Lost and Found
JANUARY 25, 2004
On January 22nd, the first marrow test since my last round of chemotherapy was clear at one unit per 50,000. The doctor rushed the results, as she was very happy, and surprised. What this means is that I have monthly blood tests for 24 months; if those remain clear, I will be in remission after two years. There are great odds against that happening, as she was careful to point out. However, she also pointed out that I was “a very special person,” who had come farther than anyone expected given the depth of my illness. She could offer no prognosis on my chances for success except to say, “you are not in any books on the illness, because no one has come back from as far down as you were. Just enjoy the days you are given because you are as close to a miracle as I have ever seen.”
It is almost exactly eight months ago that my wife, Angela, drove me from our mountain home in Idyllwild, CA, fifty-six miles down Highway 74 to Eisenhower Hospital in Palm Desert. According to my blood counts I was clinically dead. When I finally keeled over and they put me on the ventilator to keep me breathing, I began a trip down the River Styx to my Dance with the Cancer Bear. I recall the first few weeks in a series of drug-induced visions of demons and madness.
I had the last of my five, week & SHY;long, chemotherapy treatments in early December. After seven months on a trip that tested and taught me more than I thought myself capable of withstanding, I was released from the hospital on Christmas Eve of 2003. I would be home with my wife and two little girls on Christmas morning.
There were gifts, thanks to the generosity of my in-laws and the dozens of people who had been donating to the Metcalf Family Fund. I was humbled and grateful for that. Christmas day was cool, but rays of sunlight scattered brightness in a contest with the tree lights. It was the beginning of my recovery.
That recovery continues to this day, more than a month after my release into the world at large. My body finds new and perverse ways of reminding me, on a daily basis, that I am still in recovery from high doses of chemotherapy liquids that had been sloughed through my veins for seven months. So why am I mostly optimistic?
Adult Leukemia is much like a horrid microcosm of life: for all of the controls we delude ourselves into thinking we have, we have only two. We can control how we choose to think or act, and we can control our reaction to whatever outcome may present itself. That’s it. That is why I repeat again here, on our web site, and in most every conversation I have with myself. “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Viktor Frankel
I am alive because of a chain of miracles: prayers offered up by so many; new and old friends who stood by me; the doctors and nurses who cared; the people who have been so very generous with their donations; and, most of all, to my wife. Beset by so many new challenges, Angela remained ferociously loyal, devoted and has acted as my defense against the many problems that can arise from confusion and simple idiocy in any hospital.
Altruism, Community, Humor, Imagination and Divine Luck, the very skills that I had been teaching others for so long came back to rescue me.
New Year? Life is too precious, tenuous, and warped with wonder to celebrate once a year. So, I wish for you a Happy New Day, New Night, and New Breath.
C.W. Metcalf