Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 2

By Roger Owens

In Windows 10, you hold the power button down for 15 seconds, then release. Press it again and begin tapping “F11,” until you see the boot menu. You select “Troubleshoot” from the menu, and then click “Advanced Options.”
    By this point you feel a little smug; that feeling gamers report when “reaching the next level,” that sort of thing. You are now confronted with options including one known as “System Restore,” and when you click on that, you get to chose from a few dates in the not-too-distant past at which time, in your fondest dreams, your system had not been corrupted by God only knows what virus, power surge, plague, disaster, war, famine, or election gone awry that might have had illicit cyber-congress with your hard drive and impregnated it with some vampiric succubus.
    And if you are very  lucky indeed, when you take whatever gonads you own firmly if figuratively in hand and tell it to go ahead, take your digital life in its digital hands and restore your system, after a period of maybe half an hour, it says, “System Restore Completed Successfully.” You are transformed. Redeemed. Your cyber-life, as odious as you may at times perceive it to be, is restored to its previous glory.

If only. If only your real life were so malleable, so easily restored to its condition on a previous date. Before. Before you crashed the car, before a child drowned, before your wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. But, of course, it is not. I have wished such a “system restore” were available numerous times in the last few weeks, because Cindy, my wife, has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
    After waiting an inordinately long time for results, due solely to the doctor’s being out of town, we have learned she has Stage One cancer, meaning it has not spread to lymph nodes even in the breast itself. Oh, yes, if we live long enough, don’t we all get to learn far more about the medical field than we really care to know? I can now tell you all the stages of breast cancer, having lost my office manager and good friend Sharon to it just last year. Stage Five, of course, is when they put you in a box.
    We have learned that Cindy’s cancer is not particularly aggressive, although more so than our doctor says “we like to see.” We like to see perhaps a three to four percent growth rate, and hers is growing at a rate of twelve percent. Not great, but not terrible.
    At this point I ask how he means a certain percent, is this over a time period? Wouldn’t that require multiple tests? The doctor is impressed. I clearly understand something about statistics. Oh yeah, I’m a pretty smart guy, ask anybody. Sometimes I know stuff I really wish I didn’t; being a “smart guy” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
    The doctor says no, it is the percentage of cells in a given area that are in a growth stage. I mention her cough; remember the persistent cough? Could it mean this has spread to her lungs? That’s what happened to Sharon; she didn’t have a mammogram for eight years, and it cost her, cost her big time. She had double radical mastectomies, chemo, and radiation, and she still died within five years of diagnosis. He says there is absolutely no chance of that.

So, okay, at this point we feel a certain alleviation of our anxiety, which, you may understand, has been pretty spectacular since we discovered this problem. An odd mixture of horror and relief, rather like dodging a careening bus just enough so that it only crushes your leg. Suddenly Cindy’s chances of surviving more than a few horrible years of endless pain, ghastly treatments, and disabling affliction are much improved.
    But still, something must be done. The choices, from the point of view of Western medicine, are a “lumpectomy” and radiation, just in case it has spread to lymph nodes in the breast undetected, or a mastectomy and no radiation. I ask the doctor what he recommends. He says that many women actually do better with the lumpectomy, this having to do more with the psychological effects of losing the breast entirely versus not losing the breast. I understand this too; I majored in psychology and grasp, perhaps more than some others, how important breasts are to the self-image of some women.
    Yet all my fevered brain can think of right then is how funny it is that the vaunted medical profession, with all its ingenious, occult terminology, cannot come up with anything better than “lumpectomy” to describe this procedure. There is a caveat, however; the lump is in the inner left quadrant, and there is no way to prevent the radiation from impinging upon the heart and lung. Also, the treatments will take five weeks, five days a week, and besides the heart/lung involvement it leaves one sick, weak, incapacitated. Cindy tells the doctor that heart disease runs in her family. Her father died at 46 from his third heart attack.
    The doctor’s face goes from a reassuring smile to a disturbed frown faster than a Maserati can hit 60. It is still, he says, clearly uneasy, a decision she will have to make. After reassuring ourselves and the doctor that all relevant questions have been asked, we pay the outrageous fees without qualm to the smiling face at the window and make our way to the parking lot. We have not even gotten past the spaces reserved for the doctors, those emperors of this tormented domain, before Cindy says she is having the mastectomy. Period. She seems a bit irritated that the doctor and I appeared to be making a decision for her.
    Despite being the most even-tempered, easygoing woman you could ever meet, she will not countenance being told what she will or will not do. Anyone who tells me I should convince her to do this or not do that is told flatly to argue with her themselves. I will not do it because it never worked for me, not once in nearly forty years, and I am not one for exercising futility. Let futility get in shape on its own time, I will not waste mine.

So, there we are, folks, this is your intrepid, embedded wartime correspondent, reporting from the front lines of the war on cancer. Having lost so many friends and family members in this conflict, I am akin to the most rabid anti-war activist one could imagine. I despise cancer. I hate it; I am terrified of it; I would give my own life to end it. In spite of there being millions just like me, the war goes on unabated. Until next time, that’s the way it is.

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens