Live strong

Despite wearing my LIVESTRONG wristband, I can feel the difference between me and Lance Armstrong all the time.  When the nurse leaves me with a little plastic contraption to exercise my lungs, I do it only when she’s around.  Lance would be glued to this thing, thinking of L’Alpe d’Huez and Arcalis with every inhalation.  When the physiotherapist encourages me to move and I trundle along the hospital corridor, Lance would have already badgered her into providing an exercise bicycle to train on.  He was strong.  I’m exhausted and weak.

A reminder that suffering is a part of success.

On Monday morning, I was laproscopied.  The doctors liked what they saw but didn’t think it was in the right place.  They stopped the microsurgery nonsense and made a big vertical cut in my belly, almost from the chin to my balls, and took out without much hesitation:

• Half of my colon with a bulging tumor and a lot of surrounding tissue, including lymph nodes in various states of contamination.
• My appendix – for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• My gallbladder – just so, because it’s of no use and might be a nuisance, should more surgery be necessary later on.
• A lot of growth on my peritoneum.
• A network of subcutaneous fat called the omentum.

This is a rather long shopping list, and yet I got away easily.  Kidneys, lungs and liver remained unscathed, though the liver got flipped around a fair bit to exclude anything malignant hiding behind.  I still have my spleen, bladder and pancreas.  And, in contrast to Lance Armstrong, I kept both testicles.

I was warned about general anesthesia, weird feelings falling asleep, vivid dreams that can be directed by will power ahead of time, and a long period of delirious confusion during wake up.  I experienced none of this.  Anesthesia was like sleeping, going in and out of it at the switch of a button.  The time lost sleeping was nothing but blackness.

Over the last two days, I’ve tried to recover.  Progress cannot be denied.  I sleep well at night, suffer no pain, and can stand up and walk for brief periods of time.  The latter surprises me the most.  What I’m I doing walking around a day after the operation? This is not my idea of coming back from the dead.

This is why I was mighty surprised when a carer came this morning and asked me to get up.  I had just been operated on and was feeling rather weak.  She insisted.  You need to get your circulation going.  Lying around isn’t doing you much good by itself, she said.  The first time up from my comfortable hospital bed was painful, full of movements my body wasn’t ready for, with skin stretching where fresh sutures were holding things rather rigidly.  It would have been easy and was very tempting to fall back onto the bed and doze, but carers can be insistent.  By the end of the afternoon, I had walked down the corridor all the way to the end and then back to the other one all by myself, accompanied only by Fred, the five-wheeled stand holding my infusions and pumps.

The surgeon told me that the operation couldn’t have gone better, and that my prospect might be slightly better than before.  A full histological examination of the removed tissue is required to know what’s really going on, but all macroscopic lesions, all visible cancerous growths are gone.  Chemotherapy can now target what remains, microscopic evil of much greater danger, with full force.  It’s not going to be pretty, and maybe I’ll be thinking back to the operation with fondness.  It was an easy ride, the first warm-up in the mountains maybe but not a stage in the high Alps yet.