Bone Marrow Biopsy

We are very thin in staffing at the library. What with people taking vacation, people sick with the flu, people whose children are home from school, people traveling home for the holidays, we are less than half staffed. No matter. We have some local students who are willing to work - thank goodness for their help! It's not a good time for me to have to leave work for medical tests. Maybe I can reschedule my bone marrow biopsy, I think, knowing full well that I will not do so. Just get it over with.


Noon finds me sliding into my coat and heading for the car. I really do not want to have this done. Its not that there is a lot of pain associated with it or that it takes a long time or zaps my energy. I just haven't the heart for it right now. As I walk down the hallway at the cancer center, I realize how much the environment reminds me of what Dad is going through even now - the wheelchairs, the shiny, hard linoleum floors, the medical personnel in their scrubs, the IVs, the older patients, the suffering. Its hard not to cry.

The same nurse who did my last two biopsies will be doing my biopsy today. She is cheerful and we joke around. I just want this over so I can get back to work and not think about cancer stuff. She numbs the site, then a deeper numbing of the bone. I feel it in my shoulder - strange. She tries to extract the marrow, and my shoulder goes berserk. Not working. She repositions the needle and tries again. Suddenly I must breathe like a woman in labor - in, out, in, out, slow, regular, focus on the air and the rhythm. Ten seconds to go. Done. Now for the bone chip - another session of serious breathing - done.

I lie quietly on the table, letting the weight of my body put pressure on the injection site. After all, it would be a waste to leak perfectly good bone marrow all over. They let me lie a bit to collect myself. It is hard not to think about Dad. I hate to see him struggle so for every breath. I don't even want to go down the road about my own future prognosis. After all, one of the areas they watch in my body is the lungs. I shudder, remembering Donna, the woman I worked with in Connecticut who died of lung cancer. Miserable stuff.

Moments later, I walk down the hall and into the waiting area, meeting up with Kiel, my driver of choice. It is as if I have closed the door on disease and entered a much happier place. We head for the car and a lunch at Panera's before I return to the semi-normalcy of the library. A weight off my shoulders. Hang on to the words of the doctor - I should have a good decade of remission before my cancer dares show its ugly head again, and by that time there may well be a cure.

I say a prayer for Dad, and another one for Mom, then jump into the tasks of closing down the library for the day and for the season. Hopefully the PET scan next week will go as well, I think as I ruefully rub my sore behind. This too shall pass.