like father.

on the surface, my father and i have very little in common.  he is introverted, i am extroverted.  he takes afternoon naps, and i take on the afternoon.  i am tall, he is short.  he likes white bread, white potatoes, white rice, and i like green vegetables.  he is religious, i am not.  he is the type of reader who reads multiple books simultaneously, never finishing what he starts, and i am the type of reader who reads one book at a time,  finishing every book that i start.   he is content with simple pleasures, i am energized by chaos.  he tends to ignore problems, and i tend to attack them.

one is not better than the other; we are just different.

while being incredibly different, my dad and i have always connected by sharing our love of a few things including: our morning coffee routine, wandering in book stores, walking the dog, rolling our eyes when mom is micro-managing us, and communicating in writing.

however; in the last year, we have had more shared experiences than in the previous three decades.  to give you a heads up, one good, and two are less than ideal:

hiking the wild wall:  one of my favorite travel memories – if not my favorite travel memory – was taking my mom and dad to the great wall of china this past april.  it was a trip entirely out of their comfort zones, and they loved every moment.  on our last day at the great wall, my dad and i decided to do a hike that we had read about that went up into the “wild wall”, where the great wall has not been restored.  we were told that the hike was challenging and steep, so i figured we would need to take it slowly and carefully.  we surprised ourselves, not finding it particularly challenging, absolutely in awe of the wonder of it all.  i will never forget the fire in dad’s eyes, and the giddy child-like joy he had when we had completed the hike.  he literally stopped to boast to strangers about what we had just done.  in a million years, no one could have guessed that during that hike, we both had cancer growing inside of us.

which brings me to our next shared experience, which is cancer.

we received the news that we had both had cancer recurrences in the same week.  it was dizzying.  it was discombobulating.  it was devastating.  mom called to tell me about dad, and at that point, i had felt the lump in my armpit that afternoon at the gym.  i stayed mum about my own fears, because i wasn’t sure our family could handle it.  i certainly admire my dad in so many ways, and would love to follow in his footsteps… but health struggles was not something i ever imagined we would share.  you might think that sharing cancer brings people together; however, we have both approached our diagnoses very differently.  i am hungry for information, open to alternative treatments, and very vocal about my feelings.  dad is different. at times it frustrates me, because i wish he would do more.  but i also respect that everyone responds so differently to crisis and trauma.  regardless, what we do share, are our cancer-related fears: pain, loss, and death.

this past week, my dad had his first of two lung surgeries, which brings me to our most recent and most terrifying shared experience, lung nodules.

i received the results of my CT scan on wednesday, and they were not the results we were hoping for.  they have found a worrisome nodule in my right lung that wasn’t there in my may 2017 scan.  in my may 2018 scan, it was very small.  now, it has grown to 6mm.  it could be nothing.  or it could be cancer.  i am in shock.  i had been expecting to book a flight back to bangkok this week, but instead i was grieving.

dad has two lung nodules, both of which are cancerous.  we do not know if they are a new primary lung cancer, or if they are a metastasis of his previous cancer.  he had the first of the two removed last week, with a surgical wedge resection.  he is recovering well and already back to short walks with his favorite mexican street dog, our kahla!   in the next months he will need a lobectomy, which is removing an entire lobe of his right lung, to deal with his other tumor.

in my case, there are some potential scenarios for this nodule:

1. that it is benign, and that we will continue with my treatment as is
2. that it is melanoma, that immunotherapy isn’t working, and that we need to move to a secondary treatment option called targeted B-RAF therapy
3. that it is melanoma, but that it is actually showing pseudo-progression (essentially that it is responding to immunotherapy, but is getting worse before it gets better)

to figure this out i will need a PET scan, and potentially lung surgery… in fact, it could be the SAME surgical wedge resection that my father just had.

this setback, while i knew was always possible, has broken my little spirit.  in a million years, i could never have imagined that my father and i would have shared these scary experiences; especially considering i am half his age.

i have written and re-written a closing statement, trying to end on a hopeful note.  but that’s not where i’m at right now.

like my father, who cried the other day when he heard about this setback, i’m so very sad and scared.

so, together, we will just sit with that.

*this photo was taken on the great wall of china at mutianyu, in april 2018.  we hiked together in the atlas mountains of morocco in the summer of 2006, and then hiked the wild wall together in 2018.  where to next?  (and walking up and down the halls at the hospital doesn’t count!)