a bit of history 1: the lump

the story of j's cancer is long. and drawn out. and hard to tell in one sitting. so i'll spread it out. this is the first installment.

the cancer that j was originally diagnosed with started out as what he described as a "fullness" in his neck, on the left side, just below where the jaw bone connects to the skull. i remember him occasionally complaining about some achiness when he chewed, in his ear. (this is what the doctors call "referential pain": pain that radiates from the tumor site. everything gets tight under the skin when a tumor is present.) other than the painful chewing and the fullness, he was asymptomatic.

and the fullness, which was really a lump, was there for a long time. it was there before we met, before we got married, while we got married, while i was pregnant, after a was born. sometimes, i look at this one picture i have of the two of them, a is maybe two months old, sleeping in j's arms. the way he is sleeping, the left side of j's neck is all stretched out along one side of the photograph. i have looked at the picture of number of times, studying j's neck to see if i can see the cancer. it's so strange to think this malignant thing was silently hitching a ride through all of these happy times.

i don't remember what it was that finally made him go to the doctor to have it checked out, but he did. he went first to a primary care doctor who sent him to a ear, nose and throat doctor. (we still get that guy's newsletter. it's a kind of interesting, in a nothing-to-read, stuck-on-the-subway kind of way.) the ENT doctor first guessed it might be cat scratch fever, (yes, that is a real disease. j was really mad at the cat for a few days.) but sent j to get a cat (no pun, but that is kinda funny) scan. he may even have biopsied it, i can't remember exactly. at that point, i wasn't paying very close attention to the whole thing. i was two months post-partum and j went to all the appointments during the day and he's a guy so he never really told me much about them. and i never in a million years thought about that lump being cancer.

what it felt like was when you have the flu or some other viral infection and that gland by your jaw swells. when it swells, it gets all hard, like a little marble and you can kind of roll it around under you skin. since all of this started, i have lost count of the number of times i have felt my neck in that area, trying to imagine what a cancerous lump feels like. if you feel your neck there, it all feels lumpy. you have your salivary glands and lymph nodes, short muscles that control your jaw; it's a lumpy mess up under there.

but that lump was cancer which i found out as i was taking a bus up third avenue to get the stitches taken out of a wisdom tooth i had had extracted a week earlier. j called me and said the doctor says it's malignant in the oddest tone. it was like the words that he was saying had nothing to do with how he was saying them. like, isn't that weird that the doctor would say something like that. i think my immediate thought was that the doctor had made some mistake. i have a pretty low opinion of the competency of doctors in general, so my first thought was how we (or more truthfully, i) were going to get this idiot straightened out. and then my phone battery started to run low and so we hung up and i went to the oral surgeon's office.

i guess i was in denial, or perhaps shock. it's not that i didn't think that cancer could happen to people: my mother's father and mother both died of cancer; an old boyfriend's father had died of cancer while he and i were together; a friend had just gone through treatment for breast cancer. i knew that cancer happened; i just didn't think of it happening to someone like j.

often i think of that movie "american splendor" and when harvey pikar finds out he has cancer. his wife joyce reassures him that she will take care of him by telling him she's from a very sick family: she knows illness. she seems like she might even enjoy it. sometimes i feel like that. i too am from a very sick family.