The Effing Truck

 

Photo by Ian Parker on Unsplash

Back in May, I wrote about my oncologist Tim using the truck analogy for the first time with me. In short, the truck analogy is that with an incurable, progressive cancer, the disease is like a truck  that has started rolling down the hill it was parked on. You can slow the truck, maybe, but cannot stop it.

The truck. The effing truck. 

In the last three weeks, I have had good (great) consultations both with my Mayo oncologist (by video) and a Mayo neurologist (in person). They—both the doctors and the discussions—gave me reassurance as where I am on the myeloma path (persistent but stable) and what the neurological landscape looks like (low end of the neuropathy scale, no red flags, keep walking). 

Both of those discussions lifted huge weights off of me, some of which I was aware of and some not. The utter relief. The sheer exuberance of those worries lifting away.

But I would be kidding myself if I pretended or ignored the reality of the myeloma in me. It is a daily presence. It is the effing truck.

My dad has outdated and homespun notions of what cancer is and what my cancer is. Until my older brother was diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer and my father started going to oncology appointments with him, Dad thought cancer was something you caught. In fairness to him, he is almost 89 and came up in a hills culture, so I get it. He will sometimes make a comment, if I say I am tired, that "your cancer is chewing away on you." His cancer experience and images are of tumors eating away at livers and brains and other organs.

But here's the thing. My cancer doesn't have to "chew away" on me. Tumors "chew away," yes, because that's how they move through the body to new locations. But myeloma? Heck no. Dr. Leung explained it best when Warren once raised a concern about the myeloma metastasizing elsewhere in me. "It doesn't have to. It's already all over her body in her blood and bone marrow." 

I am bathed in it. 

The effing truck will roll down the hill.

My challenge going forward is not how to slow the effing truck, but how to accept it. I go through this process—how to accept the disease—increasingly as I age, as the years with myeloma accumulate, as my energy declines. What is important? Keep that. What is not? Let that go.

The effing truck is what it is. I don't add it to the process, only acknowledge it. The rest of my life is what matters.

I am writing this out by hand sitting on the front porch. We had heavy storms pass through in the night and the air is cool and damp. There are bees in the spiderwort. I just rescued a firefly from a spider web. I will get a walk in soon before the high temps move in and the morning turns on me.

What is important? Bees in the spiderwort. 

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[An editorial note: I use the adjective "effing" on purpose. I am married to a wonderful man who grew up without being exposed to swearing and who is very uncomfortable with it under any conditions. I, on the other hand, went to law school during a time when female students were very much a minority and swearing was a way for women students to make it clear we were there to stay. It was (and perhaps still is) embedded into the collegial side of the law: we swear a lot. What can I say? Marrying Warren cleaned up my language a lot and I do not regret that, but it is an effing truck.]