MRI of a Rose

While undergoing cancer treatment, Ramona Jan removes metastases from her rose bush.

Photo by Daniela E. on Unsplash

It was summertime when I was diagnosed with late stage cervical cancer, and so started doing a wrong thing, moving flowers in an unforgiving heat. Flowers in bloom, or about to bloom. “Survival of the fittest,” I said, wagging my finger at them. I was pissed. Mad that my cat died. Mad at the chipmunk invasion that pressed me into growing flowers instead of much needed vegetables. Mad at the inconvenience of cancer.

The Japanese garden tools, recommended by a friend, were returned immediately. They were crap. And I wasn’t going to stand for crap anymore. Not from anyone; especially not from doctors. “I’m the patient,” I reminded the one who got testy when I asked, “Why do I have to be on chemo for the rest of my life?” Between treatments, my metal pruners, hot from the sun, burned my hand like the radiation seared the skin around my pelvis. 

They say it’s cancer, the tips of blackish-brown stems on a rose bush, and that they need trimming. Had I let it go, it would have destroyed the whole cane, and eventually the whole bush, and so I did surgery. Like a radical hysterectomy, lymph nodes and all. The kind I was supposed to have but didn’t because it was too late. The cancer had already spread to my liver and lungs. I didn’t feel the spread. The rose probably didn’t feel it either.

The author’s rose bushes and fallen petals.

I didn’t feel the radiation, only the side effects. Diarrhea that looked and smelled like blackish-green tar. Nothing without a sacrifice. Five weeks and twenty-five rounds of radiation. More rounds of diarrhea. Endless rounds. The cancer? Still there.

At the Manhattan chemo-boutique, in less than fifteen seconds the carboplatin and paclitaxel, turned me into the elephant man, all scrunched up and aching. I was allergic. “Find a place to get treated somewhere nearer where you live,” the doctor said before sending me packing, refunding my money, even though she knew…treatments are the same everywhere.

The new line of defense? A monoclonal-antibody with two names: Pembrolizumab and Keytruda, prettied up under the label of “Immunotherapy.” It’s a miracle drug with potential “life-threatening side effects that, at any time during treatment or even after it has ended, could lead to death,” states the announcer in the ad. “Ask your doctor about Keytruda.”

They say it’s cancer, the tips of blackish-brown stems on a rose bush, and that they need trimming. Had I let it go, it would have destroyed the whole cane, and eventually the whole bush, and so I did surgery. Like a radical hysterectomy, lymph nodes and all. The kind I was supposed to have but didn’t because it was too late. The cancer had already spread to my liver and lungs. I didn’t feel the spread. The rose probably didn’t feel it either.

As summer gave way to fall, I snipped the ends of thorny branches, and told the rose to tolerate it, but the next day there was more dead rot on the same branch. Maybe I didn’t snip enough. All my tumors are gone now, except the ones in the lungs. The place of most concern.

My primary oncologist said, “You still have cancer in your liver and cervix, we just can’t see it. MRIs can never fully detect it. You’ll be on this drug for the rest of your life even if it puts you in a wheelchair.” My second opinion doctor said, “Your MRI’s look great! They’re a great tool; very reliable. You’ll be off this drug in a year.” But he’s the one who nicked my lesion, and I suspect turned it into an invasive weed.

Just before the first frost, I yanked out crops of crabgrass to make room for the tiny but strong-rounded leaflets of a transplant my pro-gardener friend said would never make it. Like a newborn in delivery, it had pushed itself through the unyielding earth, reaching for a promise. Organisms are programmed to survive, and so I wonder: what goes wrong when they don’t?

Come summer, I’ll dig into the ground, and for all the days before, during and after, into science papers, looking for answers that no one has, not even the doctors. And then I’ll touch the tiny sprouts that rise from nowhere and everywhere, and hope to get out of this quagmire, to live a normal life again, before this life is over.