When the fear is gone…Only I will remain

Through our campaign to raise funds for Pelotonia 2016, my Midnight Train from Georgia teammate Noble Jones challenged me to really open up and share more about my experiences with cancer. We are sooo close to making our goals and I am hoping this might touch a few more lives before we sojourn to Columbus at the beginning of August.

Those Damn Nodes

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I got a full set of scans — both MRI and CT. One of the things that showed up was the lymph nodes in my chest were larger than average. This sort of size could be a sign of disease, or it was just part of me being me. Fortunately, it turned out to be the latter because a positive result might have meant additional surgery or even chemo to eradicate the cancer.

But those punks would rear their heads about 18 months later.

I’d had my quarterly scans in April. I will never forget them because I had a dreadful head cold and half the CT machines at MD Anderson were offline that day. My nose was running all day long and my tests were so delayed that I think I was literally the last person in the main building. That’s saying something, when you consider the staff at Anderson is larger than the population of many a small town in Georgia or Texas…

About a week later, I got a call from the doctor. Everything looked clean but those nodes in my chest now looked really large. They wanted to look at them closer and had scheduled a follow-up exam. This time they were going to actually biopsy the nodes and see if they were full of lymph or cancer.

It is easy to sound tough at moments like this. I was 99.98 per cent certain that because of that cold, my immune system was simply doing its job and was fighting the virus, thus producing lymph…and therefore you get enlarged nodes. I mean, I am not a doctor, but I can play one on the internet as well as the next guy — so no worries.

Except, as I have said before, it’s cancer you are fighting, and not the common cold. I spent a very long weekend in Texas waiting for this procedure to scope out my nodes. I think it would be overly charitable to describe my attitude as ‘perky’ or ‘upbeat’.

Don’t Fall on Me

The day before the exam, I got an email from my wife linking me to the REM song Fall on Me.

It hit every emotion I was feeling. I suddenly found myself slumped over my computer in a blubbering heap. If you are unfamiliar with this song, you can listen to it in the link the below:

For those days leading up to the test, I truly felt like the sky was about to fall on me. How far had I come only to have the beast rear its head again? I had been so strong and so good — surely this was not going to be my fate.

In a crazy way, this song is forever linked to this near miss. I swear I lose my shit every single time I hear it. I think I burst into tears 4 times while writing this post.

I must not fear. Fear is the little Death

As you may know, it did turn out to be a false alarm. Those damn nodes were chock-full of dead lymph cells. I woke up from my general anesthesia, my dad by my side. I tried to find the words to ask about the results but had no voice. My dad just smiled and nodded — no cancer.

Fear, as it turns out, is Cancer’s greatest weapon. To be sure, fear of Death is at the top of the list. But Fear is a pernicious enemy and it takes on lots of forms. Fear to tell others. Fear that you are receiving attention out of pity. Fear that your normal world will turn its back on you.

In the title for this post, I paraphrased my favorite quote from the novel Dune which is part of a mantra the main character recites to calm his fear. You can read the whole prose here:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2-i-must-not-fear-fear-is-the-mind-killer-fear-is

As I have written before, I ride my bike out of fear as much as I do anything else. But Hope always provides us with the tools to snuff that fear out. The folks at Pelotonia and The James Cancer Hospital keep adding to that Hope. I am personally asking you for your help to remind cancer that it needs to fear us too.

Why? Because I survived, and so have others. That means that buried within the same DNA that allowed cancer to grow is also “something” that reacted so well to treatment that I was able to survive.

We are going to find that “something,” and your support of Pelotonia is helping that happen sooner rather than later. Remember that 100% of your donation funds cancer research and patient support.

www.pelotonia.org/carabello1014