Losing My Hickman

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It's good news and it's bad news. Dr. Collins doesn't play the game, asking which one I'd rather have first. She just launches into the good: everything is clean. Sparkling. The single expensive, full-color, uncomfortable bronchoscopy has confirmed what multiple thrifty, black-and-white, simple x-rays were telling us all along. There are no infections in my lungs.

Dr. Collins smiles. She shrugs. She stands at the foot of my bed and does this little half smile, apologetic, because she knows that as good as the news is -- no infections! woo-hoo! -- what it really means is that the Hickman is coming out. We're both reading between the lines. She's standing there, right, all cool and calm and collected, and it really is good news, that the myriad tests I've undergone recently have turned up nothing but nothing.

But we both know where this is going.

Dr. Collins is standing at the foot of my bed and I'm trying to pretend like I don't have a temp. Stupid. Stupid, Robert. I'm shaking. Blankets are piled. She can read my charts. She knows better. I haven't been able to go, what, two consecutive days without spiking a temp? My teeth are chattering while I wait for the demoral to kick in.

If it's not my lungs, then it's my clean, infection-free Hickman. It's really not all that complicated. It's binary. A process of elimination.

It can't be the Hickman, but then again, it can't not be.

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A Few Notes

robert (now and then)
(hover to see RKB in 1990)
After running two marathons in October 2010 with Team in Training, I've decided to "slack off" with just the one marathon in 2011.

This year will be in memory of Siona Shah, an amazing young girl who spent the final third of her too-short life battling leukemia with courage, grace, humility, and smiles.

It will also be in memory of my step-grandmother, Ruth, who passed away on June 15th after a recurrence of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

I'd originally started using this site to tell my story -- roughly eight months of treatment in 1990, as well as the impact leukemia had on me in the years that followed. Much of that story is still available through the "Table of Contents" below (starting with my initial diagnosis while I was studying in England).

 - Robert K. Brown
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