We just came back from professor Ko at the big university hospital in Taipei.  I have some good news and some bad news.  No, actually the news is almost all good!!!

The bad news first: there is indeed a cancer in the lymph node, no doubt about it.  And it’s a metastasis, meaning that the lymph node isn’t its origin.  The real cancer is coming from somewhere else.  The task is to take out the lymph node but also to find the real cancer.

And the good news: taking out the lymph node is no big deal.  Yes, it’s big and deep and the jugular which supplies blood to the brain is running just next to it, but never mind.  Professor Ko does this operation all the time, with his left hand tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded.  I’ll have a big ugly Frankenstein’s monster scar on my neck and I’ll only be able to eat ice cream for a month, but that’s a small price to pay.

So where is the real cancer?  Looking at the cell samples, said professor Ko, it seems to be coming from the mouth somewhere, but the CT scan doesn’t indicate anything unusual.  Like a car mechanic looking for the fault in an engine, professor Ko began rooting around for it.  First in my tonsils and gums, then in my vocal cords and finally he sent little painful probes down behind my nose.  “It must be here somewhere, but I can’t see anything.”

There is a possibility that one of my tonsils is slightly enlarged.  If so, it is a cancer of the tonsil.  But they won’t know for sure until they take it out and look at it.  It could also be that the cancer is microscopic in size and that it can’t be detected through normal tests.  Microscopic cancers are good.  My kind of cancers.  It’s the large inoperable ones I don’t like.

Professor Ko has the most amazing hands.  Fingers long and strong like a basketball player’s or a pianist’s.  As a patient you realize immediately that you are, literally, in good hands.  He’ll pull me out of this nightmare, I’m sure of it.