Surgery yesterday. Went back 3 times to have cancer removed & then 4th time to have reconstruction done
Long, long day
Bled a lot but feeling good 2 day, no pain, no blood
So Lance & I now have 4 things in common. We are both
Cancer survivors, we haven’t won any Tours de France, we have to buy our own bikes
(Trek gone)
Our own shoes
(No more Nike)
How about that?
Luv from Cancer Fighter Poplak
The email arrived in October 2012, several weeks before David George’s downfall and the day after my father underwent a procedure to remove a basal cell carcinoma from the left side of his nose. Basal cell cancer metastasizes, but instead of spreading to cells in other organs, it confines itself to the skin and eats away steadily. Given enough time, the disease would devour my father’s nose to the cartilage, then start in on the surrounding flesh, at which point the doctors would scoop away at him just as they did at his mother, who died with a silver-dollar-sized hole in her cheek.
The procedure resembles microscopic gardening more than it does the practice of actual medicine. Called Mohs surgery, it involves tiny excisions of the diseased area, followed by a biopsy so accurate that it can assess the health of individual cells moments after they are culled from the skin. This process is repeated over the course of a session—hence went back 3 times—until the troubled region, often no smaller than a pinhead, is completely removed. Eighty years ago, this surgery would have differed only in small ways from when members of the Barbers’ Guild sawed and hacked and chopped away at humans in distress. There is still an element of barbarism: the resultant bleeding is shockingly copious. But shortly after Mohs, my father was home for dinner and chipper enough to make an entirely valid comparison between his own circumstances and those of Lance Armstrong, who was at the time experiencing some difficulty with the sporting authorities.
Luv from Cancer Fighter Poplak, wrote my father. This was meant, and received, as parody. In the developed world, we have adopted the terminology of warfare to describe what my father had experienced. Doctors and nurses exist on the “frontlines,” employing “weapons” like Mohs and chemotherapy. We “fight” or “battle” the disease, and should we do so successfully, we are “survivors,” who often experience “survivors’ guilt” when we leave friends behind in the chemo ward, or in the morgue.
My father was not concerned for his life, and had no reason to be—the odds were ninety-nine to one in his favour. The doctors used the word “idiopathic” to describe the cause of his cancer, which means that they had no idea why he was stricken with this minor calamity. It stands to reason, however, that repeated exposure to harsh sunlight inspired the skin cells on his nose to behave like a photocopier on the blink. In his case, the procedure was an inconvenience rather than a nightmare, because my father is not unused to pain or blood. For one thing, he visits pain and bleeding upon his own patients in his dental surgery. More to the point, he has voluntarily experienced pain and blood in volumes that seem ludicrous for a man who’s never worn leathers and a gimp mask.
After all, my father is a cyclist. He has won no Tours de France. He has to buy his own bikes (Trek gone) and his own shoes (No more Nike). But a cyclist, nonetheless. And cyclists, when not rolling around on the asphalt groaning, take a lot of sunshine to the nose.
Idiopathy, as I’ve come to learn, is the medicalization of fate, the studied acceptance of bolts out of the blue. Around the time that my father received his diagnosis, my cousin Janine was in the midst of a far more serious “war.” In December of the previous year, idiopathic lumps were found in her breasts. Such stories have become Reader’s Digest tropes, bathroom-reading banalities, but they are not so banal when they occur to a member of your own family, especially when that member has two small children, a husband, a dog, a cat, parents, in-laws, friends and a great ungainly mess of a life to maintain. The doctors on the frontlines mobilized with force, but they offered no guarantees. As with all battle narratives, Janine’s “courage” would determine her fate.
And her courage was exemplary. Unimpeachable. A thing to behold. I received the news in a Facebook message sent by her husband, to which I replied simply, embarrassingly, “Jesus dude.” When my iPad pinged with this miserable dispatch, I was standing in the small dining area of the cottage I rent only a few hundred metres from Janine’s childhood home, in the Johannesburg suburb of Orchards where I am based as an African political journalist (or, as a colleague once put it, a “geopolitical idiopath”). All the way back in Canada, Janine was at war, displaying her endless reserves of courage. Much later, when I asked her what she drew upon in order to overcome, her answer was not T-shirt slogan-worthy.
“The kids are too young to understand,” she said, stuffing guacamole into taco shells. “I have to make suppers; I have to change diapers. Life goes on.”
Unless it doesn’t. Janine spent her year at war inhabiting the tiny niche of cancer patients who, because they’re simultaneously raising toddlers, practising animal husbandry and running a household, don’t have time to “survive” in the sense we’ve come to understand it. I was once again struck by the fact that the cancer narrative has been whittled down to an empty set of declarations in a culture that views survival as a transferable commodity. In an Oprah-fied universe, Janine would eventually be asked to reduce her story to a palliative that applies just as equally to a broken marriage or a downsized job. That, I suppose, is what I wanted from her when I asked for her secret—a pacifier I could mentally suck on when life left me low. Her story would be something I could use when I needed a leg up.
Mostly, I used it when I was on the bike. Climbing a hill behind a group of hardened racers, I’d think of Janine. On a fast flat road in a peloton travelling at fifty-five kilometres an hour, I’d think of Janine. Janine, Janine, Janine. In all, I owe her a year and a half of tiny victories.
Luv from Cancer Fighter Poplak.
“Now that I’ve beaten the disease,” my father said over Skype, “I’m going to be flying on the bike.”
Anything for an edge in this sport. Anything.