There’s nothing to say because there is nothing to say.

If you’ve never experienced ice skating in an outdoor rink between a river and the foothills of a major mountain range, Winthrop, Wash. needs to be added to your bucket list.  

The evening of 20 December I’d made my way through some light snow and winding mountain roads north and east through the spine of Washington’s part of the Cascade range in Nicolette’s cherry Subaru Outback Wilderness. Despite the side quests at the aid station and laboratory, I was making good time and would get there with plenty of time to settle in and make the first scrimmage of the weekend.  I had my new passenger to keep me company: the swelling on the right side of my neck.

I kept touching it. I’d gained a keen awareness of it. Did Alex and Shyla notice it the night before when we had Mexican in Spanaway? Did it just show up this morning? It put a little pressure on my jaw when I turned my head right but otherwise was completely mute to my senses. Probably just some weird infection in my lymph nodes or thyroid or something. But… I felt fine. Aren’t infections supposed to be symptomatic? I was concerned to a point, but CPT Bennett hadn’t shown a great deal of concern that my doom was imminent, so I was prepared to just go skate and let God sort it out.

I pulled in a little after dark to a snowy lot at a lodge that sat as the only structure between Winthrop’s rink and the Methow River. The area was covered by a blanket of fresh snow and people had small fires going outside their cabins. This is one of those scenes that inspires urban yuppies to transition from weekend visitors to invasive gentrifiers. 

I had enough time to sneak in for a public skate, after all I’d not skated since returning from Japan. The first scrimmage was a blast! I forgot about my troubles for an hour and got my legs back under me.

An important detail to note in this story is that I’d basically been sober-adjacent for the past couple years leading up to now. I greatly slowed down my casual drinking when I moved to Washington in 2021, and it was basically non-existent by the time my divorce began to unfold in late 2023. Aside from a cheap beer every few weeks in the locker room after a game, my drinking was reserved for special occasions by the end of 2024. This was a special occasion, but I had four games in three days and 9 cumulative hours of driving over that span; I was not going to drink anything other than some NA beers to fit in. This will matter in a near-future entry to this blog.

Saturday and Sunday were hockey heaven. I played, I watched kids play, I enjoyed the picturesque town of Winthrop where everything was a short walk away from everything else, and just decompressed from the last six weeks of military exercises and long distance travel that came at the end of six months of workup toward said exercise.  I even drove back to Tacoma in time to play in my league’s game that evening.

Monday rolled around and I called the referral number. No answer. This is not particularly shocking even during non-holiday block leave timeframes, so I left a message and figured I’d get a call back in the afternoon.  Nothing Monday afternoon. I didn’t leave a message. I’m sure whoever the poor soul that was left on the ultrasound desk will get around to it before they leave tomorrow on Christmas Eve.

Nothing on Christmas Eve. OK, understandable. I’ll for sure hear back from someone the day after Christmas.

Nothing the day after Christmas. Shit. OK, time to go to the hospital in person.

I made my way to the ultrasound scheduling desk and talked to a person that was scheduling other types of imaging. She said the ultrasound scheduler was out until tomorrow and she’d leave a note for me with her.  This was annoying, but pretty on-brand with bureaucratic inefficiencies that plague people-facing industries post-COVID, and is amplified by general military bureaucratic-isms that are more or less accepted as a part of life in this line of work.

Friday morning I got a call when I was on my way to pick up the kids from their mother for my half of the winter vacation period, “Hi sir, can you come in tomorrow morning at 0600?” This type of speed between appointment-setter and appointment was nearly unprecedented in my career; I’d made the snap judgment to accept the appointment and deal with the childcare logistics on the back end, “Yeah, that works, no problem, I’ll be there.”

Up to this point I’d made the deliberate decision to keep my mouth shut about “the lump” because, well, there wasn’t anything to say. I didn’t have any new information, I’m not going to get my parents all spun-up about nothing, and I wasn’t going to fuck up their holiday mood with some nebulous self-diagnosis. However, the aforementioned back-end childcare logistics means I was going to have to tell something to someone.  Enter Aunt Cathy.

Aunt Cathy is my Dad’s older sister and just so happens to live about an hour north of me in Lake Stevens. She’s had just about every medical issue under the sun and if there was someone that would temper their concern with pragmatism, I knew she’d be that person. Plus she’s retired and I’m her favorite nephew, which pays dividends.

After a brief call explaining the situation and my dire need of childcare, she did what any good family member does and stepped in without complaint. Her number one concern was me figuring out what this was.

“Did you know Grandma had lymphoma? She beat it, but you should make sure you’re ok,” she said toward the end of our call.

No, no I did not know that.

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Imaging Rodeo

Aunt Cathy and her husband Chuck arrived right on time for me to blaze out of my house in Tacoma on 28 December. The lump hadn’t really changed much. At times it felt bigger, at times it felt smaller. This was reassuring in a way: cancer doesn’t just up and shrink randomly, right?

I showed up to the general radiology desk in the hospital and was corralled by the ultrasound tech. For what CPT Bennett triaged as a “routine” ultrasound on my neck. In her defense, there was no reason up to this point to triage it as anything else, otherwise she’d have hauled me off to her ER homeland long ago.

“An ultrasound is a medical test that uses sound waves to create images of the inside of your body. It works by sending high-frequency sound waves through your body, and when these sound waves bounce off tissues, organs, or fluids, they create echoes. These echoes are then turned into pictures that doctors can use to see things like babies growing in the womb, organs like the heart and liver, or to check for problems in different parts of the body. It’s safe, non-invasive, and doesn’t use radiation.” – ChatGPT

In reality, a non-OB ultrasound is performed by a guy that looks like you interrupted his DnD campaign to smear cold gel on your neck and rub a smooth piece of plastic over it for a couple minutes.

Rounds complete. I had now completed all the tasks that my provider asked me to do. There was an ice cream’s chance in hell that I was going to get a call about this before everyone came back from the holiday block leave period so I managed the best I could in the “fog of lump.”

In photos I definitely noticed it, and would purposely angle the camera away from it when me and the kids went out and about. There was no escaping it unless I’d kept people away from viewing the right side of my body. Even seeing it in photos made me uncomfortable and began to erode my confidence.

The radiologist and CPT Bennett came to the same conclusion in their interpretation of the ultrasound: there was a mass that was necrotic or cystic in nature in my lymph node, I needed an ENT referral, and a CT scan “with contrast” to get a better idea of what nefarious game my neck was up to. My labs, however, were perfectly normal across the board, with zero indications anything was going sideways. One might say my labs were… routine.

“We can’t schedule your referral until you get the CT scan,” the ENT clerk said over the phone.

“We can get you in in March, your provider listed it as routine,” the CT scheduler said to my face at the scheduling desk.  By this point, my nerves were starting to fray. The lump wasn’t going away, and it was becoming obvious to my caveman brain that this wasn’t “routine.”

I looked at her coldly and pointed to the lump. I was having a big-lump day, “Well hopefully this doesn’t kill me before then.”

She looked up from the screen, and the frankness of my statement broke her out of whatever script she had playing in her mind for this conversation, “Um, well, let me look and see if there’s anything sooner.”

Low and behold, there was one about two and a half weeks away. I got that scheduled, and then called ENT back to set my follow-up to the CT for exactly a week later. I figured I’d have an explanation as to what was going on by close of business on 28 January. The worrying was going to be for nothing. It was probably just a cyst they needed to drain or, at worst, remove. Easy peasy.

Life went on for three more weeks. I hung out with the kids, played hockey, went to work, prepared paperwork I had to gather for my reassignment to D.C. this summer, and tried to go on as if all systems were nominal. Because all systems were nominal. They were routine.

“A CT scan with contrast is a special type of X-ray that gives doctors detailed images of the inside of your body. The “contrast” part means that a special dye is used to help certain areas show up more clearly in the images. This dye can be injected into a vein or taken by mouth, depending on the area being scanned. It helps highlight things like blood vessels, organs, and tissues, making it easier for doctors to spot problems, such as tumors, infections, or injuries. The scan itself takes just a few minutes, and the contrast dye helps improve the quality of the pictures for better diagnosis.” – ChatGPT

No lies detected. I had to fast the night before, but otherwise, you get stuck with an IV, you lay down for the CT in a big MRI-esque machine, and you’re out of there. It was almost as uneventful as the ultrasound.

This was the last anti-climactic medical appointment I am likely to have in 2025. 

New year, new me (new me has cancer).

The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.