The Chemo Versus Sex Ratio

“So... how often do you get it?” asked a friend in an e-mail.

"More often than sex? You better not have to get chemo more often than sex. (Now, remember, I’m middle-aged and married… so “more often than sex” to me means you can have chemo once a week—but NO MORE!)”

Here is her question posed as a word problem:

Patient X is getting chemo every other Tuesday.

Patient X is:

     a) Single.
     b) Not currently involved in a relationship.
     c) Also not currently hanging around on boats in the Mediterranean where the number of handsome, devastatingly charming, not to mention persistent Italian and French sailors is exponentially higher than the number of free-spirited, unattached American women trying to learn a foreign language.

You do the math. (Extra Credit: How long until the chemo versus sex ratio narrows? For 10 points, please include the formula used for arriving at your answer.)

My second chemotherapy treatment in the 13th Floor infusion room is on April 1. I am supposed to start at 8:45 a.m. but the oncology nurse thinks we might have to postpone because my white blood cell count is low. This is not a joke, but the fact that it’s April Fool’s Day makes it, while not exactly hilarious, somewhat funny. Since Dr. R is on vacation, his partner, Dr. S, is in charge and will make the call.

“Dr. S is a genius,” whispers the nurse. “I have a nurse-doctor crush on him. My fiancé’s a little jealous but I told him of course he’s coming to the wedding.”

Just in case we proceed, I snag one of the infusion room’s two recliners, make myself comfortable and wait for Dr. Genius.

“Mrs. Smith? You ARE going to get treated today!” Dr. Genius says by way of introduction.

“Miss,” I say. “Margie.”

He wheels a stool up to my chair and continues, “YOU have a condition that we can TREAT and CURE. Some of these other people, we don’t really know what’s going to work or how they’re going to react so we might skip a week to let their counts rebound but we know how to treat YOU! You need to be TREATED and you need to be treated ON TIME.” He holds the blood test results in front of my face, points to an arbitrary number and resumes. “This blood count is low, yes, but look, this one here is perfectly normal, and this one is the harbinger of what the low one is going to do in the next 48 hours and it’s all good. Plus we’ll give you some %*$#! which will help boost your white blood cell production. Oh, by the way, I’m Dr. Genius. You’re gonna do great! Call her insurance company and see if they’ll cover the %*$#!”

Dr. Genius’s last comment is directed to the nurse. These cancerologists have a drug for everything. This is how a girl gets hooked. So far I’ve got anti-pain pills, anti-nausea pills, and anti-anxiety pills. I haven’t taken any of them, but I am fascinated by the double-digits number of my friends who seem to be well versed in the street value of my virgin stash. I am not sure what %*$#! is, but it sounds important and expensive. Procuring it requires not only follow up calls and a quiz from my insurance company, but also special delivery arrangements. Even my surgery didn’t require pre-certification.

“What’s the name of that drug again? And is it a pill or what?” I ask the nurse as she starts inspecting my veins to start the chemo.

“%*$#! It stimulates white blood cell production in your bone marrow,” she replies. “We give you an injection. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Does it have any side effects?” (What are the side effects would have been the better question.)

“It makes your bones hurt.”

Oh.

(Editor’s note: A quick search has just informed me my new drug costs $3,000-$7,000 per injection. It also turned up a forum of patients—including a guy going by the name “chemosabe”—detailing the excruciating pain. This is why shoe shopping is better than Googling.)

The nurse puts the IV in so I can type on my laptop. I am overwhelmed and deeply touched by the response to this blog thing. My support net is well woven, reaching farther and wider than I dreamed. My Mom is driving me all over the place, making me soup and taking care of millions of little details. The girls in my posse call every day. I get volunteers for chemo dates and offers of money, mostly from friends who don’t have it. All the Philadelphia Catholics have been praying for me, the St. John contingent has been channeling love, light and other new age healing powers and the rest of the self-proclaimed heathens I count among my friends have been sending tons of good thoughts. This is good since, before the chemo, all my spiritual energy was focused on getting to happy hour on time.

Writing is both cathartic and instructive. My e-mail inbox reveals some interesting statistics:

     a) 30% of all respondents are suffering or have suffered from illness far more horrifying than mine.
     b) 65% of the people on my list are as hilarious as I am (and to my college roommate who wanted to know if I was this funny in college, the answer is yes and begs the question what were you so busy doing that you didn’t notice?)
     c) The remaining 5% of you are just plain brutal. One writer friend wrote to point out intolerable grammatical errors in my last posting. An old colleague complained that I was ruining his long-postponed plans to take me dive bar trolling in Philly. And this from one of my editors: “If you don’t die, this could get you a book deal!” which might have been shocking, had I not heard a similar proclamation some years ago from a TV news director sending me out to interview a mob boss (“Look at it this way: If his goons shoot at you, it will be the best thing ever to happen to your career! Assuming they miss, that is.”)

My typing is interrupted by a visit from a Philadelphia sailor friend, similarly landlocked by a six-week stint in the hospital. He’s a great chemo date because he’s in worse shape than I am. Commiseration is also cathartic. We reminisce about the carefree days of old (early January) when our most pressing issue was locking down a spring weekend when the whole gang was available to go sailing. I tell my chemo date about my trip to New York, a long weekend in the Big Apple topping the list of things to do when you’re looking for something better than chemo but sailing and sex are not immediately on the menu.

The visit was with two of my favorite people in the world, one of my best friends from high school and her husband, who are both opera singers. My girlfriend took me scarf shopping, where we found Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and Chanel, all at a discount. (“You saved $647!! My credit card receipt congratulated me.) “I can’t wait until I get cancer!” proclaimed my pretty and stylish singer friend, who patiently spent hours wrapping my head in silk. “I mean, well, you know what I mean. You do know what I mean, right?” (I did.) “Won’t it be funny if now your hair doesn’t fall out?” (Hilarious.)

During our downtown meandering, we inadvertently found ourselves at St. Paul’s chapel, the little church a block from Ground Zero that became a respite for emergency workers in the aftermath of 9-11. Now a permanent shrine to the attack, St. Paul’s hosts a daily, multi-denominational peace service. A small choir of city kids in sneakers and street clothes were singing an a cappella refrain, their angelic voices wafting over bowed heads in the pews. Within minutes we were both weeping. Every corner of the church beckoned with remnants of that devastating September day. I could see the school groups traipsing through 50 years from now, when the event is relegated to history, reading the museum-style placards that are already in place:

1776: George Washington prayed here during the Revolutionary War.
2001: Countless relief workers took respite after the deadly terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Breathing was difficult, so palpable was the presence of 2,749 souls crowded into that tiny church. It was haunting and sobering, stumbling into this reminder of life’s irrevocable fragility and its plaintive demand that we take not an hour for granted.

One evening I had a non-chemo dinner date with a smart and generous newspaperman who, when I moved to the Virgin Islands a few years ago, gave me a wicked cool Dora the Explorer watch as a going away gift (which I wore long after it stopped ticking. Nobody cares what time it is in the Caribbean.) We talked about how his own cancer scare a few years ago had changed his perspective. “The other day I spent 15 minutes on the phone with a Girl Scout who wanted us to write about some event,” he confided. “It wasn’t a story but I tried to work with her. I know it’s not much, but before? I would have just hung up on her.” Was cancer making my hard-edged journalist friend go soft? This time the bling for my wrist came in a little blue box wrapped up with a white ribbon. I suppose one should class up for chemo. A nice piece of silver does a fine job drawing attention away from the needle sticking in my arm right now.

This, by the way, is not to say that I don’t appreciate the late-night text messages (“Hey Babe, you up?”) I get from some of the men in my life (“Yo! How are you feeling?”) because I do. Really. I’m just saying flowers are nice, too. Right?

My singer friend’s normally munificent husband is unsympathetic. The one night of my visit that we stayed in, he wouldn’t even let me pick the movie.

“You have to let me pick the movie,” I protested. “You have to be nice to me. I have cancer, you know.”

“Yeah, but your cancer is more than 80% curable. Most people are lucky if their chances are more than 50%. Might not want to push that cancer card too far,” he said, adding, “I love you, Margie!”

Even cancer grades on a curve.

The highlight of the NYC trip was a party in honor of my talented friends. It was a quintessential Manhattan gathering, hosted by another friend in her two-story Upper East Side Penthouse, and featuring performances by the guests, many of whom are professional musicians, including half a dozen choristers from the Metropolitan Opera. They sang about love and loss, longing and ecstasy, and (torturous, melodramatic, sometimes comically prolonged) death, i.e. they sang about life, even its tragedies beautiful in the passionate retelling.

Monday morning I drove home to Philadelphia with my girlfriend’s parents, who have known me since I was 12. On our way out of town, we stopped at the Riverdale Diner and dished the previous night’s soiree like we were guests on Live with Regis and Kelly, chatting up the A-List event of the week. (We know the guests of honor! They are the toast of the town!) How wonderful to be surrounded by extraordinary people who love and care for you, and make the odds of being happy and healthy, the ratio of good to bad cards notwithstanding, very favorable indeed.