It's being a bit of a year.

I'm 53 years old and have three kids.  Not that they're really "kids" any more--the youngest (who tentatively identifies as non-binary) is 16, and the others are Simon (24) and Luke (22).  What with Covid, and the job/housing market, Simon, although he has graduated, is still living at home, as is Luke, who has been going to university.  Though he's taking a year off at the moment.

Luke in some ways is the classic middle child, being the one who's been most likely to help out around the house, which is helpful in this likely undiagnosed-ADHD-ridden household.  He has had his ADHD diagnosed, and anxiety, and has gotten his own medications for those.  He got a part-time job as a parking attendant, which is more than Simon has managed.  (Simon took a Comp.Sci. degree and wants to get into game development, and has been fruitlessly job-hunting since he graduated, but has been largely unwilling to apply for jobs outside of software development.)

A couple of years ago (not quite sure when it started, but as of last August it had definitely been a thing for a while) Luke started getting lower back pains.  So he started trying to fix his posture (he's quite tall, so probably had a bit of a tendency to slouch), he tried to be more active, and of course he went to doctors.  They couldn't figure out what it was; one of them thought maybe it was a problem with his gluteal nerve being inflamed or something, and there were some plans to try to deal with that.  They did an MRI.

Then they did a biopsy.  And apparently this is a more loaded word than I had thought, because this was when my wife started getting anxious but I remained clueless.

Because what they found was cancer.

They weren't 100% sure about it, but it looked like something called a "Ewing sarcoma", a rare bone/soft tissue cancer which often appears in the teens.  Apparently in Luke's case it had shown up in his sacral area.

My wife had a cousin (once removed) who got cancer young and did not make it.  My mom went through breast cancer a few years ago and came out of it okay, but her husband's bout with it a few years later was not as successful.

So we went in to the Cross Cancer Institute, a local institution which is pretty state-of-the-art, to talk to the oncologist and her team.  They had to do some more scans to try to see if it had metastasized, which is of course always the big question mark and a major determiner in how screwed you are.  They didn't find much except a tiny spot on one lung, which they eventually concluded was nothing to worry about.  Which was a relief, given how long it had been since the pains started, and we started to relax a little bit.

In about March they started him on an aggressive chemotherapy schedule--chemo every two weeks, alternating between a week with a half day of treatment and a week with three full days of treatment.  Which got to be a bit of a grind, especially for a one-vehicle household in a city that doesn't have the greatest public transit infrastructure in the world.  And of course after a full day of getting toxic substances pumped into his veins, Luke didn't particularly want to have to get home on his own anyway, so we tried to juggle things so that one of us could pick him up.  I'd been back in the office since October 2022, but I started taking more WFH days, with the approval of my immediate bosses who are, luckily, entirely sympathetic.

Luke's hair fell out; he wore a wig briefly while it was still patchy, but has pretty much given that up by now.  He had to get some pricy medications, which were generally covered by the Blue Cross plan I have through work or by his student healthcare plan (Canada healthcare is good enough that we weren't even charged for anything apart from that, but our pharmacare is still vestigial), and they have "drug coordinators" to help fill in the gaps.  He quite his job right away, and finished his university year in April but didn't sign up for the next year, because that had been enough of a struggle.  One of the drugs, Lapelga, was designed to try to help his white blood cell count, because of course the cancer-fighting drugs also beat those down too.  (My mom's white blood cells apparently got really low during her treatments.)

We're now into the second half of the treatment.  His white blood cells have also gotten low; he started off by getting an actual blood transfusion to try to bring them up, and he's now on chemo every three weeks to give him more recovery time.  But the cancer is getting beaten back.  He's now starting on radiation treatments as well (anecdotally, radiation is supposed to do quite well against Ewing sarcomas, so here's hoping), but that schedule looks like it'll be even more grueling: treatments every day (well, every weekday) for six weeks.  (What happens when they overlap with the chemo days, I'm not sure yet.)  His energy levels are up and down--chemo weeks he'll spend more time sleeping, but he still tries to hang out with his friends from time to time, often online.  I'm sure he understands that his job right now is just fighting cancer (or hanging on while the cancer is being fought, at least).  And presumably when the chemo and radiation are done, what's left will be a tiny thing they can surgically remove.

Apart from when we first got the news, the mood in the house has been generally positive.  The doctors seem optimistic (though of course maybe they always do that, to keep people's hopes up), they do seem to be making progress, it doesn't seem to have metastasized...  It's a lot of effort, but maybe it'll just be One Bad Year and after that things will be Okay.  I am a little vague on what the cancer is actually doing to his bones--are they going to need to be repaired somehow once the tumour is gone?  Will he still suffer pain there for the rest of his life?  And, of course, the lingering question of...will the cancer come back?

One of the books I'm reading right now is Risk, a.k.a. The Science of Fear, by Dan Gardner.  At one point he's talking about how people often deliberately exaggerate numbers to make something sound worse than it is, because that way they can convince more people to do something about it.  And cancer is one of those things.  A lot of work has been done on treating cancer, and it's not an automatic death sentence by any means.  And one reason we're getting better at treating it is because it's been treated as a serious problem...but the better we get at treating it, the less serious the problem becomes?  I'm glad that chemo and radiation treatments are getting as effective as they are.  I'd heard a thing recently about using these newfangled mRNA vaccines to get someone's immune system to attack cancer cells; sounds like that might work better with someone whose white blood cell count was up to the task, but it sounds promising.

Last summer we lost our cat (to what I believe was lillium poisoning after we stupidly got a stupid free bouquet from the store).  We've talked about getting a new one, and maybe now is the time.  Bring some cheer back into the house.  (Which means, of course, we'll probably be biased in favour of getting a cute kitten rather than a mature or elderly cat which may have its own health problems.)