"Hooray For Body Trauma!"

Three rounds of chemo and a CT scan later, and I was finally ready for surgery.

It's a weird thing to celebrate — getting sliced open and having doctors scoop out an undetermined number of my organs, followed by a 6-week recovery where I can't move much at all isn't usually my idea of a good time. But in this case, it means that the chemo has been working! How well exactly?

"We'll see when we get in there."

"In there" meaning, "in me."

"There's a chance we'll have to take your spleen," I was told. "And your pancreas. And we might have to do intestinal surgery, depending on what everything looks like. There's also a slight chance that we'll find a bunch of tiny tumors we didn't know about in there, and in that case we won't be able to do surgery at all, we'll just sew you up and send you home and you can come back the next day for more treatment..."

So even day-of this procedure — hell, even after I made my peace with doctors scraping out as much of my insides as they please, even after I sailed away into blissful unconsciousness — even then this surgery might not happen at all?! I might wake up relieved that it's all over only to be told, "Actually, just kidding! It’s worse than we thought and ALSO you have to be back here 7am tomorrow for chemo all day. And then chemo again, and again, and THEN we'll redo the CT scan, and THEN we'll do this same mindfuck all over again where we won't tell you if you're having surgery until after you've already had it.”

I hate surprises.

Like me, my doctors like to plan for the worst case scenario. For surgery, that involved an all-day bowel prep in case I did end up needing on-the-spot intestinal surgery.

I could really take my time here in describing that whole experience in the world's grossest blog post:

"Spew" is not a word I use very often. But taking these pre-surgery antibiotics on a completely "bowel prepped" empty stomach? Oh man, I spewed. Everywhere. Just a fire hose projectile vomiting across my living room, nothing but liquid magnesium and blue Gatorade coming out of me the color of anime water.

I had been listening to podcasts to try and distract me from the gross concoction I was trying to choke down, and now if I ever hear Conan O’Brien talking about Mary Todd Lincoln again I think I will have a Pavlovian response to puke on the spot. One poor houseplant got hit with the worst of it and now she's turned all her leaves away from me to face the wall…

But enough of bodily fluids. On to body horror.

I do not like being reminded that my body is a body. I’ve often said it, but never quite been able to really explain that concept to people. More than self-consciousness about the way my body looks, I hate being aware that my body is a living thing with blood pulsing through it and soft organs going about their own business without me telling them what to do. There are too many things happening in there that I don’t understand. I hate knowing if any one of those processes stopped I’d be dead.

There are just so many design flaws with the human body! How have we not evolved past this form yet?! We have iOS upgrades seemingly every other day — give me a system update for my organs. Fix the bugs that make an appendix spontaneously explode, or that drive cells to mutate into cancer just for funsies. Give me a bionic body. Make me a floating head in a jar.

There have been many experiences in the last five months, this surgery being a big one, that remind me just how fragile our bodies are. And how resilient, I suppose. Who knew you could take out so many organs and carry on living without much change? Sitting here now without a gallbladder, a uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, or an omentum — at this point I’m basically just a bag of skin.

I am a lucky bag of skin, though. The surgery did end up happening the day I went in for it, and it went so well my doctor said she was literally cheering, “this is great! This is so great!” in the OR. The chemo apparently worked even better than expected and I got to keep my spleen, my pancreas, and my intestines fully intact. Hooray!

Having cancer is apparently just celebrating a series of increasingly bizarre things.

But this truly is cause for celebration! Slow-going recovery aside, I sleep so much better at night knowing the worst of the cancer is officially gone. Now it’s just a matter of clean-up. A few more rounds of chemo to zap out the remaining cancer spots and (hopefully) I will be able to breathe a little easier again.

God, I’m looking forward to tattoos being the only body trauma I endure for a while.

(This one felt dark. Enjoy another round of Out of Con-TEXT to lighten the mood:)