May 20th 6:26 pm

Removing the mass was a relatively minor operation. The next week was preparing for the next phase much different from the first. Spreading, it would enter into the lymph glands and nodes that were on the front side of the spine.

A twelve-hour operation with two teams and an incision starting just below the heart traveling down, five inches past the navel.

Waking up there was white light, desert mouth and intense pain. There was no liquid they would give. Morphine slowly cascaded from shoulders to arms. ed Unable to raise my head, a hand investigated the incision, there seemed to be a harden cast covering the entire abdomen.

There was a stomach pump, it seems the intestines do not like to be touched by human hands and so they cease to function. It was expected, nothing to worry about. Until the days had passed longer than they wished.

Patience worn off. They pulled the tube and started feeding me. My parents had stayed in the two-bed room. Other patients would come and go on the other side of the drawn curtain. At night dad slept in a chair by the bed and mom down the hall in a waiting room. It was a time they could go home and get some sleep.

There was pain I told the nurses, only gas they said. Eat and you will feel better. When it was vomited up, they came in with a narcotic cocktail that I have no words to describe. The cascade came as it usually did, but with much more intensity. It had been maybe three weeks and I looked like death warmed over, with the cocktail there was total peace and calm.

My mother had told me, when she was bleeding profusely during one of her miscarriages and had lost so much blood she was unable to move. “If the building was to burn there was nothing I could do”, she said. Completely helpless. And so it was.

In the days to come, there was muffled talk in the hallway. They may have to go back in.

But yet it was not to be.

Just short of a month I was driven home. Before my weight was 140, leaving it was 115, arms blue and black from blood draws and the steel IV needles they don’t use today.

The cancer was not to show it’s face again, but as the years began to blend into one another it became self evident that I would never have a child of my own.