May 21, 2020

My hospital phone rang and startled me. Hospital phones are funny and have a curly cord and big buttons. User friendly. Yet somehow I managed to hang up on the caller twice before figuring out how to answer this jitterbug. It was a med student in his hospital rotation. So I gathered, he was a low talker (Seinfeld) and had a very thick accent. He went through a litany of questions regarding my symptoms and any changes I had noticed since yesterday. This must be the equivalent of fry duty at McDonalds. I worked at McDonalds one summer in high school and was put on fry duty for a short staffed busy Saturday shift. I left that full day after dropping a thousand fry baskets, covered in grease, and ready to get promoted to the drive-thru. Back to the med student. He was kind and empathetic but I’m sure he was ready to start using his stethoscope.

Today was my Mom’s birthday. Happy Birthday Mom! Ya kid’s got cancer. I’m sure she would have preferred a gift card. I don’t think we will ever forget this strange, coincidental, bond of circumstance and timing. More on that later…

By mid morning the resident doctor came in to talk with me. He was tall and handsome and I was more concentrated on who of my friends I might be able to set him up with. Focus Rachel. You have cancer. “So how big is this thing?” I had seen the CT image of my chest in the ER and it was jarring. Once I was oriented with what the black areas were (air) and the white areas (bone) and the fuzzy areas (heart and esophagus) my eyes locked in on the BIG blob that was my tumor. “I think I need a visual, like a vegetable size reference,” I said. What are we really working with here doc. My brain immediately visualized a grapefruit. I feel like that’s the terminal size. Death by citrus. The doctor paused and looked back at the portable work station computer screen in my room. With his head tilted, he seemed to be doing some internal math and turned back to face me. “Its the size of a medium sized watermelon.” Death by melon. “Wow. That’s big.” That is all I could say. I really don’t remember much of our conversation after that.

A few days later I was talking to one of my dear friends. “He picked a watermelon? That is the least standardized size fruit,” she said. I laughed. It was true. And funny. There are mini watermelons, and hybrid watermelons, seedless watermelons, giant 4th of July drip off your chin, feed a whole BBQ sized watermelons. Joel helped me with some calculations and moving forward we decided that a cantaloupe was a much better consistent visual reference.

The rest of that day was bright and blurry all at the same time. I was waiting for a biopsy of this melon and they were doing their best to rush it. But Covid again was making scheduling difficult and they decided that I needed a negative Covid test before proceeding. If you ever wondered what that test feels like, well you actually probably don’t. Take a long toothpick and put a bristly toilet brush on the end of it, jam it up your nose until the back of your brain feels like it needs to sneeze. May come out with some grey matter on it. That about sums it up.

My jitterbug phone rang late in the afternoon and it was a voice I didn’t recognize and he sounded rushed. “Hi Rachel, this is your oncologist, I’m on my way to see you, I’ll be there shortly.” Had I brushed my teeth? I immediately thought about things that didn’t matter, like my gray roots from two months of no hair color. Was I wearing a bra? Fifteen minutes later and he was in my room, tall and efficient. And again the computer screen in front of me lit up with the CT images of the unwanted melon. Which was actually sitting in between my real, God given, potential money makin’ melons. I jumped right in. “So you think it is cancer? Is there a chance it could be something else?” He paused, looked down and then looked me straight in the eye. “I could look over there and see a duck. It has white feathers and orange feet and a beak and is quacking at me. But I can’t confirm that it’s a duck until a veterinarian tells me.” Oh god now we are doing barnyard references. First non-standardized size fruit, now ducks. But I knew what that meant. Precisely. “I need the biopsy to confirm it, but we are looking at cancer. Very likely lymphoma.”

Back in December 2019 I ran in the St. Jude Children’s Hospital Half Marathon in Memphis, TN. This was my 3rd time doing this race. While some may consider this a form of self-inflicted torture, somehow the charity and the experience have kept me signing up. (I hear you non-runners. I am somewhat of a ‘shuffle runner’ myself.) The week of the race I woke up with a terrible and odd chest cold. An angry cough with sidecar of chest pains and it was socked in like a bad storm. How was I going to travel there and run the race with this devil raging inside my chest? I had so many thoughts of disappointment – in myself, in the timing, in the letting down all the good people who donated to support me and St. Jude. In the end I went. I just had to and I’m stubborn. If you didn’t already know that about me. I traveled solo, and woke early the morning of the race ready to rock. This event is one of the most inspiring experiences. About halfway, the race course winds its way through the St. Jude hospital campus. The staff, and patients and families that are able, come out to cheer on the runners. These brave kids – bald, weary, fighting – usher you through a half mile stretch with signs and bells and cheers and ENERGY. It is emotional to say the least. Little did I know that this beast of a chest cold was the golf ball. That grew into the grapefruit. That grew into a non-standardized size melon. So to reference one of my favorite movies Dirty Dancing, ‘I carried a watermelon.’ For 13.1 miles. I haven’t settled on the meaning of this sequence of events or reconciled that these two things were indeed strange bedfellows. I ran a race for cancer research while I unknowingly had cancer growing inside me.