December 3, 2001: Good News: When Pain is a Grace

Friends:

I write with the best most ironic bit of good news I've ever had. As you know, last week I had an MRI done on my right hip/pelvis/leg and the results were suggestive, along with the increasing pain I was experiencing, of a new outbreak of multiple myeloma damage. My oncologist ordered a bunch of new tests to confirm that diagnosis and told me call him over the weekend if the pain got worse.

Well, the pain got worse over the weekend. Much worse--to the point that I could barely stand, and that even lying down was excruciating. So I called, and on Saturday night I found myself, once again, a patient in the oncology unit of lovely Paoli Memorial Hospital, getting blasted with Morphine that wasn't even beginning to dent the pain in my hip/leg.

However, at the same time that the pain was getting worse, I noticed a small patch of what I thought was simple acne on the small of my back--the result, I beleived, of sitting for too long on the heating pad at full blast, getting sweaty and creating a breeding ground for pimples. I didn't give it much thought except to ask Sheri to bring some zit creme from home on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning, when applying said ointment, I noticed another similar rash on my right leg, and suddenly the lights began to blink--flash, actually, like a fire engine siren. (Now, a flashback to last January when, two months before i was diagnosed with cancer, I had a short bout of excruciating pain in my right thigh and an annoying, disgusting rash that lasted only a couple of weeks. It was Shingles--a nasty grown-up version of the chicken pox virus and a cousin of herpes that usually occurs under stress and when immune systems are suppressed--like in the early stages of an immune system cancer, like Multiple Myeloma.)

With my wheels of memory spinning, I called in Sheri and the floor nurse and asked them what they thought of the connection I was making. (What every woman wants to hear from a man in the bath room: "Hey, you've got to come in here and see this!") The nurse called the on-call doctor. He poked around my hip and leg and back and agreed too, but said we would have to wait until Monday morning to be sure. And so, in what is surely up there among the oddest prayers of our lives, we spent the night hoping that I have a debilitating, nasty, stress-induced disease.

This morning I sat with my oncologist Dr. Hoessly and looked at the rashes, the nature of the pain, and the preliminary results of the tests we did at the end of last week. The results and conclusions all said two things:

I do, indeed, HAVE SHINGLES and this most recent bout of pain is NOT A RECURRENCE OF MY CANCER. In fact, the blood work and 24 hour protein counts confirm that the chemotherapies and stem cell transplant have been working exactly as we hoped they would: the levels of cancer in my body are in fact significantly less than even early in September. What we the thought Monday's MRI results suggested (new cancer) was mistaken, and rather, the Multiple Myeloma damage they revealed probably occured early in the Spring after my initial diagnosis but before the first few chemo's had a chance to do their work.

Phew.

I have already started a new regimine of anti-virals to combat the Shingles, and should be out of the hospital by tomorrow night with the pain under control by week's end--just in time to enjoy my sister and brother-in-law's vist next week from Hong Kong.

You can only imagine how relieved and excited we are, to have gone from deeply discouraging--and terrifying--news to this in just a few hours.... it's like a new lease on life, literally.

Thank you for sharing the journey with us, for praying and calling and supporting us over the last few days. We were very, very frightened, yes, but also aware of your love and support. Having you there to buoy us up when we thought the world was crashing down around us only makes sharing this good news that much sweeter.

And it is sweet indeed.

There is a time and place for everything, and this is the time: Hallelujah.

love to you all.

Dwight

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