Trey R. Barker – Official Website and Blog

The Cancer Chronicles, Pt. 1

November 27, 2005 – 1:51 pm | by Trey

An odd thing, to be told you have cancer.

It was a simple thing.  I had a bit of swelling on the right side of my neck.  Like an infected lymphnode, or swollen glands from a cold or flu.  Went to the doc, got some antibiotics, swelling went away.  A few weeks later, it came back and I got some heavier duty antibiotics.  Swelling went away.

Then it came back.

In early September, sitting in a bar in Chicago with novelist Sean Doolittle, I can remember him eyeing the swelling and making a subdued comment.  No problem, I told him.  Gonna get it checked out when I get home.

A bit after that, I went back to my doc.  I’ve never seen a man’s eyes as big as his when he saw the swelling.  It was blueberry-sized, maybe a bit larger.  Pressing so hard against the nerves in my neck I had to take a few days off from the Sheriff’s Office.  He gave me some steroids and hooked me up with a surgeon.  Said surgeon didn’t seem overly concerned.  He gave me lots and lots of statistics about how a swelling in that area almost always meant nothing.  In fact, he rescheduled my surgery for two weeks after the original date because he was going to be out of town.

Not worried at all.

The surgery went fine, he said he got the entire lymphnode and everything looked clean.  A few days later, my regular doctor called and asked me to come in.  He casually mentioned that I should go see an oncologist.

“So there was a problem?” I asked, slightly confused and now suddenly sweaty and hot, my gut tight as a snare drum.

“The biopsy came back as malignant melanoma.”

And with that, I was ushered in to an entirely new world.  One of stage 3 cancer and Interferon treatments and early diagnosis and 80 percent recurrance rates and endless weeks of weakness from chemo and — worse yet — pity from people around me.

The pity is not the worst.  The worst, obviously, is the possibility of dying way sooner than I’d like (but isn’t that a possibility pretty much every day?  In a world of random shootings, heart attacks, drunk drivers, strokes, etc.)  But seeing the eyes of people who suddenly don’t know what to say is more than a little disconcerting.  They roll out all the platitudes. “Jeez, dude, I hope everything comes out okay.”

Uh, yeah, me, too!

“You’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.”

Uh, yeah, no problem, won’t worry at all.  It only kills how many people a year?  But, yeah, I won’t sweat it.

Honestly, I’d just as soon they shut the fuck up.  If you’re not sure what to say, don’t say anything.

But in the midst of the maddening, superficial words, there were two friends who made me laugh my ass off.  I called Sean, the novelist I mentioned earlier, to let him know what was going on.  He had had my new novel for a little while, reading and critiquing it.  When I got him on the phone, I basically got this from him: ”Dude, you have cancer?  Wow, that’s too bad because you’re novel sucks, too.”

(A disclaimer: the conversation didn’t go exactly like that, but that’s the funniest way to tell the story…writer’s license and all that.)

The other was a guy I’ve gotten to know decently well only in the last few months.  Ben Atkinson, a sergeant with the Princeton Police Department.  He and I talked quite a bit about what was going on with me.  He took me to lunch one day and told me straight out he was worried about me.  Worried about the depression I was going through in the two or three days after the diagnosis.  Standing in the parking lot after lunch, he said, “I’m just worried,” and mimicked putting a gun in his mouth.

Uh…what?

Yeah, cops have better access to the easiest way to kill themselves than most people.  I have, with me or in my house at all times, my service weapon.  But the reason it made me laugh is because Ben doesn’t realize what a coward I am.  I would be waaaaaaayyy too scared to ever kill myself.  For one, my pain threshold is way too low.  Hell, I stub my toe and I’m down for six months.  Secondly, I’ve got too much to do before it’s time to naturally check out.

But the fact that he’d thought about it and jumped in feet first to make sure it didn’t happen touched me pretty good.

My doctor made me have a PET scan, which is a multi-hour test where you can’t move at all and are strapped to a table and then slipped into a machine, sort of like ground sausage jammed into the casing.  That test was to take a look, head to toe, and see if the cancer had spread.

It came back negative.  No spread, no indication of any cancer anywhere.

The Interferon treatment I have to do is cautionary.  The oncologist says let’s take the drugs, do the protocol.  It will soup up your immune system and make sure that if there is a handful of cancer cells anywhere in my cranky little body, they’ll die a horrible, horrible death.

Hey, better them than me, right?