The Return of... You Guessed It... Todd

Darth... Todd... Same difference, really.

The results are finally in.

The cancer under my arm, the one that was getting pissy and not responding to the chemotherapy (now that I have a dog named Kimo, I have to use the entire word--no more "chemo" these days), the one that baffled my oncologist's pathologist... remember that one? He's been identified.

It's Todd.

He really is, y'all.

After worrying that it was metastatic renal cell, or t-cell, or something as yet unidentified by science, it turns out that the mass under my arm was classic nodular Hodgkin's. Todd. Just resistant to the ABVD chemotherapy regimen I was on.

Classic Todd.

What does that mean? That's where it gets fun. And by fun, I mean...

It never really stops being funny.

So, this Friday (yes, this Friday), I'm getting my kidney out. Wayne is going buh-bye. I have told y'all about Wayne, right? My other cancer, that just sits in my kidney, hanging out, doing nothing other than irritating me? That's Wayne.

Totally Wayne. To a t.

Yeah. We're giving him the boot.

About freaking time, too.

Once that's done, my generous oncologist has given me three weeks to recover before we start back into chemotherapy. That's more than I'm giving myself. Right now, my wife and I are engaged in battle. I think I should be able to go back to teaching on Monday. She thinks I need to take the week off. Who do you think will win?

This is a shock to absolutely no one.

That's when things get ugly.

Wait. This isn't the ugly part??? This, by the way, isn't just gratuitous. It's a
laparoscopic nephrectomy (kidney removal).

After I recover for a while, I start into new chemotherapy regimen. It's called ICE. Or ICE-R or sometimes RICE. Whatever. It's chemo. It's not gonna be fun.

Once I've done two treatments (should take a month to six weeks to do), they'll do another PET CT to see if the cancer's responding. If it is, I then go in for a bone marrow transplant.

By the way, I am not a medical professional. In the last post (or was it the one before that?) I didn't describe accurately what a bone marrow transplant looks like these days. Basically (and I may still be off on this), my understanding is that they'll harvest stem cells from my blood, freeze them, then take me up to the big city (Salt Lake). They'll nuke me with high levels of chemo, wipe me completely out, then re-inject the stem cells. I'll be in isolation around four weeks.

Yep. Something like that.

Luckily, by the time I'm finished with everything else, the BMT should happen right around the first part of December. Right as the semester ends.

Woot.

This may mean spending Christmas in the hospital. I'm okay with that. Mostly. It's actually not the first time it's happened. I had some surgeries when I was in high school, and I spent my Christmas break having the doctors re-inflate my collapsed lung.

This seems worse.

When I talk to others about it, the response is typically, "Wow. That sounds great. You'll be able to sleep, read, watch Netflix..." And yes, that is all true.

But I like people. And people and I will not mix well together once I'm at immunological zero. Zero. ZERO.

It always seems to come back around to
The Hudsucker Proxy. See what I did there?

Like, seriously, y'all. I'm going to have to get all my childhood immunizations again. This is a hard reset for my body.

After that, I'll be on a maintenance dose of chemotherapy for another year. Eighteen more treatments.

Now, if all of this seems overwhelming, it... well, it is.

I am overwhelmed.

Just a tad. A titch. A wee bit.

But this was the good news, y'all. It would have been so much worse if it had been a third cancer or metastatic renal cell carcinoma. So as much as I'm feeling like there's so much ahead of me, most of the time I also try to remember that there's quite a bit behind me as well. I've made it this far.

I can keep going.
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Next post: a long form poem, written in iambic pentameter, about... absolutely nothing. It's gonna be RIVETING.

Not that kind of riveting.

Next post.