The burning sensation begins at the back of my throat and then spreads quickly and efficiently throughout my chest, settling as a small but intense fire in my testicles. The fire burns for a little over two minutes but it feels longer, partly because the CT-scanning room is perfectly still, and partly because it is my testicles that are on fire and I can think of nothing else. I amuse myself by thinking of the refrain from an old rock song, “Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!”

The burning sensation is caused by the intravenous drip of a liquid designed to “light up” my insides for the CT camera. As I lay on the gurney beneath the large SIEMENS letters on the light institutional green and white scanning machine, I am reminded of the wonder of 21^st century medicine, of it’s ability to “see” inside my torso without cutting me open. Of its ability to take pictures, and to analyze those pictures with sophisticated, computer-assisted programs that not only measure and assess this and that, but also that correlate individual assessments with large databases.

I also remind myself to think positively while the machine softly whirs and the cool, detached digital numbers above my head register something significant but unknown to me about my passage beneath the CT-tunnel.

On Monday I posted poem that chronicled how my disease and treatments have affected my body. I knew then that the poetic form and body content would resonate with readers who have been wondering, some asking me, “what is really like to” live with a terminal illness?

But today is Friday, and, true to the course of my now mostly predictable routines and their aftermath, I am back to feeling pretty good. I still pound the Advil, but my body is no longer expressing dissent in discomforting ways. Instead, I am strong enough to get out of the house, do errands, go to meetings, text Nic on my iPhone frequently, work on my class and other writing projects, and otherwise engage in the practices that define “my new normal.”

Friday’s body and what I want to share about it doesn’t feel like a poem anymore.

Instead it feels more like rejoining our ongoing conversation, a meeting of friends, and now it is my turn to “update my status.” Because this is a blog post and not a Facebook entry or an iPhone text, it will be longer and more detailed than either a poem or a typical status update. But if you want to know how my day went, here’s the rest of the story …

***

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”

--Philip Larkin

On Wednesday I had a follow-up CT-scan, this time on my upper chest to check for any damage from six months of chemo and to give my new oncologist, Dr. Robin Obenchain, a more complete picture of what my dear ol’ Granny – Nellie Grimm Saylor – used to call “my innards.” I also had the usual telltale vials of blood removed from my body. On Friday San and I met with Dr. Obenchain to discuss the results. And the news was good, mostly and good … maybe.

That’s kind of how the news goes in the frontier territory called Remission. Yes, I am a “cancer survivor,” but at least with pancreatic cancer, the detour out of Cancerland means that I am never more than a few short sentences away from the longer, harder narrative, and that harder narrative is always lurking, forming, insisting, somewhere inside me no matter how I fight it – how we fight it – each and every day.

It also means that the ongoing storyline between these wild narrative territories is never exactly linear. As one of our oncology nurses and my personal “chemo wife” Monica puts it: “it’s more of a roller coaster ride.”

***