Offstage announcer:

Previously On “Seven Years of the Cancer”

(Graphic: January 2007)

(Phone rings)

Voice on telephone:  “Lee we’ve got the results from your physical and we want you to come in and take the blood  test again. I’m setting up an appointment for you with a hematologist/oncologist”

Lee: “A what?”

(Cut to doctor’s office)

Doctor: “I’m the hematologist here and you have chronic lymphocytic leukemia.”

Lee: “I don’t know what that is, but you’ve made a mistake.”

Doctor: “It’s incurable, but it’s treatable, so come back in four months and we’ll do another blood test.”

Lee: “What does this mean?”

Doctor: “It means you come back in four months and we do another blood test.”

(Tight shot Lee, rolling eyes, shaking head)

(Graphic: April 2007)

(quick montage: Internet pages, conversations, Lee and Cheryl driving to cancer clinic, meeting new doctor)

(Golf course: Lee and three friends on a green)

“Look, maybe you have all the time in the world, but I have cancer. There are a few other things I’d like to do with the time I have left. Will you just putt for godsake.”

(Graphic: January 2008) (Infusion center: IV in the back of Lee’s hand, Lee and Cheryl holding hands)

(Graphic: September 2008) (Lee and Cheryl in exam room. Doctor walks in holding papers, smiling.)

“You done good..”

(Lee walking the dogs down the sidewalk)

(Graphic: February 2012)(Lee in the infusion center. Two nurses overheard talking to each other)

“He seems a bit depressed.”

(Graphic: September 2013) (Lee being led to an exam room, door closing behind him.)

Lie on my stomach and wait some more.  A lot of idle chatter about the weather and then she jams a sharpened metal drinking straw into my hipbone.  Poke in a needle and draw out some fluid, and then some kind of gizmo that reaches in and snips off some bone marrow. They tell me it’s supposed to be painful. And this time it fulfilled that promise.

(Graphic: October 2013)

After looking at the bone marrow biopsy, my doctor declared I’m fairly healthy for a guy with stage four cancer.

(Graphic: April 2014)(In exam room going over paperwork with the director of clinical studies.)

We had talked about it and had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do. Is there any reason not to wait? Will it be any easier or more effective if I’m older and sick? If anything, it seems like the right time for it now.

(Graphic: May 2014) (Lee in hospital bed, IV in arm, taking a handful of pills.)

(Graphic: August 2014) (Exam room. Doctor sitting on stool, with papers in hand.)

“That’s really amaz.. really good.” Lee and Cheryl squeeze each other’s hands.

And now, the season finale of Seven Years of the Cancer

(Graphic: December 2014)

I finished the infusions in November and no matter what will continue to take my pills for another three months, maybe longer. So the next step in the process is to figure out how it’s working.

I’m at the hospital at 8:30 in the morning to drink a quart of iodine water so that whatever they’re looking for will show up on the CT scan. The scan doesn’t happen until 10:00 and it’s pretty uneventful. Cold room, thin warm blanket, get dressed and leave.

Breakfast wasn’t allowed before the scan and my next appointment is at 11:00 in another building so there’s no time to eat yet.

Bone marrow biopsy number I’ve-lost-count is next and again, like almost every time, they have trouble getting through my hip into the marrow. Something about strong bones. That’s good if I live long enough to fall like so many old people, because odds are I’ll do more harm to the sidewalk than my hip. But it’s not good if the objective is to get a hole in the bone and snip off some marrow.

She kept trying and it was pretty aerobic for her. Didn’t bother me though. Every couple minutes she would ask if I was having any pain until I finally said that answering her questions was the only thing keeping me awake.

Anyway I finally was able to eat and then Cheryl joined me for the doctor’s appointment and at least a partial verdict.

He had the results of the scan and except for one small lymph node under my arm, the rest were gone. Now, I wouldn’t know a lymph node if it were on the table next to me, but the fact that the scan can’t find any is a good thing. The one it did see is described as fatty tissue. Well, that’s embarrassing. But have you any idea how hard it is to get a lymph node to eat right and exercise?

So my doctor is pretty impressed with how it’s going and we won’t have another appointment for three more months. Even so, the biopsy results won’t be in for a couple weeks so all in all it’s a hung jury.

Then, in the morning of Christmas eve, I got an email. From my doctor.

“Regarding the bone marrow biopsy: the liquid aspirate showed only a tiny tiny amount of CLL: 0.01% of the cells were CLL cells. This is about as low as it gets before it’s no longer detectable. It’s possible that we will want to repeat the marrow biopsy in about 2 months to see if the 0.01% residual goes away.”

As we kind of suspected, there wasn’t enough marrow to test but the conclusions from the aspirate were conclusive enough for me. Considering I was in the mid-double figures six months ago, getting down to one one-hundredth of a percent is pretty good. And I’m still taking pills. Could root it out altogether. Have at least kicked the can down the road a good long ways.

When we opened the champagne on Christmas Eve I was toasting something in addition to friends and family.

Coming soon: Season Eight.