Of Ice and Men

Last week brought a rare snow to Seattle. It was a treat to see the snowflakes falling in the soft glare of the streetlight and watch my neighborhood gradually become blanketed with white. Inside, my boyfriend and I stayed warm but nervous as we awaited the results of my recent biopsy.

Snow and ice never hang around Seattle very long. As snow crystals merged back into raindrops a few days later, I went in for my oncology appointment. My doctor works at the Swedish Cancer Institute, whose fountain (pictured above) was that day a mixture of water and ice formations.

The news was as good as I could reasonably hope for. Instead of lymphoma, I have a recurrence of a much more treatable form of cancer that plagued me five years ago. I had received radiation at that time, but apparently a tiny bit of the pestilence was silently growing outside the area the doctors had irradiated. Now we would attack it with chemotherapy, a systemic treatment that should eliminate the disease once and for all.

The ice was melting into hope.