"C" is for Cancer and Cut It Out

"C" is for Cancer. Which in Japanese is "gan" which is the word that I was focusing all my powers of attention and concentration on trying to pick up in conversation at the hospital this morning. My husband Masa went in this morning to get the results of his blood test from a week ago. A week ago I was at home with the girls (who were right on schedule in their morning bickering and shrieking at each other) when the phone rang and Masa was on the other end telling me that "It's all over. I'm over. Take good care of the girls." and he wouldn't tell me much of anything else. He had gone in to get the results from a battery of tests that he had undergone two days previously as screening to qualify for the new biological therapy meds they are using for RA. So I knew that one of those tests had found something.

I could go on to tell you all about my frantic ride in a taxi (with bickering children), our ungainly entrance into the large prefectural university hospital and our harried search through all the different departments until we found Masa but it wouldn't begin to adequately depict the tsunami of panic that was crashing over us. What the tests had shown was a spot on one of Masa's lungs. The first doctor proclaimed it "cancer." The second wasn't so sure so he ordered blood tests to look for cancer markers. Then he sent us home to wait a week for the results, our free pass to hell.

Finally, after sitting in the flames, spinning over different scenarios of death, separation and despair we graduated to hell proper--the doctor's waiting room this a.m. And then the clouds parted and a drop of grace fell and quenched our twisted souls. The cancer marker test came back negative.


Which leads me to my second word for the letter "c". Cut it out. Okay. Phrasal verb and not a word, but the first word in it starts with a "c". I say this phrase a lot, "Cut it out." is one of my on automatic mommy phrases, along with, "stop it. I said stop it. I mean it. Stop it. Stop it now." and other classic selections like the count down: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . ."


However, I'm smuggling in the whole set of words (all three) not as a phrasal verb here but for their actual literal meaning, cut-it-out. Which is what I immediately wanted to ask the doctor at the hospital to do. Cut it out. Out spot! Out damn spot!


Sitting in the corridor outside the oncologists office I turned and asked Masa if he didn't mind just waiting and seeing what happened with the spot. How did he feel about cutting it out?


"Surgery?"

"Well, couldn't they just go in and take it out?"


Turns out that they could but they would have to go in on the side of his rib cage, cutting through a rib or two and remove a chunk of him, not just the spot. If we understood the doctor correctly. Pretty serious surgery and thus the doctor is recommending that we just sit back and see what spot will do. Will spot grow bigger? Shrink? Turn into cancer?


We sat silently for a few minutes and then Masa stood up and went back into the office. When he came out he sat down. I continued watching the line of elderly patients line up to use the free blood pressure cuff in the reception area. You could tell who had good results and who's blood pressure was too high from studying their faces as they retrieved and read the bit of paper that the machine would spit out after taking their blood pressure. The winners would kind of wave their result strip in the air or share it with a friend. The losers crumpled theirs into tiny little balls that they heaved angrily into the waste bin at the side of the machine. It seemed like a kind of lotto for the elderly.


After a bit my mind wandered back to the issues I had been trying to keep it from pondering. A mental image of my husband laying on a surgery table like a parody of Adam while the surgeon-God carefully extracts a bit of rib began to form when Masa broke the silence and announced:


"I made an appointment to find out more about the surgery."


"Isn't it too risky?"

"I want it out. If they can I want them to cut it out."


And I said nothing. Because I want it out too. I want it out.