Braunstein Speaks

‘Off With His Head’

It was just three years ago that I first noticed that small bump on my leg. My wife and I both assumed it to be a boil, or some other kind of benign skin affliction. By April, it hadn’t come to head, but started turning red, and off we ran to a dermatologist.

Physicians don’t like telling patients bad news any more than anyone else does, so after much hemming and hawing after the biopsy came back positive, I helped the doctor along. “Cancer doesn’t frighten me,” I reassured him. “My wife is an oncology nurse practitioner. I know that cancer isn’t the death sentence it was 30 years ago.”

So began my three-year journey through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. I have often written that cancer is a lifelong battle. It has the highs of victory, as when my lymphoma went into remission two years ago, and the lows of having those harmless-looking bumps on my leg return, even though they readily shrank away when exposed to radiation.

The problem with these little bumps that formed just under the skin is that they kept reappearing a month or two after the completion of each five-week course of radiation therapy.

At this juncture, radiation is no longer an option, and four different types of chemotherapy haven’t lessened the lesions’ onslaught on my right leg below the knee. Some of these lesions are really large now, and will soon rupture.

I outlined all this in last Monday’s piece, “Hooray for Me,” Jan. 25th.

Yesterday the decision was made to lose my right leg. Although the Merkel hasn’t appeared again above my knee, there is no guarantee that it will not break out again there, or somewhere else. The amputation is more of a “palliative” move, to improve my quality of life. (I can barely remember a life that didn’t include regular trips to the doctor for radiation and chemo.)

Sometime in the next few weeks, my right leg will be removed above the knee. I will have a two or three-day hospital stay followed by many weeks of physical therapy learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. (No, they wouldn’t go for the whalebone.)

As a young Army officer, I learned how to jump out of airplanes. In later years, I learned how to be a federal law-enforcement officer. I’m sure that at age 65, I can learn to walk on a prosthetic leg.

The only difficult part will be learning the “attitude” that ex-military amputees seem to display in the movies.

“Hey, you! What do you think you’re lookin’ at?”

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