The first meeting at Johns Hopkins happened on the following Tuesday, on the one day respite between the 1st and 2nd Snowpocolypse storms. The surgical oncologist and her team very clear about what was happening and what needed to happen based on the limited evidence. There’s comfort in procedure and process. Lisa is a long-time tech writer and even more of a process dork than I am. Still, the amount of information was staggering, which the doctor readily admitted as our eyes glazed over. There were to be more blood tests, another CT scan, rectal ultrasound after that, and then possibly an MRI in the short-term.
Long-term game plan I:
- Radiation (no chemo) for 6 weeks.
- 6 weeks of recovery.
- Surgery to remove the tumor and any lymph nodes affected.
- Ileostomy and “bag” for 3 months.
- Reversal of ileostomy and recovery.
The second storm was rolled in as we left Hopkins. Lisa dropped me off and bravely went to her office, battling brutal traffic both there and back. I hiked to the store for supplies. I had a list of things that needed to get to Hopkins from the original tests, but the facility with my report and pathology was closed until Friday. The process was choked in feet of snow and there was nothing to do up dig out from the next storm, watch episodes of Homicide, and laugh at the local news forecasters trying in vain talk about the snow in new and interesting ways after 5 days.