The Porch Wolf
Fight That Shit

February 2005

“Something is wrong, Leo. I have no energy, and getting more rest isn’t helping. If I had the flu, it would be getting better by now,” Catherine said as she walked into the kitchen.

I checked her forehead with the back of my hand; she was still running a low fever. “Sit down and try to eat some cereal while I see if I can get an appointment for you.” The flu bug had hit Minnesota hard this February, and they said to bring her to urgent care because no appointments were available. I helped her get dressed, then carried her out to the truck.

We had to wait an hour to get back there. Catherine was down eight pounds from her last appointment, and her fever was 100.2 degrees. “I haven’t felt right for weeks,” she said.

“Any nausea? Vomiting?”

“No, but I don’t feel like eating. I have had chills, and my joints ache.” The nurse wrote the information on the chart, then left while we waited for the doctor. “I’m sorry, Leo. Are you missing anything at work?”

“Todd can handle the crews,” I said. “I’m where I need to be.” Todd Miller was my new Beta, having taken over from my younger brother Ivan when he left to mate Brenda Petersen in Marengo Lakes. He also took over as foreman for Volkov Construction, the company I’d built up over the last twenty-five years to be one of the largest in Goodhue County. My company was the largest employer for my Pack members, but I was the majority owner.

The doctor came in a few minutes later; she was Canadian, having gone to school in Minnesota and falling in love with her husband. She talked about the history, then had Catherine sit on the exam table. “Your glands are swollen,” she said. “Any pain when swallowing?”

“No.” She checked her lungs were clear, then asked about the joint pain. Finally, she typed out an order. “I’m not convinced this is influenza; it’s more like a low-grade infection. Are you active outdoors? Any tick bites last year?”

“Very, we hike all the time when the weather is nice,” she said. Lyme’s disease?

“Take this down to the lab. They will draw your blood and get the results back to me. You can wait here until I return,” the Doctor said.

We waited for over two hours, the nurse checking on us occasionally to make sure we hadn’t left.

She was grim-faced when she came back, and she had another doctor with her, a man in his fifties with Einstein-like wild grey hair, partially tamed in a ponytail. “This is Doctor McKnight; he’s the Oncologist at the hospital. I’ve asked him to look at your results and examine you,” she said.

My heart dropped into my stomach as she introduced him. Oncologist meant cancer. “What’s going on, Doc?”

“The blood test showed a very high white count and the presence of malignant hematopoletic cells, commonly called leukemic cells or ‘blasts.’ These occur when your body’s normal production of blood cells is deranged; instead of the healthy cells, immature myeloid blasts are formed. You have cancer, Mrs. Volkov. Specifically, you have acute myeloid leukemia, the most common form of adult leukemia.”

Catherine squeezed my hand hard as she tried to absorb it. “How bad is it?”

“We are going to replace out,” Dr. McKnight said. “I need to admit you to the hospital immediately, both to stabilize your condition and perform the tests we need to determine the course of treatment.”

“What kind of tests?”

“We need to perform a bone marrow biopsy to identify the specific type of leukemia. The results will help us understand the proper treatment regimen. We also need to treat you with broad-spectrum antibiotics, as the infection your body is fighting now is winning. The white cells you are producing don’t work.”

The next two days went by in a blur. Catherine was wheeled from one room to another, then back to sleep until the next test was ready. The fever was going away, thanks to the antibiotics, but the fatigue was no better. When four doctors showed up with Doctor McKnight, we knew it couldn’t be good news. “We received the biopsy results and the DNA tests of your blood marrow,” he said as he started. “It’s not what we had hoped for. The cancer is advanced and aggressive. The treatment is going to be difficult, and will require you to remain hospitalized.”

“What kind of treatment? And for how long?” My wolf and I were howling inside, wanting to take the pain from our mate so she wouldn’t suffer.

“We would begin an intensive chemotherapy regiment tomorrow. The first course, called the induction phase, is administered daily over the next six days. It is a strong drug, designed to clear your blood of leukemia cells and reduce the number of blasts in your bone marrow to normal levels. You will remain here, both because of the severity of the side effects, and your susceptibility to infection during the treatment.”

“All my white blood cells will be gone, so I can’t fight anything off,” Catherine said.

“Yes. After six days, we let your body recover and start to produce blood cells again. We will then take another bone marrow biopsy to verify the treatment killed the leukemia cells. If it looks good, you will be released to return home. You will still be susceptible to illness and infection, so you need to limit exposure.”

“But I can be home,” she said.

“Yes. After that, we start consolidation courses of chemotherapy. These are given over five days, with about four weeks between treatments. Consolidation chemotherapy is meant to kill the small number of leukemia cells that are still around, but can’t be seen in blood samples. When that is all done, we sample your bone marrow again with another biopsy to verify the cancer is in remission.”

“This sounds difficult,” I told him.

“I can’t sugar-coat it; the regimen is difficult, and the side effects can be serious. It is necessary if you are to have a good outcome.”

He wasn’t kidding. Chemotherapy was a shitstorm, a clusterfuck of symptoms, a virtual parade of indignities, torments, and problems. I held Catherine’s hair as she threw up, and then her hair fell out, so I held her head. Open sores in her mouth, rashes on her body, extreme fatigue, loss of appetite, weight loss, loss of her ability to taste things, headaches… it just went on and on. The doctors continually adjusted medications to address the side effects, but it was like the old cartoon of the leaky dam; they’d replace a drug that helped the rash, and she’d develop the sore on the inside of her cheek.

I ignored the Pack and the company as I did what I could to help her. I would spend all day with her at the hospital, then drive home, shower and sleep, and start it again the next day. Visitors were restricted to her immediate family due to her susceptibility to infection. Larry and Donna moved in with me, helping as best they could. Catherine didn’t have the energy to talk on the phone or greet people anyway. I would read her the text messages, send email updates, and keep her going as best I could.

Catherine was a fighter; she wasn’t going to give in to her diagnosis. “I’m going to fight this shit,” she had told me before they put the needle in for her first course of chemotherapy. It became our rally cry; it was what I told her before every chemo course started, and what I told her every night before I left.

I stopped at Emily’s Bakery and bought a cake for when the first course was done, with balloons and flowers. “What do you want on it,” the girl asked me.

“Can you put ‘Fight That Shit’ on it?” She looked at me like I was nuts. “My wife has cancer. She’s fighting that shit.”

“I’ll be right back with that,” she said. The “Fight That Shit” cake was a hit at the hospital. Her older brother ordered “Fight That Shit” t-shirts, we had “Fight That Shit” water bottles, and “Fight That Shit” floral arrangements.

Catherine didn’t leave the hospital for sixteen days. When I brought her home, she rarely left the bedroom for the next few months. Her mother and I made sure Catherine kept on track with her many medications. She would sleep a lot, especially after her days receiving chemo. Finally, in May, she had her second biopsy.

She broke down as I held her when the doctor called with the results. She railed against Luna, cancer, and the unfairness of it all. Her cancer had survived.

We did it again, with slightly different drugs, and by September, that course of treatment had failed as well. The cancer was too advanced and too resistant to the therapy. “I can’t do it anymore,” she told me after we returned home. “I don’t want to spend the rest of our time together on round three.”

Tears soaked my face as I kissed her forehead. “We’ll make the most of the time we have left,” I told her. The doctors said there was less than a one percent chance of remission now, and gave her two to four months to live.

She made it to Thanksgiving. As I fed her mashed potatoes, she made me promise I would not follow her when she was gone. “I want you to live a full life, Leo,” she told me. “We have eternity together in the Moon’s embrace, no matter how long you take to get there. I want you to have stories for me.”

I promised her I would not kill myself. It was a promise I would later regret.

On Black Friday, surrounded by her family, Catherine Volkov rose to the moon at 8:22 pm.

Her body was cremated, and the Pack celebrated her life with a Pack run on Tuesday night. I led the wolves through the woods, unable to cry in that form. We reached the point over the Cannon River Valley that was our spot, and I let out a mournful howl.

It was the last time I led my Pack in anything.

My love, my light, my reason to live was gone, and I didn’t know what to do now.

I didn’t have anything to live for, and I didn’t care.