Cancer is HILARIOUS

I have just one last question before we get started:  “Are you SURE I have this?” I ask the doctor.

Because I still don’t feel sick. And I don’t look sick. And the drugs they are about to push through my veins for the rest of this godforsaken afternoon are going to make me sick. And because this is the moment.

After two months of health care hell—the countless doctor visits, seven needle biopsies, two CAT scans, two mammograms, two Pap smears, heart tests, lung tests, blood tests, a skin check, consults with two medical oncologists, a radiation oncologist, and a fertility specialist, not to mention the PET scan that left me temporarily radioactive (“Don’t go near any babies or pregnant women tonight!”)—this is the one moment I can’t seem to handle. Every time I have tried to visualize the instant when they will stick a needle in me and start pumping poison through my body, I break down.

No matter how I try, I cannot get my head around the idea that I have to give them permission to give me this stuff that’s going to ravage my body. Side effects of the “cure” range from nausea and hair loss to lung damage, heart failure and, my favorite, other cancers. Suggested remedies for some of the less insidious possibilities run the gamut from crowd avoidance to bad footwear. Wear sensible, rubber-soled shoes? For how long? The four hours I’m getting the chemo? A couple days after? The entire time I’m undergoing treatment?

Samantha would have scoffed at that last piece of advice. When the Sex and the City character gets breast cancer, all her well-heeled pals accompany her to chemo, fashionably dressed and full of jokes. When the nurse expresses her surprise to hear so much laughter, Samantha smiles and declares: “Cancer’s hilarious!”

My surgeon friend Dr. Lisa was recounting this scene last month while we were in the pre-op holding room at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, waiting for me to be wheeled in for my biopsy. The OR was running hours behind schedule but Lisa, having done her residency at Jeff, had been permitted to accompany me past the point where you’re normally allowed to have visitors. I had comfort and entertainment.

“Surgery is hilarious, too,” said Dr. Lisa.

“As hilarious as cancer?”

The OR nurse adding something to the chart on my gurney looked up, stared at each of us, then walked out of our space without saying a word. Lisa, with a flourish, whipped the privacy curtain closed around us, creating the illusion of walls, and we burst into giggles. With no apologies to those within earshot, the irreverent improv continued.

“My friend the anesthesiologist should be in soon. Anesthesia. Now that’s hilarious. Gotta keep laughing, Marge.”

The Doctor half of Dr. Lisa gives great advice. Besides encouraging me to engage in shoe shopping in lieu of Googling on the day I got my preliminary diagnosis, she also confirmed that in the DRINK ONLY CLEAR LIQUIDS PRIOR TO SURGERY instruction on my surgery prep sheet, “clear liquids” absolutely did include gin and vodka. (“Just don’t go to the OR wasted!”)

Dr. Lisa is working in Miami now but flew up to see me through the first part of my ordeal. Her former colleagues in the Ear, Nose and Throat department cut the tissue sample out of the golf ball-sized lump in my neck, and Lisa arranged for a plastic surgeon friend to sew it up so I wouldn’t have a scar, which is the last thing I would have thought of. In retrospect, I think a scar accenting my décolletage might be sexy but Lisa, who always looks like she just stepped out of some chic, Paris boutique, had other ideas.

Back to the present and Dr. R, my new doctor—the “cancerologist” my island friend Celia calls him—is patiently explaining, like we haven’t been over this a dozen times, that the pathology and PET scan all confirm Hodgkin’s. The chemo will make it go away.

The oncology nurse gives me Tylenol and Benadryl, taps the veins up and down my arm, and starts the IV. The first thing I get is anti-nausea medication. Not too scary.

The fact that I don’t have symptoms—the reason I don’t feel sick—is a good sign, Dr. R reassures me. “Good” is a relative term in medicine. Consider this message, a week after the surgery, from Dr. Lisa:

“Marge! I just talked to the pathologist. It’s Hodgkin’s. That’s good. Happy Valentine’s Day! Call me!”

There would be a lot of these weird pronouncements in the following weeks.

“We’ve been praying for the Hodgkin’s, honey,” chirps my 90-year-old Great Aunt Betty over the phone. “I know it sounds funny to say, but if you have to have cancer, this one’s a good one.”

Her daughter, who works at the local high school, picks up the extension. “We have a couple students who had it, and they’re all doing great now,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on, but everybody’s got this lymphoma now, hon. And who knows, maybe you’ll meet a handsome doctor!”

So there you go. I’ve got Hodgkin’s lymphoma which is apparently both “Good News!” and HILARIOUS, as my girlfriends have now adopted this as our mantra.

My hilarious childhood friend Cynthia has taken to sending me e-mails like this:

To: msmargarita

From: Cyn

Subject: HILARIOUS List of Doctors

Below are notes and links for doctors at various hospitals. Recommendations are based on experiences with the doctors rather than on outcome, since outcome is based on diagnosis, and Hodgkin’s is hilarious.

Doctor X treated my brother’s friend for Hodgkin’s. She’s been in full remission for some time, thus proving that Hodgkin’s is hilarious.

FYI, you need copies of your CT scans when you go to another hospital for consult and it can take a few days to copy the CT scan onto CD. I’m not sure how many days it takes to add the U2 musical accompaniment to the CD.

I hope you found this list to be hilarious.

Love,
Cyn

P.S. There’s a general number for cancer-related questions: 1-800-4-CANCER. With cancer in the phone number, this question line must be hilarious.

Despite his office being on the 13th floor (even the 13 button in the elevator is perversely tilted), I have chosen Dr. R as my medical oncologist. He has qualities I like in a man, i.e. he is smart, and thinks I’m funny, and is nice to my friends, and seems willing to put up with my shit (but only to a point). That’s not why I picked him, though. I picked him because he agrees with me that the whole chemo thing is creepy (“Here’s my office, not too creepy,” he said while giving me a tour my first day, “and over here is the infusion room which is, yeah, pretty creepy…”) and he’s promised to try to get me through 4-6 months of treatment without having a port surgically placed in my chest or my arm. Oh, and also because when he extracted a hunk of bone marrow from my hip, it didn’t hurt all that much.

“Wow, it’s just like osso bucco!” said my city friend Ellen, when I showed her the sliver floating in a little vial of liquid. Ellen, dressed in black fur coat and high black boots, accessorized with red handbag and lipstick, had come to escort me home, as I had been told the bone marrow aspiration would leave me doubled over in pain. Since I feel fine, we go to happy hour instead. Ellen, who’s sticking to her opinion that a week at Canyon Ranch will do me more good than chemo, is even more hilarious than cancer.

Dr. Lisa, meanwhile, is back in Miami, but checks in often. Cancer is still a hot topic but, as it is not her specialty, a healthy percentage of our conversation has returned to traditional favorites, such as men. Sometimes the two topics overlap:

Dr. Lisa: “Who are you taking with you for your first day of chemo?”

Me: “Not sure. My Mom and a few friends in Philly have offered, but I’m afraid they’re going to cry. I can’t take anymore crying!”

Dr. Lisa: “Marge! You need more non-criers in your life!”

Me: “I’ve got plenty. You just all happen to live in other cities.”

Dr. Lisa: “Wait! You know who would be PERFECT? That boy you liked who took you to dinner last week and then never called again, even to see how you were feeling. He definitely wouldn’t cry. THAT guy’s fucking heartless.”

Me: “He’d be a great chemo date. Why didn’t he call me?”

Dr. Lisa: “Maybe he’s mad that you didn’t ask him to be your sperm donor.”

The oncology nurse has now come over to change the IV, to start infusing the first of four chemo drugs I will get. “This one is the Bleomycin,” she explains. Which one is that? I try to remember. The one that will make me sterile and possibly put me in full-blown menopause—at age 42—by next week? Or just the one that will turn my pee fluorescent orange?

I consult my reference materials, skipping over What You Need To Know About Hodgkin’s Disease, last updated in the nineties. Has there really been nothing added to the list of things one needs to know in the last 10 years? The plethora of frightening and suspect information provided in a .13 second Google search begs to differ. Moving on to user-friendly Chemotherapy and You, I find my drug cheat sheet. Possible side effects of Bleomycin: Fever and chills, faintness, confusion, sweating, wheezing, lung problems, mouth sores, swelling of fingers, vomiting…

Dr. R comes in to check on me.

“Your reading material is depressing,” I inform him.

He agrees. “Don’t read it.”

I had tried to find alternatives, stopping at the bookstore a few days ago in search of one of the few humorous books about cancer I had seen online, but the shelves at my local Barnes and Noble were stocked with serious fare. Leafing through one paperback that appeared to be a bit on the light-hearted side, I opened to a page where I read the sentence: “Let’s face it. There is nothing funny about cancer.” I slammed the book shut, bolted from the store and went shoe shopping (again), purchasing two pairs of killer heels and new sneakers. I hate running, but have a sudden urge to…run.

The oncology nurse is back. While I’ve been typing, the first drip has finished. It went well which is good news (!) because if it accidentally seeped out of my veins, it would cause tissue damage. Now she’s got the next two drugs—Adriamycin and Vinblastine. They get pushed directly into my vein through a syringe.

So far I haven’t cried, and I haven’t even had to force myself to think about all those cancer kids at Children’s Hospital that we used to do stories on all the time when I was a TV reporter in Philadelphia, all those kids and families who clearly have it so much worse than I do, for whom cancer is—duh—not hilarious at all.

I watch the nurse hook up the last bag, the Dacarbazine, the one that can hurt going in and might need to be diluted, which would take longer, but be more comfortable. Don’t forget to let her know if I feel any pain.

“Just think of it as intravenous Irish Whiskey,” a friend e-mailed this morning.

It’s going to be a hell of a hangover.