Musings by OZ

We are on our way home.

Where is home you may ask?

Home, for Ginny and I is not a house or an address, if it is then we are currently homeless because we have neither. 

Home is not where my heart is, if home is where I find my heart then I am home right here on this plane sitting next to my wife because my heart, as always, is with my her.

Home, the one we are currently flying to, is not an address, it’s not where my heart is, home is where my health is.

After 15 months our grand Polish adventure has ended. We have seen so many amazing places and have met so many beautiful people while we have been here, it has truly been a life changing experience. We were planning on staying here for a while so that I could get cancer treatment. We had a plan and did everything possible to make it happen. As part of this plan to remain legally in Poland I decided to renew my British passport. It was issued to me when I was a child but it expired over 34 years ago. I never considered to get it renewed until I learned that it would make it much easier to stay in Poland.  With my U.S. passport we can stay in Poland for 3 months at a time but with the British passport we can stay for 3 years at a time. It was a fairly simple process,  two months after I sent my expired passport to the U.K. I received a shiny new one in the mail.

So with my fancy new passport in hand we hired a useless and terribly inefficient company who’s goal it seemed, was to drag out the Visa process and make it the most stressful and uninformed Visa experience ever. 

I was honest from the beginning with the immigration people and informed them that I wanted a Visa so I could stay in Poland and receive treatment for  cancer. In hind sight it was probably not the best thing to tell them because now they were concerned that I was going to be a leach on the Polish medical system. After months of meetings with immigration I was finally told that the only way for me to remain in Poland legally was to get Polish National Health Insurance.  The only way to get this was to get a job and pay taxes in Poland.

 I was given two weeks to get a job and insurance, if I didn’t have insurance within two weeks I would be asked to leave the country. No easy task but somehow I pulled it off. I had both a job and insurance within a week. At my final immigration interview I learned that I was now a legal resident of Poland. After a year being denied by hospitals because I didn’t have insurance I was finally insured. Easy peasy from this point on…or so I thought.

Using my newly acquired insurance I visited my local clinic. The doctor looked at my test results and medical history and agreed with the half dozen doctors that I visited in Warsaw as well as my doctor in California, I should have started treatment months ago. He wrote me a referral to the Institute of Hematology, a place that had denied me treatment twice already. This time it wasn’t much better, they gave me a bunch of excuses why and suggested that I would be better off at another hospital, unfortunately the other hospital had also denied me treatment. I bounced around a few public hospitals  for a coupe of weeks with no success whatsoever.  Knowing that I required treatment as soon as possible I gave myself one more week, if I wasn’t admitted to a hospital within a week we were giving up and heading home. The week passed quickly with no hope of receiving care so here we are on a plane heading back to Cali.

 After over a year in Warsaw we packed everything up and jumped on a plane heading to Los Angeles. We arrive in LA on the evening of January 21st and I have an appointment with my doctor first thing on the 23rd. The doctor appointment is the only plan we have. Since we have no place to live we will stay with a friend initially until I find out what kind of treatment I require.  Everything that we own is stored in our shop in Gardena.  The only vehicle we have is my truck and it doesn’t run and is uninsured with a certificate of non operation.  The only thing we know for sure is that I need to see my doctor and find out what my treatment options are. 

Many of you have wondered what my health situation actually is, my last blog showed a certain urgency but didn’t actually provide much info, so here’s what’s up.  When we arrived in Warsaw 15 months ago I had a small lump under my arm the size of a small grape. This was my only symptom. The grape has multiplied and grown into half a dozen lemons, these are all swollen lymph nodes. Under my right arm I have a single node that is now the size of a large potato.  I’m a walking produce market full of cancer. I had a CT scan a year ago when I first noticed the lump and it showed swollen nodes throughout my body, they were throughout my abdominal cavity. When I was diagnosed with stage 4 Non Hodgkin Lymphoma a few years ago my lymph nodes were not as big as they are now. Other symptoms have returned such as night sweats and hot flashes. Also my body hurts, my back and hips hurt, my bones hurt. Not an unbearable pain but its enough to me me feel 30 years older than I am.  Another symptom of lymphoma is the blood clot that I have in my right leg. A superficial vein is blocked from my groin to a couple of inches below my knee. Lymphoma causes the blood to thicken which will cause it to clot. The blocked vein will never heal and will have to be surgically removed at some point. I give myself daily shots of blood thinner and will have to continue this until I deal with the cancer. I had to visit a doctor before this flight to make sure it is safe for me to fly. I had to take 2 shots a day for a couple of days before and after my flight. The thinning blood scared me, scares me. This whole thing scares me.

When I was first diagnosed I was scared, when I did 6 months of chemo I was scared. When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer shortly after beating the lymphoma into remission, I was scared. Having my thyroid removed followed by radiation treatment, scary shit. It was all scary but it was all new to me and everything happened so fast. From initial diagnosis to treatment took only a few weeks, I never had time to think. This time I have had the luxury, or the curse, of time, I have had many months to consider my disease. I have had nothing but time to consider the implications of this disease. I have become intimate with lymphoma, I know now what it is capable of and I am scared, I am sick, sicker than I have been able to admit myself, until recently. All of my symptoms are getting worse but the scariest one, the one that really opened my eyes and scared the shit out of me is the fact that my blood is beginning to thicken. I don’t know yet what stage the lymphoma is this time. I don’t know what treatment options are truly available to me but I do know that it’s time to get my ass back to California, its time to see the doctor that knows my complete health history. It’s time for a doctors appointment that doesn’t require a translator. 

I don’t know what I will learn in the coming weeks but I do know that I am still mentally strong and ready to do what it takes to beat this shit. I may be scared but it in no way lessons my resolve, it in know way weakens me, in fact I gain strength from the fear. Im scared but I am ready to fight this with everything I have. I am ready to go to battle once again with this disease called cancer.

• I wrote everything above this on our 12 hour flight from Poland, we are now in California, tomorrow I will see my doctor.  After a year of visiting doctors in Warsaw I still have no idea what stage my lymphoma is, I hope to find out that I am not as sick as I think I am. I don’t think I will get all of the answers but I will hopefully get some. Keep your fingers crossed that I get good news.