Novemer 22-27, 2008

I normally write on Saturday, but today is Thanksgiving, and with my wife and daughter in western Massachusetts, I have some time on my hands.

If you don't want to be on this e-mail list, by the way, just send your copy back to me and I will get the hint.

I just finished day 23 (out of 30) yesterday, and am going for day 24 tomorrow. They gave me the option of coming in Friday, and believe me, I really want to get this thing out of the way. Though I have not experienced too many side effects yet, the radiation is really kind of sickening. (I upchucked last night, but that may have been related as much to a salad I ate at Little Italy in Welcome as to the radiation and chemo.) I'll be glad to be done with it and mending, so to speak.

I wrote last week that I hadn't seen Billie Douglass in the waiting room and that I hoped to see her on the third floor. You may remember me saying that Billie was fighting cancer for the third or fourth time. Yesterday Helen Platt handed me Billie's obituary. At the time I was writing about her last week, Billie had been dead three days. When Helen handed me the obituary, I remembered some things Billie had talked about the last couple of days we saw her--specifically, about her brother, who also had cancer and who struggled mightily for twelve hours just to accomplish one bodily function. "Is it really worth it?" Betty recalled him asking, "Do I really have to live this way?" She was making the point that sometimes people get to a place where dying is better than living. I think Billie got to that place.

William Miller looked a little pale this week, but he has been quite an uplift for the rest of us. He has an upbeat approach to life, and though he is a doctor himself, he does not act like that makes him special. I do not know what his prognosis is, but I have a feeling it involves more risk than mine.

We had several newcomers to the waiting room last week, including a gentleman who drives all the way from Anderson, South Carolina to bring his wife, a frail-looking woman, for treatment. William and I started talking to him about the movie Radio, and it turns out that he has a brother who had played for the team on which Radio was an unofficial member. (By the way, that movie really seemed to resonate with William, which tells me something very good about him.)

Let me introduce another member of the regular cast, Edward from Yadkin County, whose time slot is forty-five mintes after mine. That's another way of saying I don't see him unless the radiation units are running behind. (They're repairing one of the four machines right now, which means they do sometimes run behind.) When I first met him, his wife was pushing him in a wheelchair, but the last few days he has been walking on his own, albeit a bit unsteadily. I have never seen that man without a smile on his face, and he particularly seems to connect with me. He has a brain tumor, which, I am assuming, could not be removed surgically. My neighbor, Johnny Burke, is living proof that radiation for non-accessible tumors can restore folks to a regular life.

I never did get to look at the rest of Lester's dogs. I'll try to remember to ask him to bring in the scrapbook one more time.

I ran into another acquaintance last week, a physics fellow, for lack of a better term, whose son I once taught in Sunday School. He really seemed to enjoy talking to me, and in fact, I think, had timed his lunch break specifically to catch me. He is an amazingly intelligent person who designs and calibrates the radiation equipment on which I'm being treated, and I enjoyed talking to him very much. By the way, his daughter is in med school and is thinking about following in her dad's footsteps. How's that for a compliment?

We have added another doctor to the list, and I need to correct a mistaken impression I may have given last week. I seem to recall intimating that some doctors were good people. Actually, my opinion is that all doctors are shiftless deadbeats who pretend to know something esoteric just to make a few bucks.

And if you believe I believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. There is nothing in the world better than a good doctor. (Well, I can think of one thing better--a good malted milkshake is just pretty darn hard to beat. But a good doctor is a close second.)

Death is a fact of living. Some of you may think I am dealing with that prospect nobly, but I hope you know my prognosis contains nothing of the sort. In point of fact, I am a walking advertisement for the existence of a God who intervenes in human affairs. I've had two tumors removed surgically, both in a position in my brain that facilitated removal and minimized risks to my regular functioning. And the discovery of both of those tumors was also amazingly scripted. (If you've heard this story before, bear with me.)

Both discoveries involved perfectly situated seizures, the first one while driving a pickup. I had just gotten stopped at the only traffic light for miles in any direction when I had the seizure; my wife was in the car in back of me, and an offduty EMT was in the car behind her. Luck can't begin to describe that.

The second one was every bit as miraculous, and to tell you about it I'll have to describe a couple of classes of tumors. An astrocytoma will typically recur within five to seven years, and an oligodendroglioma within twenty years. But sometimes those little rascals grow together, and can be downright difficult to differentiate. (Seve Ballesteros, the golfer, recently had an oligoastrocytoma removed.) The team that operated on me in 1987 diagnosed my original tumor as an astrocytoma. Based on that diagnosis, my doctor figured I was out of the woods, and accordingly, had scheduled an MRI for January 2008 and the next one for January 2010. Had we gone by that schedule, I would not be writing this little epistle because my tumor would still be waiting to be discovered. But God intervened, with a perfectly awful event (I thought)--a seizure in August of 2007, which necessitated an MRI. (And knocked me off my mail routes for three months, I might add.) Because I'd had that MRI, the doctor rescheduled from January, 2008 to August, 2008 for the next one. And that was when they found the little booger, just recently grown big enough to detect.

(I'm not saying I'm out of the woods--I may well die from one of these. But it will be in God's timing. And I'll know it's time to go.)

So there it is--empirical evidence for the existence of God. It may not convince you, but it sure convinces me. And yes, there are times when I doubt, when I wonder what God is up to, when the world does not look so bright. But I keep coming back to this quartet of "co-incidental" occurrences and to the bedrock truth that everything in my life has come to me straight from the hand of a God who loves me. And that makes some things easier to take.

Till next time, Chuck Eggerth