I have a paralyzing fear of doctors and hospitals.  I’m convinced that if I avail myself to examination, invariably disease, illness and likely death will follow.  Intellectually I understand this is irrational and yet I pride myself on being a rational man.  Nevertheless, I suffer under this enigma and struggle, even today, as I vacillate between what I know to be reasonable thought and action and that other world of inaction and dismissive denial.  I manage somehow to live in both worlds.

With my emotional dilemma as a backdrop, I begin this up until now untold story of my health care journey, reluctant in the telling because I am fiercely private, but important in the understanding that it might help others in similar circumstances.  Or maybe, more likely I suffer this unreasonableness alone.

In 2016, I grew tired of looking down and seeing the unsightly protrusion of what I came to understand was a condition called an “umbilical hernia”.  In more common terms, this condition causes your belly-button to pop out.  When combined with what is commonly known as a “beer-belly”, (which I was and am reluctantly fighting and yet cultivating), it made the overall condition rather unattractive.  I have been an active athlete all of my life and because I wanted to retain that level of activity, I conjured up all of the courage I could muster in order to visit with a surgeon who would relieve me of this condition.  Full-disclosure:  I was also highly motivated by no small dose of vanity and the come-to-find-out unrealized solution to my protruding gut.  The surgery fixed the belly-button but I was still stuck with the belly.

The surgeon dutifully visited me upon recovery and informed me that although he had successfully repaired my hernia, during the process unusual amounts of fluid were taken from my abdomen and additional testing was required.  I was scanned, examined and probed and told that it was very likely that I had lymphoma.  A few days later, after visiting with the oncologist it was all confirmed; stage 3-to-4 follicular lymphoma.

Aggressive chemotherapy was to begin, 6-courses of treatments three-weeks apart.   Good-bye hair, good-bye weight, and good-bye what was heretofore known as a daily and routinely expected quality of life free from illness.  Until it is taken from you, that assumption of good health as a guarantee is a life-changing adjustment in attitude.

The entirety of the experience completely reinforced that irrational side of my psyche concluding that the hernia operation somehow caused the cancer yet the rational me did come to terms with the reality that the hernia surgery actually saved my life, thanks to my own vanity.

So obviously I recovered, but the recovery wasn’t the typical story-book of ringing the bell to celebrate my last treatment and being ordained as “Cancer-Free”.  For me it was that purgatory of in-between.  The doctors were puzzled that they didn’t completely get rid of my cancer, but regardless, I was seemingly in remission and symptom free.  Now my world became that of the endless follow-ups, never allowing for the certainty of relief and again, playing right into my worst, irrational fears that were now becoming real.

The uncertainty is by far the hardest part.  I began to live life in segments, gleefully unburdened of my fears by a positive doctor visit or a lab test result that catapulted me into good spirits for about a single day and then turned back into the grim reminder that my good fortune is measured in the time frames between medical exams.  I feel like nothing can harm me, especially early on during those “good-news” times, but the shelf-life of that comforting certainty is short and quickly replaced with doubt, fear and a gloominess hard to describe unless you have experienced it yourself.  My life is lived in narrow slices of time.

My local, community health care providers were, I’m sure, happy to hand me off to the regional cancer research-university facility that would address the “in-between” condition of my illness.  And so began the 2-hour car rides back-and-forth to Rochester, NY in order to get a higher level of expertise and to hopefully address and arrest this limbo of not quite having cancer, but being threatened by it’s reoccurrence.

For the first few years, visits, tests, scans and exams were regularly 6-months apart.  For a guy like me, this is what that looked like.  After leaving a Rochester visit and being told that everything was stable and unchanged, I would be on cloud-nine.  The car-ride back would be joyful, the air cleaner and crisper, the sky bluer, the conversations, more important, more meaningful.  This state of glee would last for a few days and then normalcy would return, the reality that my life was rewarded to me by my doctors, but only rationed out to me in 6-month portions.

As that date on the calendar for the next visit loomed large, the dread, the fear, the anxiety welled up inside of me.  I turned always to God for relief, and most times I was rewarded for my faith.  But other times, my self-doubts overwhelmed me and the silent, solitary struggle commenced a terrible cage-fight between courage and despair.  The terrifying reality to me was the fact that in that instance, I had to endure this alone, there was no one to solve this, no one to save me, it was me facing my own fears, my own mortality, my own test of faith.  I could not do it without God.

It took me a number of years to get more-or-less comfortable with my relationship with the Rochester caregivers.  The anxiety lessened to some small degree, but that old, irrational fear of more care yielding more bad-news and illness never completely disappeared.  It sounds stupid to say this, even as I write it and look at my own words, but it is the reality of what bounces around inside of my head.

And so finally, we get to the point several years ago when my providers agree that my situation has now evolved into a nearly 8-year remission and the prognosis seems promising and stable, so we go from a 1-year to a 2-year follow-up plan.  Again, the elation at the moment is hard to fully transmit to someone what has not experienced it.  In my mind, this has guaranteed me a disease free slice of life that just got thicker by a whole year!  I was bullet-proof, at least until this September.

I scheduled my CT scan for that 2-year follow-up.  My doctor in Rochester tells me that although there is no indication of any changes regarding my lymphoma condition, the scan has discovered something else.  Something is growing on my thymus.  (I had to Google it)  After a biopsy, sure enough it was cancerous and it, along with the thymus itself had to be removed.  Here we go again with the reinforcement of the irrational yet ironically, this time the follow-up scan for the lymphoma may save my life from an otherwise undiagnosed and symptom-free cancer that is totally unrelated. 

My surgery in late November was successful, except that the growth had penetrated into my pericardium as well as one lung.  Because of this, radiation is required and I start that course of treatment tomorrow, daily sessions, 5-days a week for 6-weeks.  Just like I did with the chemo, I plan on simply integrating this regiment into my normal day; treatment at 8AM, then to the YMCA for a light workout/shower, breakfast and then begin my day.

I don’t know what I’m in for, but I’m all in because I know that God has equipped me.  I’ve been saved twice in spite of my best efforts to ignore reality and then the Lord made it right. 

Here I go again and as always, thankfully shrouded in His everlasting protection.  Thank you Lord.