One day more

[This is from March, three or four months ago. I'm fine; it was just a scare due to having talked myself into believing I had a recurrence or new primary].

For weeks my unease has been growing. I've not been feeling well Queasiness has blossomed into nausea, listlessness into drop-dead fatigue, momentary wobbles into falling down with drunken dizziness even though I haven't had a drop.

"In a real dark night of the soul," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."  But it is worse when it is actually three AM. As it is right now.

Thursday a week ago I went to the Emory University Winship Cancer Center for one more regular screening: They drew blood ("labs"). They did a neck and chest CT scan. It always makes me nervous. Monday morning early their phone call woke me up. Could I come in so they could draw more blood?

"Sure," I said. "Let me get to my calendar."

"Oh that won't be necessary, sir." They wanted me down there three mornings in a row, as early in the morning as possible. Starting that day. Or if that wasn't possible, the following one.

So I went from nervous to frankly worried. But when I pulled into the valet parking at Emory on the second morning, panic hit. There was something about being there two days in a row: suddenly I felt I was back 4 years ago, in my lost summer of 2009.

Lost, not because I regret what it took to get me cured --I guess I should say, "cured for a time"-- but because I remember so little, except the dementia at the end. The worries. The desperation. Waking up and it was three o'clock in the morning, and I'd only had two hours sleep. Like tonight.

Well, not quite. Tonight there's been no sleep. At all.

Yesterday afternoon I'd  almost had a heart attack. At about 5:30 I answered the phone, and it was the  Emory Clinic Department of Otolaryngology. "You have an appointment with Dr. Wadsworth on July 3, but we have to see you before then," she said, and in an instant my heart rate shot up, I could hear the blood rushing in my ears and did not hear what else she said. Dr. Wadsworth had diagnosed the cancer initially. This was it. Relapse or a new primary?

I asked her to repeat what she was saying. "Dr. Wadsworth will not be in that day, so we'd like to move your appointment to the week before, or later in the month," she said, as I tried top stop myself from hyperventilating. I felt dizzy. I told myself I was going to pass out. The moment passed.

It's not one day anymore. Hours.


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