expose

While the peace and tranquility were evident in 2008, growing internally was chordoma, who no one knew. Below the surface, hidden in the dark, the arteries and veins feeding, the invader growing, silently, silently spreading out to nerves, to bones, to muscle growing day by day, slowly without announcing it's presence, lying there wrapped in the nerves, the muscle, the bone sucking up life from the blood pulsing through my frame, feeding the rest of me...and feeding the alien. Slowly it couldn't kept hidden any longer, it's mass pressing on the nerves sending aching, throbbing announcements that dropped away un-headed. The announcement kept coming, then, to other ringers...the bowel...the bladder, each sending their messages about the growing, invading dark stranger that was filling the neighborhood, their domain, the sacrum, the coccyx. Finally, desperate measures called out the big guns of discovery, the MRI, the CT scan, the needle biopsy.

So, the silence from 2008 - 2012 is broken: chordoma exposed to the expertly trained eye of a neurosurgeon.