prune juice in the parking lot

i have done things, and have had things done to me in the past 9 years that even surprise me.  i have had six surgeries to cut cancer out of my body, one of those surgeries being second only to open heart surgery.

i have been on andre the giant size portions of opiods to combat the pain of surgeries and to quell the pain of tumors growing like kudzu in my body.

i have endured three different combinations of chemotherapy when the surgery was no longer working, which also coincided with new advancements in the field of study of melanoma, but far more toxic than going under the knife.

i have done all of this while simultaneously attempting to live as quasi a normal life as possible and readying and steadying myself for death.  but none of this is out of the ordinary to me, or to any person dealing with a terminal diagnosis.  so none of what i just wrote has been too extraordinary.

what was surprising was having my local oncologist basically say he didn't know what else to do with me, that the disease seemed to be taking a turn for the worse and recommended a new specialist the university of iowa had hired.  so my oncologist gave up on me and pawned me off.

two weeks ago i found myself in iowa city at what i thought was going to be a routine consult with this brand new doc who wants to just be called "mo" (short for mohammad) and the next thing i know i am having an mri, and the next morning at 7:59 am exactly i see the 319 area code pop up on my phone and i know it is mo and i know it isn't good news.

one week later i am having brain surgery, and go home an hour later like all i had done was scraped a knee and the school nurse cleaned it up and placed a band-aid on the wound.  then i was offered one option as far as treatment goes, to join a trial.

this trial of course being spearheaded by mo, it combines traditional chemotherapy with an injectable directly into the tumor, once a week for 7 to 13 weeks all in iowa city.  uh none of this sounds appealing, i would be only the 4th person in the world to have this procedure done and "it looks very promising, and isn't it exciting to be on the cutting edge of what may potentially save lives?"  what the fuck are you supposed to say to that?  so i said give me a few days to think about it.

so my husband and i take a few days to visit some friends in northern iowa and wisconsin, where we ate morels, hunted morels and sat by a bonfire and hit up a spa for a night where i treated myself to a skin cleanse/swaddle/7 head shower head rinse that was so delightful and womb-like i am surprised the massage therapist didn't catch me sucking my thumb after.  oh it was so nice.

as we were leaving wisconsin my head was heavy in thought about what to do with regards to my health, but my colon was also heavy and i asked my husband to stop at the piggly wiggly where we actually debated in the juice aisle whether or not to buy the prune juice because it wasn't organic.  i know, i know.  the cap was off before i reached the car and i chugged half the bottle.  relief wasn't long after the chugfest.

so yesterday just 2 weeks out from my initial visit with mo was the big decision day.  my mom and i drove to iowa city and i was 50/50 about participating in the trial.  i had emailed mo all of my questions and concerns and he came prepared, i thought he would be all about the hard sell of being on the cutting edge, and to "trust me" which he had said more than once in two previous meetings with him.  but he was and he wasn't all about the trial, he was all about what was best for me.  he said do a ct scan and if things look differently than before maybe we do a different course of treatment.  so i said i could live with that.

i have the ct scan and 20 minutes later we are back in the cancer ward in mo's office and he said "your tumors have shrunk, some by more than 50%, your treatment is working- i want to keep you on the same treatment for just two more cycles, but dial it down a few notches so that it is not so toxic and because we discovered you basically had a thyroidectomy (due to toxic levels of chemo) and are on hormone replacement therapy you should better weather the treatment".  say what?  i asked him to repeat what he said, then i hugged him and he hugged me back.  then i said well what about the trial and what if i miss out on this potential miracle drug combo?  he said "you no longer qualify for the trial, your body is responding as it should to your immunotherapy and i believe with a few adjustments we can get you into remission".

those words were like magic.  those words were the equivalent to the relief i felt after chugging prune juice in the parking lot of a piggly wiggly.  those words strung together in that sentence have been life changing.  i am so stunned by what transpired yesterday that tears are rolling down my cheeks as i write this.  i still don't think i've fully taken in what all this means.  i am still a bit skeptical, maybe cautiously optimistic, and am going to take one day at a time and be as present as i can be in each moment, and every other fucking cliche dying people hold onto.  but god dammit i haven't had good news to share in years.  i cannot express in words how much better i can breathe today.

fuckin' A.