The Mother Node

Most of my swollen cancerous lymph nodes went right back to normal after the first or second chemotherapy treatment. The ones in my neck went away so fast I could almost see it happen, and the longest-lasting of my upper-body nodes, a node deep in the muscle of my right neck/shoulder region, didn't last three weeks. But I've always had a good-sized node in my left groin, and by "good-sized", I'm trying to convey the notion that it was the size of, say, a hard-boiled egg.

For a long time it was the only node I could feel with my fingers, and I came to think of it as the mother node. I really do suspect that it was where my Hodgkin's started, because it was the first one I noticed, and it was by far the largest, and by far the hardest, though I'm not sure there's a correlation between tumor age and nodal tumescence.

But it's histoire. I couldn't find it yesterday, and by simple finger analysis, I am now entirely free of swollen nodes. Granted, the old "gefingerpoken test" isn't as thorough as a PET scan and it's entirely possible that I still have Reed-Sternberg Cells cavorting somewhere in my body, behaving as though my immune system is their Club Med, but I find it exceedingly heartening that as far as I can tell, I'm free of cancer. I won't say I'm actually free of cancer. Only my oncologist can say that. But I can say that as far as I can tell, I'm free of cancer. I no longer have the weird Hodgkin's symptoms like the sudden eruption of almost intolerable itching all over my body or the furious night sweats. I don't feel things poking into my lungs and kidneys. And I can't find tumors with my fingers any more.

Chemotherapy is no picnic. My digestive tract in particular feels like the blasted wasteland of the Somme just after the British and Germans got done with it in World War One, and I certainly don't relish that odd sensation of poisoned sickness that comes over me after chemo. But by cracky, when I put that in the scale, it doesn't some anywhere close to the deep relief that comes from not being to find any cancerous lymph nodes.