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2004-07-26 My apologies for not writing in so long. I had nothing of interest to say. First of all, to those of you who have been following My Little Brother vs. the Tumor: A Potentially Cancerous Extravaganza, I am relieved to report that my little brother is okay. To those of you who didn't subscribe to that particular newsletter, here is the dire tale. My brother left for the Marines two weeks ago, the morning after the fourth of July. (Indiscriminate sense of irony, you are fired.) A few days after he arrived at Paris Island, we received a call from him: "Hi, this is Recruit Little Brother. They have found a tumor in my jaw and are sending me home. Expect to hear from me in 1-3 days." Wait. Wait. A tumor in his jaw? "Are you sure he didn't say cyst?" I asked my sister, who had answered the phone. "He could have said cyst. This connection isn't very good, you know, he's calling from a whole different state. God knows what he actually said. What's the difference between a tumor and a cyst, anyway? There isn't any difference, everyone knows that, why they even bothered to invent a synonym for the word cyst is totally beyond me. Are you sure he said tumor in the jaw?" My sister thought for a moment, then tapped her chin and said, "Is this your jaw?" "No, that's your chin!" I shrieked, possessed by the momentary and unshakable certainty that a chin tumor isn't actually a tumor at all, but the flu. "No, he definitely said jaw," she decided. So we all got drunk, and waited, and waited some more. A few days later we got THIS call: "Hi, this is Recruit Little Brother. The tumor has eaten away most of the left side of my jaw. A thin sheet of bone is holding my teeth in place. I will return home in 6-21 days. You will receive a telephone call from me the day before I leave." My mother burst into tears. My father, whose sense of tact is so finely honed it might well be called a superpower, sat my mother down and told her gently, "He has cancer. You have to face the facts. Your son has cancer." Then he scurried away to the computer to research tumors, bone cancer, and various survival rates. My mother babbled about the high cancer rates in this town, my brother's enthusiastic consumption of protein shakes, the number of sinus infections he had undergone as a child, and, most importantly, his conspicous absence in the dentist's office for the last several years due to their lack of dental insurance. "An X-ray would have caught it." The Professor and I, being sensible people, poured a bottle of wine down her throat to fortify her against my father's relentless and inexorable statistics. "50% after five years. 25% after one year. In children this age..." He returned home, finally, this past Tuesday. The military doctors had told him that the surgery would be "messy and disfiguring." They told him his entire jaw would have to be rebuilt, and that it would take him a year or longer to recuperate. They showed him the X-rays and said, "We've never seen anything like this before! Can you see why we're so excited?" (Yes. Yes I can. And if I ever meet this man in a dark alley, I'm going to walk away wearing his scrotum as a change purse.) Naturally, we were expecting the worst--well, maybe not the worst, but certainly the worse. It wasn't a tumor; it was a benign cyst. The doctor said it had been in his jaw for at least ten years. And while it DID eat away a portion of his jaw, the cyst itself eventually calcified, essentially turning into bone. Here's the best part: he doesn't even need reconstructive surgery, because the calcified cyst replaced the bone it had eaten away. What a freak show. It's more fragile than a normal jaw, but it'll do. I kind of want to punch him in the face, a little. Do not trust a thing those bastards tell you.
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