Cancer saved my life #3

At this point in the story, I am driving from Estevan to Saskatoon to start Cancer treatments, a solid 4 hours of quiet time to myself. I was obviously scared as hell to get there, at times wishing it was a 4-day drive or to turn around and go back to an oblivious life. The lack of info up until that point made me uncertain of what was to come, I was still unsure of how everything was going to go down. Do I just show up to the Cancer Center and start taking pills? What was “chemo”? What did it look like? What does it do? How does it make you feel? All things I had no clue about. So definitely the uncertainty helped me not dwell too much on details because I didn’t know them. The majority of the drive I was tossing around thoughts between “am I going to die from this?” or “is this going to be a crazy journey I will tell my grandkids about?” One thought brought me great fear because I was scared to die for 2 reasons:

1. I was 22 years old and I having just spilt up with my wife, I felt like I was just starting my life, the life I would choose to make for myself. For the first time, I felt in control.
2. I had been brought up in a Catholic family, and my mother put us in private Christian schools where I was immersed in their belief systems, and at this point in my life when I was potentially facing death and about to meet my maker, did I actually believe in any of it?

Studying Christianity and going to church for many years, it made me very confused of what happens when we die. Am I supposed to just have blind faith and take a ancient books word for the existence of a Heaven and a Hell? How was this old book supposed to  know exactly what happens when I die, when it has been translated, edited, and has had parts removed (many times). Do I just float away from my body and meet Jesus at the pearly gates of Heaven? Then we discuss whether I can come in or not? The Bible says, Hell is unimaginable torture for all of eternity, I knew I sure didn’t want that. The very fact that there was even a focus on a hell at all is ridiculous. I would say that the threat of eternal torture was my main reason for trying so hard to believe and be a Christian. I can now see that is a horrible reason to believe in something; I can see now that I was never a believer or a Christian; I can see now that my Christian belief systems were not comforting me in this troubling time, they were actually causing me even greater fear. If I took away the idea of a Hell or Satan, would I still have the same beliefs and actions in my life? This deep questioning of my Christian beliefs did not come until later in my cancer journey, however. On that particular drive to Saskatoon, I prayed to God for my life, I wanted him to save me from this, I didn’t want to die.

Before I went to Saskatoon to start my cancer journey I got in touch with an Auntie who I had lost contact with over the years. This Auntie was an aunt who had 4 sons of her own and took my 3 other siblings & I in when I was 6. She took us all in because my mom had just left her boyfriend and couldn’t take care of us anymore. My mother recently had her 5th child at that point, with her much older boyfriend. She left him for another guy, and left her 6 month old baby with her now ex-boyfriend. I as an adult I can see that my mother had a traumatic childhood, and without any healing from that trauma, she was trying to raise 5 young children, and was doing the best that she knew how at that time.  (I have since reunited with this brother Wyatt, when he turned 19 and he is sweet as fuck). My Auntie, who lived in Saskatoon not far from the Cancer Center, had offered her basement for me to stay in while I went through cancer treatments. She said I could stay there for free, which is what I desperately needed at the time, after being cut off from my school money since I was no longer going to be a student. I got to her house and settled in and was off to the Cancer Center the next day. They made my consultation for the pediatric oncologist, because this was more commonly a childhood cancer, and I was young, and he had experience with this specific cancer. Which was a blessing for me because the pediatric oncology department at the time wasn’t very busy. I would go to my appointments and go right in, hardly ever waiting.

So back to my first visit there, I met my main oncologist Dr. Ali. He is a short middle eastern man, very friendly, and his personality was a good fit for me. My admiration for him actually helped me a lot through my journey as he provided me with tough love, he never treated me like a dying cancer patient, but like a man, a human. My first visit with him was very good, he gave me a thorough examination and then explained to me that the hospital needed a little more time waiting on my biopsy results to come in from Vancouver to know exactly which chemo protocol to take. I had had cat scans, x-rays, blood work, biopsies, and an MRI but they didn’t yet know which route on the chemo train to take because they needed this information to stage my cancer. They basically needed to know if the cancer had spread to my brain or bone marrow, which would have more or less been a death sentence. He explained that all routes would look like me being bed ridden and mostly hospitalised with extensive chemotherapy and spinal needles. YES you read that right, mother fuckin SPINAL NEEDLES!!!!!!! I hate needles, a childhood phobia of mine from being alone in a hospital when i was young with severe asthma. I would get sweaty and stressed from a prick in my arm, and now I had to get needles in my spine, which was terrifying, not to mention risky, you don’t fuck with a spine (I have chronic low back pain to this day partially from that).

Dr. Ali also asked me my relationship status, since chemo can make you infertile. He explained that I had to freeze my sperm since I was so young and especially because I was single. I always thought I wanted kids, but after my split with my wife it made me rethink it as a choice, not a requirement. I knew I didn’t want kids anytime soon, mostly because I knew I had a lot of self-work to do and I didn’t want my kids inheriting the deepest parts of my personal traumas, like I had from my parents. But it was hard to hear that my choice may be taken away from me.  I left the Cancer Center that day being relieved, and a little too confident about how my next few months would look.

2 weeks later I got the call for their plan of action, I was to show up at the hospital and prep for surgery to install a Hickman catheter in my chest, get the bone marrow biopsy, a spinal tap, and then freeze sperm before chemo started the next day. I had to get the sperm frozen before chemo, so I didn’t have some mutant Ironman babies. I got to the hospital ready to be in there for a week to 10 days. It was my first time going for actual surgery, and at first it was kind of awesome, I woke up feeling like I slept for a week, but then the pain hit me. My low back was hurting from the spinal tap, my hip was hurting from where they took the bone marrow sample, and the whole right side of my upper body was sore from the Hickman line, a 2-piece catheter that gets put in and allowed the nurses to access my veins for blood work, chemo, and saline. This was needed because the chemo can weaken your veins so bad that they turn to shit and are hard to access. I also found out that the amount I would be getting poked would have increased chances of infection. I didn’t yet realize at this time that morphine does not work as a pain killer for me, which is why I was in so much pain from surgery. I just thought it was normal.

I got sent up to the pediatric ward an hour after surgery because the cancer ward was full. It was actually very sad being on the pediatric ward because it was quiet… you know if a child is quiet then they are on a new level of sick. There weren’t very many kids up there, which I guess is a good thing. That night I couldn’t sleep, and I went to the nurses TV room and sat with them, one of them was rocking a very young child as he slept. I asked them what was wrong with that kid, and they told me that he was on chemo and was actually 5 years old, that the chemo had hindered his growth. I would have guessed that little boy as being 2 or 3. That night I remember being so grateful that I was old enough chemo wasn’t going to slow my physical development, and that I also understood that getting cancer was just something that happened to us as humans, we get sick. Some children don’t understand that and think that them being sick is a punishment or that they did something wrong, and I know because I was that kid. When I used to go to the Emergency Room and have to stay in the hospital with asthma as a young boy, I thought it was because I did something wrong. I couldn’t understand why this was happening. I was too young to get it, to get that our bodies fail us sometimes. That’s a pretty fuckin terrible thing for a child to think, and I can look back now and see this as the start of me feeling like I was so alone.

The next morning, I had to go beat off in a cup and freeze it for my potential future family, romantic I know. When I got to that department in the hospital there were 2 nurses that explained that I was to go into a private room down the hall and fill up that cup. They told me that most guys bring their wives or girlfriends- if they only knew I was just starting the discussion of divorce with my ex. I told them I was a poor cancer patient fresh out of surgery and that they are more than welcome to come give me a hand, not because they were ultra-attractive or that I was half serious, but because I like making people smile… They both giggled and politely informed me that was against protocol. So, I made my way down the hall to a locked room and used the key they gave me to open the door. It was a small room with a coffee table, a couch, and a TV across from it. There was also a cabinet full of porn, “BEST DAY EVER!!!”, I thought. I went through the cabinet finding my favorite go to’s. I spent the better part of 45 minutes trying to get into it and get a boner going, but the pain from just having surgery was a real buzz kill and they put my Hickman catheter in on my right side, and I’m righthanded…..

Author: cancerboy55

I am on a journey of teaching, learning, and listening. View all posts by cancerboy55