What Is He Surviving

“You don’t look that old.” I guess I should really be thank­ful. I reg­u­larly have peo­ple under­es­ti­mate my age by ten years. My assis­tant at work tells me that is the gen­eral per­cep­tion. I keep telling her peo­ple are just try­ing to be nice (I could make the more neg­a­tive assump­tion and say they are “kiss­ing up”). But she assures me that the gen­eral con­sen­sus among those who do not know is I am in my late for­ties. I have def­i­nite gray­ing hair, although Still Here Too calls it mostly sil­ver, uni­formly mixed in with what is left of my orig­i­nal dark brown. I do have almost all of it left. I am what, might be called a vio­lent non-smoker, so I do not have the win­kles that would come from Sir Walter’s curse. I enjoy wines and Scotch whisky of a qual­ity that price alone pre­cludes over­con­sump­tion (yum-yum). For the last sev­eral years I have worked reg­u­larly with a per­sonal trainer result­ing in an accept­able trim, mus­cled physique that is prob­a­bly abnor­mal for some­one a few months short of sixty years of age. So I guess I appear in much bet­ter shape than the aver­age Amer­i­can male of my age. This lifestyle, while not really Spar­tan, is rea­son­able healthy. But then it has to be. It is all a façade.

“You don’t look at all infirm.” What peo­ple do not see beneath the fully clothed exte­rior, which is the only form on pub­lic dis­play these days, would scare small chil­dren and the squea­mish. The exte­rior sur­face of my skin, has a cumu­la­tive nearly four lin­ear feet of sur­gi­cal scars (yes, 48 inches, or 124 cm for the met­ri­cally con­verted in the read­er­ship). There is also an odd assort­ment of tat­toos (not really the dec­o­ra­tive type–targets, more like a strange con­stel­la­tion of ink dots placed across front and back torso) and burn-like scars left over from a very nasty neu­ro­log­i­cal, viral infec­tion (shin­gles). I have often threat­ened to buy a pair of ele­va­tor shoes, glue a pair of stove bolts to my neck, and then paint myself green for Hal­loween! The inside is an even big­ger mess! A fair num­ber of sur­gi­cal sta­ples, some tita­nium screws and wires, and that very odd look­ing device were the aor­tic value should be. That is just the stuff that shows on x-rays. The scar tis­sue, odd adhe­sions, and patches of mus­cle degen­er­a­tion left over from the surg­eries and espe­cially from the broad-area radi­a­tion treat­ments took a toll. With the scars, adhe­sions, mus­cles degen­er­a­tion, resul­tant spinal twist­ing, and neural scar­ing also results in  some degree of pain. How much pain? I do not know. You learn to live with it. So all of the effort to remain health really is a neces­sity but worth every effort.

So, what was the cause of all this? Almost 35 years ago, I became very ill. Lym­phoma is not some­thing to take lightly. How­ever, the treat­ment was very suc­cess­ful. With­out the treat­ment, my story would have ended in about eigh­teen months, but here I am, sur­viv­ing my sur­vival. The treat­ment, while the best avail­able at the time, had major long-term side effects that required cor­rec­tive action (the most dras­tic seven years ago), and hard work to live with. That I have been doing, and plan to con­tinue doing.

I tend to not divulge a lot of detail of my med­ical his­tory unless there is spe­cific rea­son to bring it up. The treat­ment I received in the mid 1970s con­sisted of very exten­sive radi­a­tion treat­ment. It was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence. I was treated 5 days a week for 14 weeks. A very inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence that I fin­ished at 6 feet 1 inch in height and 122 pounds (1 meter 85 cm, 55 kilos). Think I could have been a run­way model? Prob­a­bly not, the hair miss­ing from the back of my head where the radi­a­tion was not blocked made for a very inter­est­ing style! My friends from my old days in aca­d­e­mics knew these details because they knew me when all this hap­pened. By the time I entered indus­try, I was over the dis­ease and the short-term side effects of the treat­ment. I was liv­ing life as if I had never been ill except for a one trait that was not always easy to admit to myself I was liv­ing with. For many years all my deci­sions were influ­enced by a sense that what­ever I wished to accom­plish needed to be accom­plished sooner rather than later. At times this surely resulted in more aggres­sive behav­ior than I would have liked. “Surely” is not right, that sounds more ten­ta­tive than it should. Look­ing back, there was resid­ual stress from hav­ing been through the dis­ease and treat­ment. Was it best to keep my his­tory so hid­den. In most ways I believe it was. But it did cause an inter­nal bur­den that peo­ple around me never understood.

And then I could not hide that I was not exactly in per­fect health. In a short period of time in the early 2000s, I began to show out­ward symp­toms of the long-term side effects of all that life-saving radi­a­tion. Basi­cally, what is now known is that the radi­a­tion causes arte­r­ial tis­sue to stiffen. This includes coro­nary valves. Yours truly was actu­ally part of one of the pub­lished stud­ies report­ing this. From my per­sonal expe­ri­ence, I will tell you that the stiff­en­ing is some­thing that pro­gresses faster once it starts. My aor­tic valve went from hav­ing a noticed, but very liv­able level of steno­sis (nar­row­ing) to essen­tially total fail­ure in a period of six months. Turns out I also have some scar­ring in my lungs from the radi­a­tion. I was brief­ing a gov­ern­ment cus­tomer on an extremely crit­i­cal pro­gram and nearly passed out sim­ply because I was stand­ing and speak­ing at the same time. This is not some­thing you hide. Need­less to say, all this led to emer­gency surgery. Very com­pe­tent sur­geon carves out the bad valve and replaces it with high-tech metal and plas­tic, chops holes in the coro­nary arter­ies that are very badly stiff­ened and passes around then with pieces of vein from one of my legs. Heart imme­di­ately starts work­ing like noth­ing was ever wrong. And except for get­ting over the effects of some very nasty saw­ing and cut­ting, I am as good as new.

Of course most peo­ple in my work­place think male, early fifties, sud­den col­lapse, heart surgery; he had a heart attack. The vic­tim returns to work. Every­one wants to know how he is recov­er­ing from his heart attack. Every­one is won­der­ing how he is climb­ing the stairs so eas­ily so soon after his heart attack. Every­one is won­der­ing why he is not behav­ing like all the other males in their fifties that have had heart attacks. So the vic­tim tries to explain he did not have a heart attack but that he had valve replace­ment surgery. This is imme­di­ately fol­lowed by assump­tions of con­gen­i­tal birth defects and more ques­tions about why no symp­toms until now. Vic­tim gives up. The vic­tim starts to tell those who ask the whole med­ical his­tory. Now the sym­pa­thy flows and draws more atten­tion than the vic­tim wants or feels he deserves.

So now I am return­ing to pretty good health, every­thing con­sid­ered about my past. So long as I remem­ber to take all those med­ica­tions the doc­tors insist I take, so long as I respect the lim­its of my pul­monary sys­tem, so long as I prop­erly main­tain my blood chem­istry for the man-made valve and patched up arter­ies, so long as I work to build up the degen­er­ated mus­cles in an even man­ner so the strong parts don’t over­come the weak parts and twist me into Qua­si­modo, so long as I exer­cise and rest enough to main­tain a health immune sys­tem, I live a nor­mal life. And I would rather not be sin­gled out.

So what is the prob­lem? The prob­lem is that from time to time, I do over reach my lim­its. Cross­ing the limit can trig­ger some extreme dis­com­fort - let’s be hon­est - pain. It is not so much a mat­ter of not accept­ing lim­its as it is just being a lit­tle over opti­mistic about how close I have got­ten to the limit. A great ben­e­fit of my increased exer­cise rou­tine is that my immune sys­tem has improved. Yet, I still must be care­ful when I am around peo­ple with colds, flu and the like. Not always easy at work or in the real world. Maybe I am more sen­si­tive than I should be, but the num­ber of com­ments I over­hear about “another cold?”, “looks like his back hurts”, “he looks tired today”‚ … Some­times this is from peo­ple with some idea of my his­tory, some­times not.

And yet, how can I pos­si­bly feel sorry for myself? Guess what. Usu­ally I don’t. I am still here. I look bet­ter than most guys my age. For the most part, I func­tion in the world. I do have pains and lim­i­ta­tions. So what. I meet peo­ple all the time with lim­i­ta­tions so much greater than mine. Do I occa­sion­ally slip into a lit­tle self pity? I do occa­sion­ally, but with Still Here Too’s help I get over it. I am sur­viv­ing my sur­vival and plan to con­tinue to sur­vive it for a long time.

Is Still Here