Posted by Joe on his FB 5/28/11


Well don’tcha know I’m caught in a trap.
I can’t walk out,
Because I love you too much, baby.
Elvis Presley, ‘Suspicious Minds.’

We really don’t KNOW anything. Where we are, where we’re going. We don’t KNOW anything for sure, except that there are ‘suspicions.’

After a day of tests, and a morning of appointments, we don’t KNOW one more thing than we knew going in. What we have in the place of knowledge is suspicion, assumption, and uncertainty. If you know me well enough to be reading this, you know that if there’s one thing I deal poorly with, it’s that trifecta.

Way back on March 31, at Wood County Hospital, a CT scan was done of my chest. On that scan, radiology identified an extremely small ‘nodule’ on my lung. This Thursday, I had CT scans done again in a freezing cold basement at Cleveland Clinic. The nodule was still there. It hadn’t grown in two months, which is good. But its mere presence could, maybe, possibly, in some context indicate a spread of the cancer.

Maybe.

Might.

So now, my scans go off to an independent radiologist to determine whether the nodule is, indeed, suspicious or not. Please note – he won’t be determining if it’s actually cancerous. Just suspicious, or not.

If it’s not ‘suspicious,’ I’m a great candidate for a pretty promising trial of a medicine already used for people with recurrence of kidney cell carcinoma. If it is ‘suspicious,’ I don’t qualify for the trial, but will begin the ‘standard of care’ for recurrence. Maybe. Because it might not actually be recurrence. It might just be suspicious.

Yesterday was the first day I actually considered the fact seriously that this might come back. With apologies to the Replacements, “You can call me Hymie, You can call me Sam, you can call me Stupid, ‘cause that’s prob’ly what I am.” But I had completely convinced myself that I knew what was going to happen next. Dr. K got all of the cancer. Dr. R, my new oncologist and Nurse W – both of whom serve on national kidney cancer boards, and are literally the best in the world – would get me on the trial, the trial would work, and I, Joseph Boyle, would beat the odds.

I reiterate, for my sake as much as yours, that this may still be the case. Maybe.

But it might not. And even if it is, I know a lot more about the treatments they are using with increasing success, and in some cases, have blasted the cancer into complete remission.

I’m trying as hard as I can to bottle up the mights and maybes, to just live it one day at a time, and not get worked up about anything until something is actually known, which would be June 7, at the earliest. But I just can’t explain how difficult it is to keep my mind from going to those places. I know people mean well when they say ‘cheer up,’ and ‘stay positive,’ but it is just not that simple for me – it never has been.
Many of you have been praying, along with me, for a miracle. The more I think about it, the more I think Katie hit it on the head the other day: Catching this when we did, as such a fluke, was a miracle. Ending up in Cleveland with the best surgeon in the country for the removal; and getting an oncology team that specializes in precisely my kind of cancer… well, that’s rather a miracle, too. But I can’t help but to feel a bit greedy for another one, the big one, and I’m sort of ashamed by that. I want the big miracle; I want the cure. I honestly keep waiting for that appointment when they say that they have no idea how it happened, but I’m clean.

I know that, with time, over the next few days, my blood pressure will come down and my mood will improve. And my situation is by no means dire right now. It’s my mind that’s playing games with me, and I have to rediscover the peace I had after the surgery, and then after the blood clot. First and foremost, writing this is the last I am planning on talking about any of this for at least this long weekend. Writing is my therapy, and I just kind of needed to get this on 'paper,' and out there, and out of my life for a few days.

Thank you all again for your thoughts and prayers, and I hope you’ll keep them coming. I know God’s will shall be done no matter what, but I can’t help but think I’m meant to stick around for a while