You remember at the end of Rocky, when Apollo and Rocky are draped all over each other and Apollo says, “Ain’t gonna be no rematch,” and Rocky says, “Don’t want one.”??? Well, that’s pretty much the story here. Thyjoema is presently being cut into little pieces, stuffed into mice, examined in petri dishes, and experimented on. As for myself, I’ve got an 8-inch scar down the center of my chest, a hole in both my sides and one in my abdomen, I’m taking 25 pills a day, and passing the time watching reality TV (who’d have known Southern Charm would be so damn addictive) while filling a spit cup up with blood (I need to confirm this is normal a week out from surgery!).
That said, it’s safe to say we came out on top at the Thymoma Fighting Championships. We still have some questions regarding the final surgical notes and pathology report, but it appears the surgeon did get all of the tumor out of my chest, saved my phrenic nerves, and picked off 4 of the 20-25 nodules in my lungs. It also appears that based on the preliminary examination of the tumor it is indeed all type A (vs a mix of type A and other types), which we think a good thing.
We have a followup with the surgeon Monday afternoon, then we’re heading home. It looks like the next steps are to do a scan in 4-6 weeks and see how things look. Of course, the big decision will be what to do with the remainder of the cancer in my lungs … Wait and watch to see if it continues to grow or spread? Radiate? Try a different type of chemo? We’ll see.
Overall, we’re doing well. Dealing with a little bit of pain of course, and you guessed it, the frustration of being weak and restricted. Before I left the hospital on Wednesday morning (5 days post-surgery), I got out of bed, cleaned up, and got myself dressed (all major accomplishments believe it or not). I was sitting on a desk talking to my roommate (more on him below), and suddenly felt nauseous and light-headed. I had to lay back down in bed. It was discouraging as hell, quite frankly.
An hour or so later, the surgical team came in to see me. The second in command put his hand on my chest and made me cough. “Solid as a dump truck!” he said. Then I told them what happened earlier – the dizziness, weakness, etc.. The lead surgeon laughed in my face. “You gotta give yourself a break! You just got hit by a Mack truck, man!!!” (Surgeons in NYC like truck references). Then they reminded me what they’d done to me: sawed through my entire sternum from top to bottom, pried my chest cavity open with mechanical devices, moved my heart around, spent hours cutting out a chunk of tissue that ended up being 6.5 x 4 x 2.5 inches (damn close to a bottle of diet mountain dew, after all!), then deflated each lung one at a time, felt it up with their hands until they found a nodule they thought they could get to and then cut it out. “And it took a lot of force to close you up too!” one of them added. “The wire we used to piece your sternum back together is thick!”
Despite the weird kind of glee they took in telling me all this, it really was just what I needed to hear. The fight in the operating room was really between the surgeons and my cancer. My fight, as far as the surgery goes, is just beginning, and I have to learn to fight smart. I have to understand that just because I can put my pants on myself (barely) that doesn’t mean I’m good to go. The doctor said some people can walk 1 mile 1 month after this kind of surgery. I don’t think that’ll be a problem, but I know I can’t just hammer through it. I went 1/2 mile yesterday, one week after surgery. I thought I could go further, but when it came time to cross another street and pick up 1 more block, I turned around. As they say in the sweet science of boxing: let your hands go, get your shots in, and get outta there. Let it also be said that NYC is the last place in the world to go walking with your chest recently wired together – even with Christie lead-blocking for me, the thought of someone bumping into me is kind of terrifying …
I learned a couple of things in my first ever hospital stay. The first time I found myself getting a sponge bath at 2am by a dude from the former Yugoslavia, I accepted the fact that pride is a luxury I couldn’t afford. A night or two later a young, female nurse who just got into Yale woke me up for the 946th time, with a soft “Mr Graber … Mr Graber.” I was laying there with both legs pulled up with the bottoms of my feet together. I was sweating profusely, and my gown was hitched up, so I was just kinda hanging out there, spread eagle. I basically looked like I was in position to push a baby out. When I came to, I just said, “Yo.” She went about her business. She pinched a chunk of fat on my belly and gave me an injection of something there. Then she handed me a couple pills to swallow. Then she switched something out on my IV. “I’ll be back in an hour, okay?” she said. “Roger that,” I mumbled. She walked out, and I realized I hadn’t changed positions the whole time she was in there. You get the picture. You can’t tie the back of your gown, so your ass is perpetually hanging out. You openly discuss your pee and poop stats as if you’re prepping for the NFL draft. Your wife takes videos of your slobber-faced snoring and sends them to your kids so they can mock you. A team of nurses has to hold you still while their leader counts down 3, 2, 1, then yanks a hose out of your side like she’s pull-starting a weed whacker. You are a piece of machinery to be worked on, and the sooner you accept the fact that pride can only get in the way of a successful outcome, the better off you’ll be (although I’m not exactly sure how the video of me snoring helped me get better …).
This isn’t to say that I wasn’t treated well. On the contrary. The care I received at NY Presbyterian was amazing, especially in the ICU. Which brings me to the big takeaway from my hospital stay …
Christie and I were 30 when we got married, and 31 when we became parents. I was just finishing up my first novel (well it’s not really finished – after all these years, that one’s still awaiting edits). Anyway, towards the end of the book, my main character has just become a father himself and he makes a comment to his own father that parenthood must separate the men from the boys, or something to that effect. His father, a man who usually “shot a slew of arrows in order to hit his target” looks at him and hits the bullseye with his first try: “Not the men from the boys. Fatherhood separates the givers from the takers.” I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that line over the years. First, in the context of parenthood, but eventually in broader terms. There are infinite ways we can categorize ourselves. Men vs. women. Republican vs. Democrat. Black vs. White. Lefty vs. righty. Beer drinker vs. wine drinker. Hero vs. coward. Winner vs. loser. Etc., etc. But somewhere along the line it occurred to me that there is only one dichotomy that really matters. When we get to the end, and we take stock of our lives, the only measurement that will count for anything will be how much we gave vs. how much we took. When confronted with someone in need, someone in pain, someone vulnerable, did we exploit that person for our own gain, ignore that person altogether, or lift that person up, even sacrificing our own needs in order to do so? Some people are natural givers. The single greatest giver I’ve ever crossed paths with is my wife. Of course, none of us are perfect. In reality, we all straddle that line, operating in the no man’s land between giving and taking, left to pick which side we’re on a thousand times a day, with our sense of duty, moral code, and most importantly, our faith, to guide us.
Six months ago, when the MSK oncologist called me up and told me the cancer had spread to my lungs, he didn’t give me an exact prognosis. He only said that I couldn’t be cured and that the goal now was just to keep me alive as long as possible. He said hopefully we would be able to measure that time in years and not months. I asked him straight up if I could really be dead in a matter of months. He said, yes, that was possible. Not long after, I wrote a post here where I said I know God has a purpose and a plan for me and my family, and it was up to me to seek out that purpose and embrace that plan. I’m still working on that, but I know at least a part of it was to strip away my pride, my sense of control, my strength, my dignity – to make me accept that, for the first time in my life, I was neither a giver nor a taker, but the weak and vulnerable one in need of others’ love and support. To have me witness first-hand a thousand acts of giving – acts of kindness and love – in which I would be the recipient. It’s been a life-altering experience.
This past week was no different. The care I received in the hospital was awesome. I won’t likely ever see these people again, but from Ermin, the nurse who spent hours in the middle of the night telling me about his homeland of Montenegro, to McKea, who did several of my daily xrays and has the same birthday as me, to Letisha, who emptied my trash cans and made fun of me for all the missed shots I took from bed, to Carolyn, the former Guyana National Team basketball player who took my vitals, and dozens of others, the simple human connections I made in the hospital were, though brief, profound. Job or no job, I met a lot of givers the past week, and I’d like to think the brief connections we made had an impact on their days, too.
On the second day in the step down unit, I got a 77-year old roommate, Armando. Once he got settled in, I listened to him making phone calls (there was only half a curtain between us). His voice sounded so familiar, and it didn’t take long to place it. When I was in grad school in Colorado, I took a job at an Alzheimer’s care facility working the night shift as a care provider. My favorite resident was an 80-something year old from Boston named Ed. I can remember going into Boston Ed’s room late at night to change him or help him to the bathroom or whatever and listening to his disjointed stories. I loved that guy. Anyway, Armando’s voice was a perfect match for Boston Ed’s, although the former still has all his faculties. I heard Armando on the phone telling the story of how he’d taken the bus to the hospital after experiencing chest pains. Turned out he needed a triple bypass and had been in the ICU for a week already. I also listened to the kindness and humility Armando displayed in his interactions with his care providers. It wasn’t long before I was hanging out on his side of the curtain, talking about the Hemingway docuseries he’d been watching and hearing stories from his life. He moved to NYC 40+ years ago from Mexico. He was a professional ballerino, who, as his career waned, became a massage therapist. But Armando wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill massage therapist, he was a massage therapist to the stars. From Baryshnikov to Ansel Elgort (star of Baby Driver), Armando has grinded the knots out on a who’s-who list of big names. I learned of his grandfather, a master woodworker, his 65-acre getaway in the Catskills, and his love of travel and language (fluent in English, Spanish, French, and Italian).
That night, when I woke up at 3 a.m. and heard Armando coughing, I called out to ask if he was okay. He said he couldn’t sleep because of all the relentless machine beeping coming from down the hall. I got up and found the “gift bag” the hospital had given me and fished out a pair of ear plugs. Suffice it to say Armando and I come from different worlds, but on that night we were just two dudes who’d woken up in the same foxhole, with matching scars to boot (see attached). I felt blessed that God put us together and gave me the opportunity to do something as simple as getting out of bed to make his night a little more peaceful.
Months, years, decades? I really don’t know how much longer I get to spend here. Then again, I suppose none of us do, right? Personally, I intend to die decades from now from something other than this cancer (on a mountain might be cool), but who knows. In the meantime, I believe one facet of my “purpose” is to open my heart just a little more to being an instrument of God’s love and compassion. To keep making connections, large and small. To give a little more each day.
Speaking of givers, I want to again thank everyone out there who’s given so much to our family the past six months. And a special thanks to Frankie Two Phones, who drove up to NYC the week before last with PJ to give Aedan an insider’s look at the city and a ride back home to Virginia. I also want to give a special shout out to the friends who I haven’t seen in decades but who’ve somehow heard about our situation and recently joined us here on this site with many kind words. And finally, I’m posting a few pics of some special folks, including my kids, who’ve taken care of Tegan and each other while C and I’ve been up here in NY.
Okay then, we’ll keep you posted on any updates that come out of the next few appointments I have and what the plan is moving forward. Until then, peace out …
