I should have posted this yesterday. Hey, that’s when I sent to to my family and friends and to my RedState friends and colleagues.

Here’s this.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF MEDICINE

May God damn cancer to whatever pit He opts to damn unnatural cellular behavior. Then again, it’s different when it is a part of His plan.

We went to see Dr. Shocker this afternoon, the radiation oncologist, this afternoon. To set this up, I’d been worried about this for a week, and last night, I found all sorts of lumps in my throat. (Cancerous lumps, I’d decided, though the “lump in my throat” kind were there as well.) I was nervous, but by the time we’d left to go there, I was fine.

It was the same trip we’d made every weekday morning from late September to late November, across town to the Cancer Treatment Center parking lot behind the hospital and opposite the old graveyard fronted with a old, black wrought iron fence. It looked the same, but it felt different: it was brighter and warmer than it had been when we saw that lot daily, and we had been awake half the day. (The treatments, if you’ll recall, were AM, at 8 or 8:30.)

They’d mailed me a cardboard thing. I detached the top from the bottom via the perforations; the top went on the dash so the non-extant cancer lot police wouldn’t have us towed for being there, while the bottom I scanned when I got inside, let ‘em know we were there, like that old card I used to scan every morning. (I still have that blue thing in my wallet.)

There’s no way of extending this. We went into the familiar waiting room, which felt different. Diane suggested that it might be the brightness, and I recognized that I was more relaxed. Last year, I went in there with a purpose. I was going to do what I had to, undergo what they threw at me, to beat this. It’s the same thing anyone would do, but it adds an urgency which was not there this time.

Diane pointed to the paintings on the wall. We had just seen a feature on Dr. Shocker in the local paper which mentioned him receiving a painting as a gift, an award.

The nurse came out and got us. She inquired as to my health: no complaints, I hope I haven’t lost weight. Onto the scale I went, and I’d gained a little, which I’d expected, as I’ve only recently been eating more. She took us back to the waiting room and left us there after we’d sat. (Last time, the nurse asked all sorts of questions and had me rate my pain on a scale of one-to-ten. Fun, fun, fun, but I suppose it is not as important these days.)

Dr. Shocker came in momentarily. We chatted. He hadn’t seen my PET Scan from last February, but Dr. Howells had at least seen the results. (I’d demanded that he get them from Shocker and revue them.) He’d mentioned something on my scan from before, on my right side, which had troubled him but saw that Dr. Howells had thought nothing of it. Diane told them that it was probably the Goretex used to repair the rupture of my diaphragm seven years ago. Without an MD, my wife had solved a doctors’ mystery.

While waiting for the computer to load, he felt up my neck and looked down my throat using a mirror with a light attached to his headband. He felt nothing, he saw nothing, and this was “exceptionally good.” He reviewed the PET Scan results on his lap top and saw not hint of anything whatsoever. This was alternately “incredibly good,” “exceptionally good,” and “unbelievably good.” He mentioned offhand that it was “early,” and I asked. He said that usually the risk of recurrence runs for three years. I told him that he’d zapped my tumor sufficiently: “You welded my throat shut!”

I see Dr. Howell’s in two months. We made an appointment to see Shocker in three. I think I’ll have healed significantly by each of those appointments, given that I feel much better now than I did last time I saw Shocker several months ago or when I saw Howells last month.

God has me here for a reason.