Tell My Sons by Lt Col Mark Weber

Author:Lt Col Mark Weber
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2012-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

… TO SEEK A TEMPER OF THE WILL, A QUALITY OF THE IMAGINATION, AND TO EXERCISE A TEMPERAMENTAL PREDOMINANCE OF COURAGE OVER TIMIDITY.

December 2003

MARCH-SEPTEMBER 2011

Going back to work after recovering from surgery was exhilarating for me, but it was a bit problematic for the army. Soldiers with terminal cancer don’t go back to work. They are thanked for their service and medically retired. And as a career lieutenant colonel, I stood ready to collect a generous pension, so that option made logical sense. Except to me.

Although senior leaders of the Minnesota National Guard found my desire to work to be at least as puzzling as it was inspiring, they agreed to support me by offering me a temporary full-time assignment. The arrangement would harness my energy while ensuring minimum disruption to them if my health failed to meet my optimism.

Temper of the will and a quality of the imagination were now required of both me and the army, because this had never been done before.

My tasks weren’t busywork. They included reviewing the strategic planning and performance improvements processes for the Minnesota National Guard, as well as assuming a leading role in improving our efforts with suicide prevention—a challenge that unfortunately put Minnesota, with its particularly high incidence of soldier suicide, in a national spotlight.

Up.

This was the kind of vital assignment I’d wanted when I first came into the organization, and I threw myself into it so thoroughly that the job was eventually made permanent, and I was promoted to the position of director of strategic communication.

Down.

My health had wavered frequently in the weeks leading into March—usually two or three weeks of feeling great, followed by three days of illness with the knockdown power of the worst flu you ever had.

Either the surgery or the cancer growth was causing bile to back up inside my liver and leach into my body, which led to sepsis, a deadly infection I would come to know intimately: thirty to sixty minutes of violent, shaking chills; vomiting; white stool; orange urine; head-to-toe itching and body aches; burning, yellow eyes and skin; and a migraine-like headache.

This form of sepsis carries a 60 percent mortality rate, which always seemed accurate, because I truly wondered if I was going to survive the night each time it happened—at least thirty times in two years.

Up.

To fix the sepsis problem, radiologists inserted a catheter through my ribs, across my liver, and straight down through the bile duct (a tube that connects the liver to the body). One end of the catheter drains into my intestine; the other end is connected to a drainage bag that hangs from the space between my ribs. In essence, they installed a drain, so the liver would never again back up like a clogged sink.

Down.

Starting in March, each successive CT scan showed the cancer was still growing, which indicated a failing Gleevec chemo response. Still, Gleevec is the most promising drug on the market for GIST patients, so we all anxiously and patiently waited from March until August before concluding that it had failed.

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