Thanks, Medicine!

Yesterday I went to see Dr. Stabby, the surgeon who did my knee replacement. Every six weeks I get an x-ray of my knee, and Dr. Stabby beams at it, pokes me in the leg, beams at me while he tells me that the bone hasn't ingrown into the implant, and I should spend six more weeks on crutches. It's been four and a half months since surgery, and nine months since I first started with the crutches, and yesterday Stabby sentenced me to another six weeks while his resident muttered about the possibility of revision surgery.

I am presently in more pain from the knee replacement than I was from the sarcoma growth, in spite of the OxyContin I take like candy. Before I had a biopsy, I didn't use crutches; now my little toes are all twisty from smashing them into the crutches in the middle of the night.

The hellish radical chemotherapy I have endured has failed to cure or even arrest my disease, but it has made my hair fall out, put me in a coma, made me vomit so much my back teeth are decaying.

There has been no benefit to the treatment of this cancer, only a harvest of misery for myself and my family. It is hard to escape wondering -- wouldn't we all have been better off if I had soldiered on in Ansan with knee pain, oblivious to my approaching death?

...except that, with cancer, I can emotionally blackmail people into getting on airplanes to come visit me. Hi, Freebird!