The Long Farewell Journey: Part One
6 min readMesothelioma. It doesn’t sound good. It’s worse when you find out what it is, and when it strikes someone close to you. In this case, it’s my dad.
Mesothelioma is a cancer of the mesothelium, or the lining of the chest cavity. In my dad’s case, it has infected the pleural sac around his right lung. It’s a killer. There may be hope for remission if caught in stage one of four, but when you get beyond that, it becomes a game of trying to slow the assault of the cancer on the body and managing the pain. My father has stage two mesothelioma.
It might have been different had his physician been paying attention instead of engaging in psychobabble. The physician believed that the pain was psychosomatic, or perhaps just from “old age.” He’s 65 – not exactly an ancient man by any stretch of the imagination. It took this doctor about four months of clowning around for him to order the right test, a CT scan which picked up the telltale signature of mesothelioma; a rind covering of the lower right lung. It was confirmed in a biopsy performed last Wednesday. A day I will not soon forget. I was the one that had to tell both him and my mom the dreadful news.
My dad was once the picture of health. Having received an invitation to try out for the Detroit Tigers upon his graduation from high school in 1957, my dad chose to enlist in the US Navy under the prompting of his father. It was a fateful choice, for it was in his service to his country that exposed my dad to asbestos in his ship’s engine room. Asbestos exposure is one of the few ways that one can contract this form of cancer. My dad wanted to be a SEAL, but an improperly set fracture of my dad’s forearm that occurred when he was five made that impossible. His forearm notwithstanding, this was a man that was six feet tall, 209 pounds and sported a size 32 waist. His blonde hair and piercing blue eyes made him a poster child for the Aryan Youth Movement or a Marine recruitment placard.
He was never afraid of confrontation. I remember on a steamy Saturday night in July thirty-eight years ago. My dad took us out on a late night ride in the country to try to get my sister and I to fall asleep. On this one road, a driver that was clearly drunk pulled out in front of my dad and nearly caused us to get in an accident. My dad caught up with him and got out of his car and kicked in the side of the drunk driver’s truck. This was a 1960’s Chevrolet truck, built when they used steel to form the frame of vehicles. Completely smashed in. The driver could not get out of his truck, so he took the wiser course of action and got the hell away from my dad lest my father decapitate him with his bare hands.
Then there was the time when my aunt was being abused by her husband. My dad and one of his brothers went out to her trailer to obtain her clothing and other personal articles. This man had the audacity to pull a gun on my dad and the stupidity not to use it. That was truly bad karma for Roger. Roger was hit in the face by my dad’s fist and flew across the interior of the trailer. My uncle, who is 5’9″ and 270, went over to the fallen, wounded son of a bitch and started hopping on his chest. Roger ended up in the hospital. My dad and my uncle were nearly prosecuted for their actions. Most people have seen Dirty Harry. I lived under his roof for 22 years. I’m leaving out so many other incidents, partially because you wouldn’t believe me and partially because it is not my intent to smear him. He’s been a wonderful father to me.
Remembering the great physical prowess of my father makes it even more difficult to see this man the way he is now. He can’t tolerate a hug because of the pain in his right part of his back due to the tumors pressing against his rib cage. His once powerful forearms and biceps are now shriveled. The atrophy has been so sudden and pronounced. He occasionally moans from the back pain. I’ve seen him go to work with a broken foot. A manhole cover had come down on his foot, yet he went to work the next day. He’s hardly a pain wimp. He now lives for Oxycontin, a powerful opiate that has been the only effective treatment for his pain. If this doesn’t work, he’ll be looking at either a morphine patch or a PCA (patient controlled anesthesia) device which would pump morphine into his body. He’s went from 217 pounds to 170 in this five month period. He has more in common in appearances with a Holocaust survivor than he does with the Aryan Youth I described earlier. It will only get worse.
He begins chemotherapy on Thursday. My sister and I had considered talking my dad into going to the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit or the Dana-Farber cancer Center in Boston, both which specialize in experimental mesothelioma protocols. Karmanos leans toward trying newer chemotherapy agents, where Dana-Farber leans toward experimental surgeries where the affected lung and the pleural sac are removed and then chemotherapy and radiation are used. I discussed this with my father’s oncologist, and although he’s open to such experimental therapies, he believes that my dad doesn’t need such radical treatment. He’ll receive two drugs over a two hour period. Alimta, which is a chemotherapy agent specifically designed to treat unresectable mesothelioma and Cisplatin, a general chemotherapy drug derived from platinum. I’ve been reading the horror stories on the Internet on how chemotherapy causes fatigue and nausea. It also causes loss of hair. Fortunately for him, he doesn’t have much hair to lose, but I wonder what that will look like. I’m sure I’m going to learn a whole set of terms and things about the human body that will become monitored closely as my dad marches through this heinous illness. The only question is how long will he live, and what will be the quality of life that he’ll experience.
How long is he expected to live? If you look at things on the Internet, we don’t have a real rosy picture. The median length of time someone with advanced mesothelioma (comprising stages 2 through 4 is 12.6 months. Since my dad was in excellent health prior to this and seeing he’s in stage 2, I would expect a longer period of time. But it still doesn’t make it any easier. His oncologist is fairly optimistic on my dad’s prognosis, but that is from the initial consultation. He says my dad is not in danger of dying at this time, but how can he say that when everything I’ve seen indicates that there’s no cure for this disease? In all fairness, the oncologist warned me about reading what I found on the Internet, even from the US National Institutes of Health web site. He said it would scare me. He’s right. This man that I have loved, respected and lionized has an incurable form of cancer.
This is the beginning of what may be a very painful journey, but it may also have some opportunities for personal growth. I guess that’s trying to find a silver lining in a pile of shit.
