I'm certainly not a very active Kossack. My passions are with science, and language, and history, and ... some more science, not so much with politics. But in the world we find ourselves in, being passionate about those things requires an engagement with politics, or else we won't have them anymore. With that in mind, I've started, over my tenure here, a number of diary series. One on animal and plant disease, one dissection of a particularly bad piece of anti-nuclear propaganda disguised as science, and a guide on how to read science articles for the lay reader that ... oh, I guess I never started that one.
At one point, I had no real excuse for not contributing more. But for almost the past year and a half, much of my attention has been focused on a friend of mine, who then became the woman I love. And now I get to write one of those diaries about her current situation, in the hopes that it's cathartic.
We had been friends years ago, having met through a mutual acquaintance -- my longtime friend, her ex-boyfriend. But we'd lost touch. I knew she wasn't well. I knew the diagnosis was breast cancer, and the prognosis was very, very bad. To be honest, I thought the worst already. But she made it out to a camping trip with a group of my friends, and we reconnected. And then we connected a lot more closely.
I knew from the start that there was a terrible clock ticking for her. She had a rough life with travails that could fill not diaries but novels. That diagnosis was, indeed, very bad. Breast cancer, stage IV at diagnosis, multiple bone mets (ribs, spine, pelvis, probably the shoulders). I hadn't seen her for awhile because she'd been virtually trapped in bed, in a back brace, following the compression fracture of two vertebrae. In in the meantime, the cancer had found a new home in her liver, too.
But here's the thing. There's no minimum duration for friendship, and there's no quota to fill on love. By the time we started dating, some of the best cancer docs in the country had gotten her to the point where she was up and moving around (and going hiking and camping!). We had some scares, sure. But the months rolled by. Her blood counts improved. A new set of drugs had a much lighter side effect profile. She got her hair back, and some of her energy. The liver lesions held steady, then they shrank. One checked out entirely. She was still two years and change into a "three-to-five" prognosis, but who cares? Odds are for beating, and the time we have is for making the best besides. And, most of all, we love each other, very much.
My intention -- which I can safely post here, because she's not a Kossack -- was to propose on her birthday, next month. She will be, hopefully, 36.
But right now, we're waiting to hear back from something like a fifth round of tests. Something is wrong. She's had piercing pains below the sternum, and a variety of duller but still awful sensations from the upper right abdominal quadrant. She's jaundiced; you can see the pale yellow in her eyes, and while fatigue has been a constant enemy all along, it's clear this is getting the best of her ability to stay awake and active. Her blood work is indicative of some sort of problem in the bile process. Cholestasis is the suspected situation: a failure of bile to properly go to the places it needs to be, basically. But that's a symptom, not a disease.
I would have put $5 on the table for this to be gallbladder disease. And that sucks, but gallbladder removal is an easy peasy operation for most people. But the CT didn't reveal any evidence of obstruction there, and neither did the ultrasound, or the MRI. Does that mean that's not the problem? They can't say. Does that mean there's a problem elsewhere? Elsewhere is an increasingly unpleasant list of differential diagnoses, with names like primary biliary cirrhosis or primary sclerosing cholangitis, or a handful of other options, almost all of which have treatment summaries that boil down to "liver transplant". But as a metastatic cancer patient, if it comes down to that, her odds of even going on the list are essentially zero. And still, they can't say.
So we get the results from another test back late Thursday, and another on Friday. And we'll likely be back into the lab then for another round of efforts to figure out what has gone wrong, and why it has gone wrong now, so suddenly, when everything else was coming up roses. There is still a very real chance that this is a fixable kind of bad, but the harder the answers are to find, the greater the likelihood that it's ... not.
I am an atheist, a secular humanist, and a skeptic. So I'm not really here looking for lit candles or prayers or energetic sendings. I'm here because, even though I lurk more than a contribute, and I'm about as reliable a diarist as a really unreliable thing that you can't rely on, this community is important to me. And I needed to say it, and this seemed the place. Thank you, everyone, for your understanding.
(She, on the other hand is Catholic -- if, admittedly, more than a little lapsed -- so for those who really feel that these situations are best answered with prayers, well, there's that, I suppose.)