Improbable

I just did open heart surgery, a hysterectomy, and chemo in a city I had lived in for one day. Mostly alone.

I didn’t originally leave the US just to leave it, although I was quite an adventurous traveler for most of my life. In 2006 I wanted to open a frankincense distillery in Oman. In early 2023, I finally flopped over the border to the UAE, intending to do another project in Dubai. My main company is in New York, and this little Omani distillery was attached to it.

In 2016, I had gone back to New York to a breast cancer diagnosis, and then treatment, returning to Oman’s capital city in the north, Muscat, in 2017. I had been diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, which is often a braca fueled cancer. I took the very tough chemo treatment in New York, and didn’t really recover well. I couldn’t catch my breath, and reasoned it must be from my reconstruction…due to a previous, childhood cancer, the only reconstruction option had been a bi-lateral latissimus dorsi flap. I did a pulmonary rehab at a different hospital, and was told I was “out of shape” should “hire a trainer.”

I figured it couldn’t be my heart, as that had been monitored during the chemo, and also at the pulmonary rehab. At least that’s what I was told. I decided the fault had to come from my lats squeezing the intercostals.

From 2016 to 2023 I couldn’t walk a city block. Before that I was fit, and practiced Taekwondo, but I always felt I wasn’t quite fit enough but attributed it to my age, so I let it go.

Oman was a tough and stressful place to live alone and female, especially in Dhofar, in the south. We did well, in terms of beautiful frankincense essential oil, and we made it through Covid.

Dubai was a breeze, a dream, so easy and calm. I went to a hospital, to ask about this breathing issue. The doctors in Dubai took one look at me, and walked me over to the cardiologist, who diagnosed mitral valve stenosis. I needed Open Heart Surgery, as soon as possible. Apparently, the valve was calcified in extremis, and this was likely from radiation I had in 1986 for metastatic melanoma. There were no other cardiac symptoms, no blockages, and no heart disease. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1985. With the caveat that I was in end stage heart failure, the heart itself was ok, but there was no high blood pressure, no clogged arteries, nothing like that; just mitral valve was a disaster.

I found myself at a well known hospital in Abu Dhabi, where the huge surgical team took my heart out and worked on a table, like you would a carburetor. They put me on the heart lung machine and packed my chest with ice. Apparently, the calcification peeled right off, and then they replaced the valve. They put me in a coma for a day or two. I was a week in ICU and another week in the hospital. The expected complications didn’t materialize, or not as severely as predicted. My surgeon was thrilled as was I.

Unfortunately, they also needed a biopsy from my uterus, as there were some symptoms, and the biopsy showed a malignancy for endometrial cancer. I had to wait a month after the heart surgery to have a hysterectomy. And during that month it spread a bit, as naturally it was also “highly aggressive” etc. So I was scheduled for chemo, radiation and immunotherapy.

I was, and still am, here with my cat. We took the first apartment we were shown, and moved in. My friend who was with me for the surgeries, whose 3 week stay had turned into 5 months; had to go back to New York. My assistant was supposed to come from Oman but we had a problem with his passport, and after 10 months we are still waiting.

I have just finished 5 months of chemotherapy; not my first, as noted, alone with my cat in a new city I had lived in for one day before the medical shit hit the fan.

My first cancer was metastatic melanoma, which metastasized in 1986. It was treated partly with radiation. That’s a pretty deadly cancer, and they told my parents I was probably not going to live long. That was 37 years ago. I just joined AARP! But the long time effects to the heart of radiation on the chest are a real problem, if you live long enough to have them.

I’m Braca, and cancer is extremely popular in my family, killing most of us eventually, even our animals. We are mostly from Southern California. This is my third, this endometrial “highly aggressive” cancer. My second one was in 2016, the triple negative breast cancer, also “highly aggressive” for which I was treated to ACT chemo in New York. But it seems no one actually looked at any of the echocardiograms they’d ordered and the pulmonary rehab I did, (at another hospital,) was useless, as they told me I was out of shape and needed a trainer. All men of course.

I wonder if a man would have been told that he was just not trying. My heart was functioning around 20%. And no one in the US caught it. Every single one of them assumed I was out of shape through my own doing. That seems sexist and lame to me, but at least I didn’t die. I had bad pulmonary hypertension, and this is slowly going away I think, and it will still take time. Interestingly, every oncologist I’ve spoken to has said the heart failure “couldn’t have come from” my 1986 radiation but the cardiologists all say it likely did. No matter at this point, but the heart valve calcified over many years, and none of those hospitals paid enough attention to catch it. That’s the reason I stayed in the UAE.

Things sometimes work out differently than you were expecting.