Back in day, if we were at a restaurant and our daughter Lauren ordered french fries, I would do the old, “Hey, what’s that over there?” diversion so that I could steal a few without her noticing.  When she would turn her head to see what I was talking about, I would snatch a few of those beautifully golden brown crispy critters and swallow them before she turned back.  I obviously stooped to such behavior out of my concerns for her intake of trans fatty acids, and the health of her young cardiovascular system.  I considered it the ultimate sacrifice that I would go so far as to ingest this “poison” to keep her out of harm’s way.  And if you’re buying that, then I was also once a deep sea turtle, and have been contacted by both presidential candidates to be their running mate (and turned them both down.)

Fast forward to now, and I’m seeing that that old diversion is back, this time to help me.

When I was first slapped upside the head with my lymphoma diagnosis, everything revolved around the disease.  I had no symptoms, but I was trying to feel some.  What felt like rapidly-multiplying lymphocytes near my abdomen turned out to be my cell phone vibrating on my belt.  Or I would have random thoughts like, “Last time I was here getting my car washed, I didn’t know I had cancer.”  It was like having CNN, the Cancer News Network, broadcasting in my head 24 hours a day.

But then chemotherapy started and it said, “Hey, what’s that over there?”  Like a couple of missing french fries, the cancer thoughts were instantly gone, and we were thinking solely about the looming side effects of the treatments.  I kept a journal of everything I ate, the medications I took, my sleep duration, the number of times I went to the bathroom, and rated each day on a quality scale of 1-10.  If things started going south, I wanted the doctor to know everything he could to fix me.  Fortunately, as you may have noticed in previous posts, my treatments have been relatively drama-free.  So after a few weeks of, “Dear Diary, I pooped today at 1:17″, I shelved the daily record keeping.  But the treatments remained the headline item on my personal CNN.  The Chemo News Network.

Then, last week came the heart and PET scans.  And once again, the diversion.  Even though I was there for treatment number 4, by reading us the successful results, the doctor did a masterful, “Hey, what’s that over there?”  And in the after-glow of the report, all concerns about the pending chemo vanished like a fry in a Happy Meal.

While it can go into a deep sleep, my cancer doesn’t have a cure yet.  I’ll always be at the mercy of the next PET scan every few months to see if it’s back.  But if we can string several good ones together, then I can look forward to the days, months and years where it takes little, or nothing at all, to divert my attention away from this disease and say, “Hey, what’s that over there?”   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.