March 10, 2012 – around 3:AM

First mention of the word “lymphoma.”

After my first-ever ambulance ride (thanks, but I don’t want to do THAT again), I was in the emergency room of Sharp Grossmont Hospital, blissfully doped up on triple doses of morphine and other magical narcotics and finally and thankfully out of the excruciating back pain that sent me there in the first place.  Fresh back from an abdominal CT scan for a suspected kidney stone, the ER doctor came in to tell me the results:  Yep, there’s a kidney stone ready to drop into my bladder and once that happens and I pee it out, the pain will be gone – hallelujah!  That’s the good news.  But…..the CT scan also showed enlarged abdominal lymph nodes, which could be due to infection, but could also indicate lymphoma.  I may have been under the influence of morphine, but those words snapped me back into complete consciousness.  He said to follow up with my primary physician, more testing will probably be in order, blah, blah, blah.  But he also said that the kidney stone was a blessing in disguise, because if I didn’t have the CT scan for it, the enlarged lymph nodes wouldn’t have been found.


How can a kidney stone so TINY cause so much freaking pain? 

Yes, that's it in the left bottom of the cup.  Ugh.

For most of my adult life, I’ve assumed that I’m a ticking time bomb for cancer:  it wasn’t a question of “if” but “when.” 

Strike One:  My parents both died of cancer (ovarian and lung). 

Strike Two:  I lived at Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border for 7 years in the shadow of the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, watching as it spewed forth a noxious yellow haze that settled daily over the town of Page, and always skeptical when officials said it was "safe." 

Navajo Generating Station, outside Page, Arizona

Strike Three:  Lake Powell’s close proximity to contaminated soil and water in southern Utah from nuclear testing in the 1950s.

Strike Four (bonus strike):  Frequent travel through old uranium mining regions in northern Arizona.

Maybe all of these combined can cause lymphoma.  Perhaps none of them do.  But the hows and whys don’t really matter, do they?  The reality is what’s happening now.  And what’s happening is that I have lymphoma.