Best of Luck, Dad
By 
Pancreatic cancer snuffs about 33,000 Americans each year; with any luck, the 6-10 hours of surgery my father is enduring today in Charlottesville, Virginia, will keep him from adding to that total in 2007. With this variety of cancer, phrases like “long-term prognosis” are oxymoronic. There’s no such thing, since everything about the disease transpires in the shortest of terms. Pancreatic cancer killed his own father in 2003 and his wife’s mother over two decades ago. Neither lasted more than a few months after diagnosis.
And while I can think of at least seven reasons my father would prefer to beat the odds and live another 2-5 years, I suspect he would also prefer not to expire with George W. Bush still in office. He outlasted Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Frist and Tom Delay, and he’s optimistic that Alberto Gonzales’ tenure as Attorney General will self-immolate before the cancer returns, as it most certainly will. It’s a long wait to January 2009, but one way or another I’m planning to spend the next inauguration day with my father and his youngest granddaughter, watching C-SPAN and heckling the worst president since James Buchanan as he leaves office in a hail of eggshells.
For the time being, though, Dad is one of the fortunate ones (much like Dick Cheney, who was not disarticulated by a bomb in Afghanistan on February 27, the day my father received his diagnosis). As it turns out, the tumor is small, appears not to have metastasized, and has bloomed in an optimal spot — plugging the bile duct, where it cast off enough misery over the winter to make itself detectable at an early stage of development. If the surgery goes as expected, Dad will be carved up like an Easter ham, with a snarl of tubes protruding from orifices that didn’t exist a few hours ago, but the malignant little sprig will end the day in a jar of whatever it is they plop excised tumors into these days.
About a year ago, science demonstrated what atheists like myself have known for a long time — prayer praying for medical miracles is superstitious rubbish. On a day like today, though, I can at least understand the impulse.
. . . i’m not usually capable of sincerity, but my sincere thanks for all the good wishes — and prayers . . . So far, so good.
. . . Awful news came this afternoon. Routine pre-surgical laproscopy revealed spots of cancer all over the place — shit that never showed up on CAT and MRI scans. The tumor, moreover, was larger than expected and inoperable. No surgery, in other words. The tumor wins.
On to chemotherapy, clinical trials, burnt offerings, and desperate efforts to bargain with an indifferent universe.
Thanks again to everyone who left words of encouragement for my Dad.