the aftermath

When Tuesday finally arrived, my second surgery experience was a much calmer one than the first. I was ready for the wait, ready for the poking, and prodding, and sticking. I had lived face to face with pain for a business week and I wasn't afraid of an IV anymore. Prepared this time, I preformed my urine test brilliantly and awoke from my anesthesia without a single #%@^$#%. True to form, they promised me within a day I should feel "much better" with the plaque out and self-dissolving sutures to keep closed the hole they'd cut and, true to experience, my eye was just as miserably sore Wednesday as it had been when I'd awoken Tuesday morning. When I opened it, although it was as flaming red as the eye of sauron, there was light and there was color; even some blurry shapes. They told me there was no telling how much of my vision I would retain: radiation kills everything in its path, not just cancer, and my five day dance with the devil had cost me significant damage to the eye tissue and a partially detached retina. But with a colloidal laser treatment and frequent injections of Avastin (a wonder drug that turns back ocular time and damage) my light at the end of the tunnel would stay bright. Over the next few weeks the tumor would die as its radioactively poisoned DNA deflated it like little cellular suicide bombers. 

The flight home was nearly as miserable as the plaque treatments had been. I was sore, tired, jet-lagged and missed my husband so badly that I could feel each lonely heartbeat throb behind my eye-patch in my bloody eye. But I was going home. 

My fight isn't over yet, as I write this I'm still halfway in an eastern time-zone and my eye is killing me. But it hurts just a smidge less than yesterday and will be just a bit better tomorrow. In the next two to three weeks I'll slowly heal and get the results of my genetic testing to find out if I'm carrying the BAP-1, a genetic marker that will mean I'll spend the rest of my life afraid that cancer is around the next corner. I'll see an oncologist on this side of the country who will poke me and prod me again, scan me, xray me, and examine me until we are sure that I'm out of harm's way, at least for now. But right now, I'm taking it a step at a time. I have my family, my husband, and my eyes and even through just one, the world has never looked brighter.