Army

Symptoms came back yesterday afternoon. Tried to take a long walk with Gabrielle; didn't get very far. It's hard to describe: not exactly weakness, not exactly fatigue, not exactly light-headed. Just an uneasy feeling that if I do too much I might not make it. The hemoglobin must be dropping.

Today, we did take a long walk — but uphills make my heart pound, immediately, and after even a couple of dozen stairs I grind to a complete halt.

I've had amazing luck. What if I hadn't gone in for an annual physical last month? Exactly when would I have started to feel this stuff as symptoms of something dangerous, instead of just flu, a cold, not enough sleep, too much to drink last night, whatever? I'm severely anemic now; I would've needed a blood transfusion right away if I'd waited much longer.

In the Cancer Center last week, I thought: there's an army fighting with me. Doctors, nurses, scientists, therapists, even the f-ing insurance company — hundreds, thousands of people working on the knowledge, the drugs, the antibodies, the cure. Not all-powerful, yet still mighty. None of it's about me personally, of course. But I'll choose to think of it that way.

Then there are the other armies: my parents, my extended family (including half a dozen doctors, even a Mayo Clinic oncologist), my friends with their stories of illness and recovery. Steve Schneider, my climatologist colleague and friend, who survived mantle cell lymphoma and then wrote The Patient From Hell. My friend Marcia's brothers, both hematologist/oncologists: I never met them, but they read my emails, looked over my lab reports, talked to me on the phone about the diagnosis, the treatment, clinical trials of new drugs.

Platoons, regiments, battalions. Generals and footsoldiers. Field medics and walking wounded. Weapons of war. Weapons of love.