Month: April 2025

In the past two weeks I’ve had followup conversations with both my chemotherapy doctor and my surgeon. These conversations have slightly complicated my good news and optimism. The news is still good! As far as anyone knows I am Cancer Free. So what’s complicated about that?

First of all, one of the things the chemo doc told me was that actually, thirty lymph nodes were “harvested” (weird word, unpleasant) rather than just a few. I still have tons left in my body, so that’s not the issue. Twenty-eight of the nodes were clear. Two had cancer cells. Hearing this, I became anxious, as you might imagine. No no, he assured me. This was totally expected. The news is still good. He wants a follow-up CT scan in a few months, but he told me that any future appointments aren’t as time-sensitive and can be rescheduled to fit around my life.

Our visit with the surgeon, a week later, was brief and followed a similar theme. Yes, those two lymph nodes had cells but they were probably the ones right near the tumor. There were nodes harvested from my hip region, further away, that were clear. There is the issue of a small hernia along the closed up part of my backside, of the kind which is really hard to do anything about surgically. So we’re just going to wait and see if it resolves itself. The surgeon wants a follow-up CT scan in fall, and a scope in a year. I suppose the hernia accounts for the discomfort I’m still experiencing when sitting for long periods of time.

“So as far as we know,” I asked worriedly, “I’m free of cancer?”

“Yes, as far as we know.” It was a relief to hear him say it, and yet the mood around us as we left and made the long walk back to the car was not one of elation. Now, in fairness, this was the late afternoon and our day had been fairly long by that point already. So Lori and I were naturally a bit low on energy. But I had thought that getting in-person confirmation like this would…maybe energize us a bit, y’know? Not that we’d be dancing in the streets exactly, but what I felt was much heavier than I’d imagined it would be.

As we walked, we talked over what we’d heard from the surgeon, and it felt to me that we were trying to convince each other that this was really good. I was puzzled and spent the next part of our drive home trying to identify what was going on in me, and with us.

Part of it is probably that the news is good but not Perfectly Good. Going from “lymph nodes were all clear” to “lymph nodes were mostly clear and it’s probably fine” was something of a comedown. And the not-easily-fixable hernia thing. I’ve been feeling well and wanted my recovery to be complete, which was probably not realistic in hindsight. And anyway, even if it was, it’s not like having a Perfect Recovery is going to put things back to how they were before this journey started. Still, I don’t feel ashamed of being a little crestfallen.

It’s also been suggested that after a year of ups and downs, being told “okay you’re good to go” might be hard to accept. That it might be difficult to trust good news after experiencing such bad news. I’m actually not very sure this is the case; I felt pretty good sharing my good news after the surgeon first phoned me. The idea does feel worth noting, however.

I’m more sure that Lori and I were also thinking that we’ve known people who got the All Clear and whose cancer came back. What if our good news is only a temporary reprieve? What if I’m right back in treatments and appointments in only a short time from now? What if, what if. We talked about this on the drive back from Winnipeg as well. The place we came to involved those words: As Far As We Know. We don’t know, so, in a way, we get to choose. Do we choose optimism? Gratitude? Faith? Or do I choose to withdraw inward, cultivate a bleak outlook and choose pessimism instead? I’m doing well these days, and it seems to me it’d be a terrible waste if I just sat around waiting for the good days to end. (Like falling into The Maw, from the previous post).

The thing is, we’ve had to go over this conversation and remind each other more than once since then. We’re trying to be upbeat and lean into optimism, but it’s not a one-and-done choice. This week I’ve started saying to myself “Today is a gift.” Not sure how long I’ll keep at it, but even when things seem chaotic or overwhelming, it makes me smile a little to remember that I get to be here today, doing whatever it is I’m doing, by God’s grace and the timely intervention of medical professionals.

It seems cheesy when I read it back to myself, but right now it’s working for me. Things are gonna be okay. Even if it goes bad again one day, right now, it’s like this, which overall is pretty good.

In a week from today it will be exactly one year since I got my diagnosis and this journey started. I plan to watch Howl’s Moving Castle, and later, write about identity or something. Also, tomorrow’s our 13th wedding anniversary! This, too, is a gift. (Which we plan to celebrate with some Boursin and mimosas 🙂)

Back in January I wrote that I had rejoined the Prairie Singers choir for their spring season, but I’ve realized that I never did continue the story of how that went for me. At the time, I wrote:

“it remains to be seen whether my other life stuff will interfere with my practices and performance, but I was advised last year not to stop doing the things I love because I might have to quit them at some point. We don’t know! So I’m going to try and assume the best.”

Well, the concert has come and gone and I…was not a part of it. I was in the audience instead, loving the music even if I was occasionally sobbing quietly.

When rehearsals started out I had a difficult time enjoying myself. I can sing capably enough (I’m a 2nd tenor, if you’re curious) but just barely read music by sight, so I rely quite a bit on those around me to keep pace when learning a song. And, our choir director is someone who likes to challenge his groups, so the early going was quite difficult and slow-going for me. On top of all that, I was getting over a cold when rehearsals started, so my vocal range was impacted and I was frustrated by that as well.

A few rehearsals in and I still wasn’t ‘feeling it’. The previous year’s choir rehearsals had been challenging as well, but energizing! Where was that feeling? Then, the even bigger questions started setting in. I was pretty sure that my surgery date was going to be before the concert in March, so was there really a point to continuing if I wouldn’t get to take part in the finished product? And then I started thinking about space.

I took this slightly blurry picture of the moon a few days ago, through the lens of a friend’s powerful telescope. This friend runs the local astronomy club and gets absolutely fired up about interstellar topics, which is interesting and fun to chat about. But, it’s also thanks to him that I’ve been gaining a new appreciation of just how incomprehensibly vast space is, and how relatively tiny we are.

I’m coming back around to my story, I promise! But I also want to properly plug my friend Kenton’s Pembina Valley Astro Club which just kicked off the 2025 season! What follows in my story is not his fault. Anyway, tell him I sent you, and if you have some time, ask him where the tungsten in my wedding ring comes from and buckle up 😄

So, my thinking spiralled from: why am I not enjoying myself at choir? To, why am I bothering with this at all? Which became, we’re so insignificant and life is so short, so why bother with…anything? I’ll admit that being between cancer treatments and major abdominal surgery likely had something to do with my downer headspace. Kenton says he has a friend that calls this mode of thinking “The Maw”, after the sort of philosophical chasm that can open up beneath you when you start to go down this road.

Lots of folks have lots of different answers to these kinds of questions. I came around to a better place eventually, aided by the choir rehearsals that started the whole thing. This might not make a lot of sense, but I remembered two main things. One is that it’s all relative. We’re tiny compared to the solar system, but our bodies are galaxies to the cells inside of us. Thinking about this was a way to sort of recenter myself, and lead into the second thing; what we do with our time here matters, to us and to others, right now.

I know that in a hundred years, probably nobody will remember this particular season and concert of the Prairie Singers. But, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile for me to do. This is my one go at living life here on planet earth, and when I really think about it, I’m not going to sit around doing absolutely nothing, affecting nobody, making nothing, and expending no energy, just because it might fade from memory one day. I definitely shouldn’t have had kids if I expected to just sit quietly in a room and wait for the afterlife. I’m gonna live.

Accepting this means it isn’t feasible, or really any fun, for me to sit in the constant knowledge that we’re motes of dust dancing in a ray of sunlight. So I had to set that aside, and decide for myself that things like choirs matter because of the time and energy we invest in it. Things…got better from there. Rehearsals started to feel better. Still challenging, but at one point a really beautiful piece of music clicked while we were working on it, and I mentally stepped back from the song and marvelled at the beauty of this group of people making art together.

I got my surgery date and exited at the last rehearsal before the 20th, which was also the best and most energizing one I’d done this season. However, I didn’t want to stress about missing practices due to recovery, and I knew I’d try to push myself too hard to rejoin the choir if I tried to say I’d be back. I was deeply pleased to be able to attend the concert, however, and got to finally see how the pieces we struggled with had come together. And yes, I really did cry more than once, not only because of the beauty of the music, but because of the layered feelings around the experience.

This has been: The Time I Had An Existential Crisis About Singing In A Community Choir. Please enjoy this picture of my children getting mad at Super Mario Bros. 3. (There are two of them because I was also testing a Raspberry Pi computer running a Nintendo emulator, and they are not great at taking turns)

I had a chat with my CancerCare Counselor this week, and brought up my sense of frustration and unhappiness with having a colostomy that I mentioned a few posts ago. Again, it’s nothing extreme, just a feeling that persists even though I’m dealing with the mechanics of the situation reasonably well. I asked if this was something that needed to be addressed and dealt with right away, perhaps with a worksheet or something. She chuckled and said she did not have a worksheet handy, but could possibly come up with one if needed.

Instead she told me a few good things to remember. One was to remind me that it hasn’t actually been that long since getting out of the hospital. Processing my feelings is going to take time, and there isn’t a rush or a deadline. (However, she did acknowledge that if I was in my eighties and still deeply unhappy about it, the situation might bear more serious discussion.)

Another thing is that two things can be true, something Lori also reminds the rest of us about on a regular basis. We often think that our feelings about a topic have to be either/or. Either I’m totally adjusted and content with my colostomy or I am not at all, which I tend to assume is a failing that must be corrected. But, I can be grateful to it for allowing my continued existence, and frustrated at the change to my body. Also, frustration at having to think about ostomy supply levels on top of everything else in my life. ALSO, frustration at the way the weird caramel-coloured bag adhesive is absolutely ridiculous to try and work with if you don’t put it on properly in one go.

Anyway the point is that we can hold more than one feeling about something and that’s a normal thing to do.

Lastly we talked about grief, which is something I haven’t really thought about since starting this journey last year. We talked and I wrote, back then, about the sense of another life, another timeline where I didn’t get diagnosed and our house renovations and travel plans continued as expected. I’ve had plenty of time since then to come to terms, but now I get to do it again; because the pathology report being good news doesn’t mean things are ‘over’. Things are not ‘normal’, as they were before last May, and they will not go back. So once again, there’s a sense of loss to become accustomed to, one I hadn’t really noticed on my own yet.

(This sense, I observed, may have also been why the pathology results weren’t as exciting to me as to others I talked to; because for me the results didn’t provide a definite sense of resolution.)

This week I was energetic and confident enough to go with my family to the Manitoba Museum, and we had a great day. I’ve felt deeply grateful to be up and about as much as I’ve been able to, although the seats in the planetarium did get right up my stitching and I was happy to keep moving after the show. (On the other hand: Lori and I got to have dinner and see a play last night, and even though the seats in the theatre were ancient they were perfectly comfortable for the duration. How???)

All in all, it turns out physical and emotional healing take time. More time than I’d like, surely. Time, and sometimes treats for myself, and sometimes a good episode of Star Trek, and sometimes just playing an old video game I’m really good at.