Jeff watched an orange laser light show, his chin and
forehead resting against the metal frame mounted on the ophthamologist’s
microscope. Dr. Pendse projected
crosshairs on Jeff’s left eye and zapped away – by quadrant - the debris left
after cataract surgery in November. Then
he whooshed the bits to the edges of Jeff’s field of vision where they will be
absorbed by the body.
Jeff’s
description of the procedure was matter-of-fact, no hint of his pre-cancer
squeamishness. This is the man who once
nearly passed out at the eye doctor’s office.
Well, okay - he was, after all, having metal removed from his eye. This time, though, he had been more nervous about
whether his vision could be improved rather than the means by which improvement
might be accomplished. Once finished
with the laser procedure, he went home and took a nap.
Happily,
hours later he believed his vision was better.
He told me that there is “still something there, like a hair” but things
appear much clearer. A week later Dr.
Pendse performed the procedure in Jeff’s right eye and, again, “something’s in
there” but there is improvement.
Eyes,
kidneys, liver and skin have all been affected by the transplant
experience. And, of course, there is the
fatigue. Fatigue is a curious thing. It can sometimes be ignored and sometimes
must be acknowledged and given into.
Jeff takes naps three or four times a week for one to three hours
each. Twice a week those naps occur when
Jeff is with our granddaughters. On the
weekends we work around his naps, adjusting our plans as necessary.
Fatigue
can also cause depression or, at least for Jeff, confusion.
“How
can I be so tired and not be sick? How
do I know it’s just fatigue?”
I
remind him that his blood counts have been great so… no cancer. I suggest he talk to Dr. Porter about his
concerns but whenever he goes to the doctor’s office, he forgets to mention them.
Jeff
asked me to go along to his next visit.
With a little prompt from me, he asked the doc about disease
recurrence. For a large percentage of
patients who are, as Dr. Porter explains, “destined to have a recurrence”, it
happens within two years of transplant.
For another large percentage it happens by five years
post-transplant.
I
remembered seeing charts showing the five-year survival rates in patients with
MDS and AML who had bone marrow transplants.
At the time of diagnosis, those numbers were frightening - with that
terrible drop in the first two years and then a too-low percentage surviving
five years! And we’d feared that “you have
an incurable cancer” meant that the survival curve continued a downward trend
after five years - although the rate of this decline was unknown to us. We imagined the chart only needed to show
maybe, what? - another five-year period before reaching a no-survivor vanishing
point.
Dr.
Porter said the issues Jeff is having (related to treatment and meds) are
annoyances – particularly, he guessed, the vision issues. Jeff will always have to take
immunosuppressants for GVHD. However,
Dr. Porter does not see any of these issues as insurmountable. If asked, he would sign a life insurance form
“cured of leukemia”.
The language
of cancer is interesting to me. I am pragmatic in most things; I ponder
probabilities – it helps with planning for the future, right? (Ha!)
With a few words from Dr. Porter I began to consider that Jeff could be
in a group of people for whom recurrence is not
inevitable. Jeff, on the other hand, was
always sure he would survive. His faith
- which I mistook for denial early on – and his humor have kept us both from
going to dark places.
At the
kidney specialist’s office, an intern was searching online for the results of
Jeff’s “echo”, the echocardiogram that was done after his November hospital
stay for chicken pox. Jeff sat behind
her and called, “HELLO, Hello, hello, ‘ello…”
The intern chuckled. Jeff was
very pleased with himself.
As we
approach the six-year anniversary of his transplant, it seems more and more
likely that we will have a lot of time yet together.
I read
this to Jeff, as I always do before posting.
He laughed and said, “Just in case, we’re keeping our life insurance
policies up to date.”
