Chapter 6

March, 1992

The first thing to do in dealing with Hodgkin's disease was to find out if it there were tumors in other parts of his body. We were told it was a slow-growing cancer, but since Don had let it go for quite a while, it could easily have spread to other lymph notes. Therefore it was necessary to "stage" it, or determine how far it had spread.

In 1992, that meant a staging laparotomy, exploratory abdominal surgery to remove the spleen and to take a sample from the liver. Based on my reading on the internet, it appears that nowadays diagnostic tools have improved to the point where this is no longer necessary. But at that point, it had to be done.

Don had the surgery, and didn't like it. He'd never had much tolerance for pain, and the operation (done under general anesthesia) involved a ten-inch vertical incision, stretching from just below his ribcage down past his navel. He'd carry the scar for the rest of his days.

It hurt a lot, not surprisingly, and he grumbled and complained. He was in the hospital for almost a week, and stayed home for a week longer to recover. His overdeveloped work ethic was offended by the necessity of missing work for so long, and he grimly announced he wouldn't be missing work any more if he could help it.

Over the course of those two weeks, he lost ten pounds.

Happily, the laparotomy showed no sign of the cancer having spread. The usual treatment, then, was radiation.

Before modern cancer treatment, Hodgkin's had been a deadly cancer. But it was one of the most receptive to modern treatment. And radiation, I thought happily, was no big deal. Everyone knew that chemo was the treatment that made you puke your guts out, after all. Radiation treatments would be a walk in the park by comparison.

The first phase of the radiation treatment involved irradiating the left side of Don's neck. The tumors (there were actually quite a few little ones beneath the big one) shrank rapidly. The radiation gave Don what appeared to be a bad sunburn, turning his skin there red, and then almost black. Even after the burned skin peeled off, the skin on the side of his neck would never look quite normal again.

But the tumors shrank, and that was all that mattered.

There were no side effects apart from the "sunburn." Clearly radiation really was no big deal.

Then he began the second phase, which involved irradiating his chest, just in case they'd missed something. Better to be safe than sorry, the doctor explained.

Unfortunately, having the radiation directed at his chest irritated his esophagus, which in turn made Don's stomach very, very unhappy.

He was getting the radiation treatments after work, so as not to miss a single hour of work. Every night he got irradiated, drove home, sat in the living room for a little while... and then went into the bathroom and threw up until eleven.

I supported him the best I could, stroking his hair and trying to keep his spirits up. But the frustrating reality was that there wasn't much I could do.

By the time it was all over, he'd dropped from two hundred and ten pounds to a hundred and seventy. Admittedly he still weighed fifteen pounds more than he had in high school, but he'd grown two inches since then, too, not to mention developing a certain breadth of shoulder he hadn't possessed in high school. At a hundred and seventy pounds he was terribly, painfully skinny.

But the oncologist was optimistic that we'd taken care of the cancer for good.

Read Chapter 7 here.