Regrowth

My hair and beard are starting to grow back. Well, my beard anyway; my scalp hair is still not much more than a faint fuzz that hints at future growth, but it's fuzzier than it was last week.

All of this puts me decidedly on edge. You'd think that I would greet the return of my hair with something akin to approval, the return of the Prodigal Follicles after being banished to the bleak Chemotherapy Desert for months. But it actually scares me. It's proof that the chemo has stopped killing cells in my body, which permits such useful things as hair follicles and digestive epithelium to grow back.

It also permits less useful things like mutant Reed-Sternberg cells to grow back. My cancer, in other words. The advent of hair means that the advent of cancer may not be far away either.

One certainly hopes not, and the odds against the cancer coming back are better than even - the "cure rate" (which is kind of meaningless unless you also specify a timespan) is 62%, according to the doctors. But 62% isn't 100%. Four times out of ten my cancer will come back, and meantime I'm as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I keep checking my groin and neck for tumors, as though they'll suddenly pop up from one minute to the next. So far so good, and the longer I go without finding any lumps the better off I am. But I suspect I'll never be entirely free of the fear of finding tumors.

Right now the fear is pretty strong. It'll probably wane the longer I go without finding anything, but it'll never go away.

And let's be honest, Hodgkin's is going to kill me eventually. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in ten years. But one way or another, Hodgkin's or the long-term consequences of chemotherapy are going to do me in. If the cancer itself doesn't get me, it'll be leukemia, heart valve damage or oxygen toxicity secondary to chemotherapy. I feel as though chemo alone has taken twenty years off my lifespan just from the sheer wear and tear. I'm not nearly the same man I was two years ago, and I don't believe I'll ever recover completely.

But secondary leukemia, oxygen toxicity and the like are things I'll have to worry about in ten or twenty years. A return of cancer is something I'd have to worry about right now. That's the difference between dying of cancer and dying of chemotherapy.

Fun, huh?

Well, it could be worse. A lot worse. As of my last check, I didn't have any tumors, so I'll take what I can get.