time heals all wounds," they say. They never add, "But be sure to wash the wound with a disinfectant, and keep it bandaged," but we all know that's part of it. And sometimes a wound requires a trip to the emergency room, and stitches, and vitamin E gel to reduce scarring. Emotional wounds also require more than just the passage of time. Like an untreated flesh wound, they tend to fester. If you're lucky, the pain will fade into the background noise of the world. Or maybe that is not lucky? Maybe too much of that "noise" in the background makes one unable to hear the truth being whispered all the time by God. At any rate, neither type of wound heals without care, no matter how much time one gives it.

Over the course of a few weeks of forcing myself to go to RICC, it became easier. By mid-September, I found myself in a mental space which I had not predicted: I was tolerating RICC with very little effort. I wasn't happy with the worship service, or the preaching, or the music really*, but the idea of returning weekly didn't make me want to break something or scream. For the first time since February, I had an actual choice of whether or not to attend. Until September, the thought of attending RICC was almost totally repugnant to me, even though there were people there who I love. Instead, attending RICC became, in my mind, just another kind of work towards God's kingdom. But not the only work, and not work to which God was direct-from-the-burning-bush calling me.

*It has always been so loud. I can't hear the people around me singing, only the people on the stage. I have brought it up in the past, but never really pushed hard. With the people running sound, it did not feel like my place to offer strong criticism (and my apologies for doing it here, brother), and the few times I brought it up with the pastor did not produce results. I see parallels to the bigger picture of the attitude of RICCs leadership as well. But that is for another post. On my last Sunday I put in ear plugs, so I could at least hear myself singing. Instant mood improvement.

This story is not finished, but this was an important piece right out of the middle of it. I heard once on a Christian radio station in Kansas, that forgiveness is such an important part of being a Christian that it might be worth it in the end even if everything else about Christianity is wrong. It felt true to me, and my experience in 2022 has definitely given evidence to this claim:

Forgiveness is the foundation.

(Thanks to Nelson Townsend for helping me clean up the anger/anchor paragraph and the emergency room suggestion!)

(Thank you also to my friend who is still running sound at RICC. I rewrote that paragraph in a more sensitive way after he approached me with gentleness and grace.)

Some Final Exam Bits

During their conversation test, I hear:

"I want to learn Japanese because I want to go to Japan," she answered when asked about learning other languages.

"Why do you want to go to Japan?"

"Because I love anime! My favorite manga from Japan!"

After the test I said to her, "Rey, I understand why you like Japanese animation. Your style is like an animation character!" If someone were to say this to me, it would be a struggle for me to take it as a complement. Not Rey.

"Thank you teacher!" bursts out of her along with the same laugh you hear from the school girls in anime. 

I was not exaggerating: Rey has bright red hair, and lipstick to match. A couple of lip piercings, and a clothing style that is very eccentric compared to my other freshmen. At first I thought she was a bit of a goth, which would also be way out of the norm. But I came to realize that it was mostly the lighting in her room. If we had not been on Zoom all semester, I probably would never have gotten this impression. The complete lack of a tan might have suggested it, but two and a half years of COVID have pushed this nation of sun avoiders to new depths of paleness.

I thanked Rey for always being so cheerful, even when she was sleepy. The class met at 9 a.m. on one day, 2 p.m. the other, and she often had her camera off in the morning. 

As far as English ability goes, she wasn't at the bottom of the class. Her grammar and vocabulary were somewhat lacking, but she made up for it with enthusiasm. And to me, a student like that has the potential to be a better communicator than one who constructs very good sentences with a robotish intensity and lack of feeling. 

Part of me wants to give students a good grade just for being likeable and bringing the energy. I would rather talk with Rey than some students who speak more accurately and quickly. But a proper class cannot be graded according to how much the teacher likes the student. Though frankly speaking, conversational skill does have some correlation with charisma. 

Rey took her test on Zoom, like most of my students. I gave them all the option of coming to my office to test live and in person, strongly implying that their grades would be better for doing so. Three groups took me up on it. Three out of 36.

Seeing those students in person was amazing. It reminded me of why I like this job so much, even though some of them were stressed out and short on sleep because it's final exam season.

Best Class Activity

When I started teaching in university, my final exams were always one-on-one with the students. This gave me a laser sharp focus on each student, so that I could evaluate them to a very detailed level. I liked it in some ways, but on the whole it was exhausting. There were semesters when I had more than 200 students, and that is just too much graded conversation. Answering so many of the same questions over and over was bad enough, but asking questions was just plain brutal.

Eventually I dropped that practice in favor of a more practical test: making students talk to each other. They had to ask each other questions, as well as answering. I only provided the first seed question, from a list that they had previously prepared from. The hardest parts for me became not participating when the conversation was interesting, and staying awake when it wasn't.

Of course, that test method is for English conversation classes. But one of my classes is not a standard conversation class. It's called "Building Relationships in English," or BRIE for short. I designed it myself, with the intent of helping Korean students to learn strategies for making friends with English speakers, get along in an English speaking workplace, and have a healthy romantic relationship with a non-Korean speaker. I was aiming for a course that focuses on the cultural aspects of those conversations and relationships, rather than just the language, though I had planned to make it about 20% English vocabulary, expressions, and modalities. Ambitious, I know, but I was already teaching a fair amount of that stuff in between the grammar and vocabulary of a standard class.

But then a funny thing happened: the first time I taught the course I had a lot of foreign students enrolled, about a third of the 25. At first this seemed like an enormous obstacle to overcome: adapting the curriculum to accommodate non-Korean students, and to figure out the differences between their cultures and "standard English" culture (which is so amorphous that it is ridiculous to even think of it as one thing). 

Then I realized that what I actually had was a natural laboratory for having students build actual relationships... wait for it... in English! I had them discussing the differences between their cultures with regard to the topics we covered in class, and working on presentations to show how things could go right or wrong in various encounters. It was actually a lot of fun, even though it was hard to teach.

Now I've taught it twice (and I'm in the middle of the third time), all three completely and only on Zoom. I have bumped into one or two of my students randomly on the street, but couldn't get the class together. Last spring (2021) I got very lucky, though. I was taking a bus someplace, and a strange young woman said to me, "Are you professor Robert?" 

She was in my BRIE class, and recognized me even with a mask on. (Granted, a foreign man my size, with glasses, graying hair in a ponytail, and a beard peeking out under their mask is not exactly a common sight.) I would never have recognized her, because I did not require that class to use video, just profile photos. She had changed hair styles and color, and was wearing a mask, but when she talked I recognized her voice.

We talked for about 15 minutes, until she got off the bus, and it was so much fun! She is a foreign student of Korean heritage, and her English is good enough that the conversation was easy and natural. I asked her how she felt about the course, because teaching to a Zoom screen is the worst for getting feedback. She told me that it was great, and it was the only class she had that she did not have to work at to stay awake.

I really needed to hear that. As I may have mentioned, working from my bedroom means that I have been living at work for the past two and a half years. I am hoping that we have live classes in the fall of this year, but I'm not holding my breath. I really enjoy being in the classroom with my students. It is tiring for me, because that is where I put my energy into building them up, and helping them put their fears behind them.

In the next few days I found myself wishing that I could have that experience with everyone in that class: a conversation about their experience in the class, how it has changed their point of view, and just how they are doing in life. Then I came to the realization that I could! I couldn't make all of my students bump into me randomly on a bus, but I could make a 10 or 15 minute conversation mandatory. So I did.

I decided to make it a low stress assignment: I gave the students a few questions, and told them that this was a completion grade: show up on time, get full points. I figured some students might not prepare, but I was wrong. Some prepared more than others, of course, but they were all ready to talk with me. Some of the conversations were boring, some were interesting, and a small handful were reminders of why I love my job.

One question I asked was what was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned. In my experience, the majority of answers to a question like this is a recent lesson: the freshest memory is the most interesting, right? But I had answers that ranged through the semester, and almost every activity got mentioned.

These meetings also gave me a chance to encourage my students in a general way, as well as some specific ways: one student gave up an online business that she had started herself, making jewelry, to focus on being a student. I congratulated her on that decision, and told her that quitting is extremely underrated. I assured her that she could rebuild her online store in the future if she wished, and it would likely be even more successful. She told me that I was the only person who had ever told her that.

Another advantage of these meetings is that they helped me to better understand where my students were coming from. A general favorite for most students has been the section on dating and romance. I do a speed dating activity, and we talk about how to be better at dating and why we do it. Then one student told me that the romantic love section of my class was her least favorite, because she was not interested in having a boyfriend or husband. Now or ever. 

I had not even considered students like that, even though I was aware that some people feel that way. (The only label I have for this is "aromantic," which my spell check is not pleased with. Even my brain has trouble with it, reading it as "aromatic." There's a pretty big gap between smelling good and not wanting to date.) So I decided to incorporate it into future versions of this class (which I will be doing in the next couple of weeks). I also told her that it was okay to be the way she was. And once again, I was the only person who had ever told her that.

Research shows, and everyone knows, that empty praise is not worth the breath you spend on it. Telling someone "Good job!" takes no thought, and does not build anyone up in a significant way. But when you get to know someone, and see something that no one else sees, that is a vulnerable time. That is when a few simple words of encouragement can make all the difference in the world.

That's why I like being a teacher.

Early 2022 Update

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.

 

And on that appropriately obscure, wandering note, I will close this entry.

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.

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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.

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.