The Jelly Belly Journal - March 9, 2008

Last Thursday, Sharon and I visited UPMC once again.  After receiving a letter from their financial aid department, we called to set up an appointment in order to get things moving off of top dead center.  Our application for assistance was accepted by the hospital and they have granted us a 70% discount on nearly all hospital services for the next year.  Wow!  Surgery on sale!!  Unfortunately plastic surgery and liposuction do not fall under this medical dispensation of grace.  But God is kind.  A hefty discount.

I was talking about my scheduled visit with my friend Bill, and he asked a very simple and obvious question: “What is the purpose of the visit?”  I said, “To set up a date for surgery.”  “Why can’t you do that over the phone?  You’re gonna drive three hours one way to set a date for your surgery?”  Good point.  

So I called and asked if there was anything else we needed to take care of during this trip, since we’re three hours away.  The lady on the other end said, “I don’t know.  I was just told to set up an appointment for you.  I’ll check and call you back.”  She checked, called back, and informed me that I needed to be in Pittsburgh at 2:15 for a CT scan.  “Tomorrow.”  

I have come to accept the fact that needles are a normal and necessary part of pretty much any medical treatment.  As much as I hate them, I understand they are a necessary evil.  I refuse to accept nausea as medically necessary.  CT scans do that to me.  It’s not the gallon of oil-based, exterior, WeatherBeater paint I have to drink that causes my entrails to glow that makes me sick.  And it’s not the machine that looks like a giant Krispy Kreme doughnut that they slide me into, and out of, while it makes strange noises.

What is so disgusting about the whole ordeal is whatever that radioactive stuff is they pump into your arm with a garden hose while you’re lying flat on your back.  It enters the arm, and the last time this happened, I felt it go in, up my shoulder, down through my heart and on down all the way to my bladder.  If they had not warned me, I would have been mortified that I had wet the table, my clothes, etc.  But such was not the case.  It just feels EXACTLY as though I did.

However, on Thursday, a wonderful man by the name of Max was taking care of me during the scan.  The first thing I told him was, “Get the bucket.”  “You gonna throw up,” he asked?  “Oh yeah.”  “I don’t do throw up.  I’ll get (I forget her name).  She’s does throw up.”  OK.  That’s fine.  But somebody needs to get the bucket!

So Max inserts the garden hose into my IV and gets me all hooked up to the torture device, while his assistant who does throw up comes in and desperately tries to talk me out of it.  I’d be happy to be talked out of it, but it is an unrealistic expectation.  In fact, I have no hope of escaping tossing the salad.  Or, in this case, the exterior paint.  But this obviously experienced lady brings me a little piece of cloth about the size of a large postage stamp, that has been dipped in alcohol.

She places it on my lip just under my nose and says, “This helps some people with the nausea.  Is that OK?  How do you feel?”  Well, I feel nauseous.  And we haven’t even started the radioactive injection into my IV yet!  “That’s fine.  I’ll be absolutely delighted to give the alcohol stamp a try.”

Then begins the machine, lights and such start flashing, and Max’s voice from behind the bulletproof glass tries to console me.  “This will be over in a minute.  I’m going to slow down your injection so you don’t get so sick.”  Excellent!  Great!  I hope it works.  And the alcohol rub under my nose isn’t hurting either.  In fact, it may actually be helping a bit.  I’ve always kinda liked that smell, but only from a distance.  There’s not much distance in this case.  Maybe a micron?

OK, here we go.  Pass number one, as I slide into the machine and the Plutonium 486 starts entering into my vein.  Right on schedule, I’m not feeling so good.  Max’s voice comes through the speaker mounted somewhere on the wall behind me.  “How ya doin’ Keith?”  With a slow shake of my head back and forth, I give him the universal “I’m about to need that bucket we were talking about earlier” signal.  

His comrade says, “Breathe deeply through your nose and exhale through your mouth.”  In moments of high stress, I don’t do well with complicated instructions.  So instead of doing what I was told, I took a deep breath through my mouth, exhaled through my nose.  What had been a very helpful piece of alcohol-saturated cloth blew half way across the room.  My last hope of avoiding nauseage floated in slow motion all the way to the floor.  This is not good.

“Ten more seconds and we’re all done,” shouts Max.  Ten seconds??  I just might survive this after all!  I think I can make it for nine, eight, seven, . . . two, one.  “All finished!”  I felt like I had given birth! Someone needed to congratulate me on a job well done!  We made it!  All the plutonium was finished, the scan was complete, and I didn’t even lose the paint or wet my pants.  

I realize this is a small blessing in the big scheme of having such a weird cancer.  But I have come to REALLY loathe CT scans.  Just thinking about all this makes me feel queazy.  I truly had zero expectation of getting through that scan without making an embarrassing mess.  The Lord was merciful to me in this relatively small thing and I was, and am, very grateful.

A couple of hours later, Dr. Holtzman, who said I could call him “Dr. Stud” (He’s young, single, and quite personable.  I like him.), said the scan showed no change from the scan taken after my surgery back in October/November.  That is indeed good news!  Dr. Stud said he operated on a woman last week who decided to ignore her PMP for two years.  When she finally came to him for surgery (because she couldn’t breathe!), he removed TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS of jelly from her abdomen!

So surgery now is better than surgery later.  Doc thinks this is going to be relatively easy since there is no evidence of more tumors or more “jelly” since October.  He said he could do the surgery on April 1st.  Right.  You’re gonna make an incision from the top of my head to my knees on April Fool’s Day?  I don’t think so.  “Hows about the 2nd?”

We will be making our return trip to Pittsburgh on the 1st and spending the night in the home of John and Ann Holmes.  It was Ann’s mother, Austin Robeson, who led me to the Lord in March of 1972, thirty-six years ago this month.  The Robeson family continues to minister to me, even now.  I cannot say how much of a blessing Ed and Austin Robeson, their daughter Helen Soyster (with whom I attended high school in Chester, SC), and now Ann and John, have been to me over the course of my Christian pilgrimage.  God bless you all.

So mark your calendars for April 2nd.  I’ll be at the Hillman Cancer Center at 5:30 that morning.  I didn’t realize the world turned on its axis at that time of day, but apparently hospitals do stuff that early in the morning.  Maybe I’ll be too sleepy to know what’s going on.  Probably not.  But Sharon and I would appreciate your continued prayers for us.  No doubt it will be a longer day for her than for me.  Ten hours is a long time to wait for someone to come out of surgery.  But no doubt, April 3rd will be a long week for me.

God has proven Himself utterly faithful to His people for millennia.  I strongly suspect He will do so yet again on April 2nd.  And on April 1st.  And every day, until that great day when He comes to take us home.  If He wanted to come again on April 1st, that would be just fine with me.  “Come quickly, really quickly, Lord Jesus.”

Many blessings to you all!  I hope to give you one more update before D-Day.

Grace and peace,

Keith (and Sharon)