Don't Cry For Me

June 10, 2008

Fun Kim has just gotten off the phone with the mayor’s office in Pamplona. Her friend and assistant to the mayor, Ana, wants to know if las rubias americanas will be returning this July for San Fermin, the weeklong bacchanal immortalized in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and best known for the daily running of the bulls. In a conservative city populated by dark-haired Spaniards, two American blondes were quasi-celebrities at last summer’s event.

Fun Kim, who spent a year in Pamplona studying Spanish and teaching English to the mayor’s little boy, can’t go. The youngest of my single girlfriends, she is back home in Oregon, wisely working on the master’s degree that will let her live and teach anywhere in the world when she is finished. Me, I can’t go either, for less impressive reasons, but passionate Spain in the sultry summer sure looks good from where I’m sitting, which right now happens to be the Little Infusion Room on the 13th Floor.


Day three of a 100-degree-hitting heat wave and Philadelphia is sweltering, not sultry. The infusion room is chockablock, with every recliner occupied and some patients in the straight-backed visitors’ chairs, which are also mostly filled with friends and relatives. There are old faces and some new ones too. The elderly man in the recliner next to mine is having a heated discussion with his wife with an accent of Castilian Spanish that I immediately recognize as Argentine.

Oddly, this is my second cancer-South America connection this month. Last week I received an e-mail from an editor at a sailing magazine in Argentina, wanting to do an item on my blog. I sent her some photos, also mentioning that I had been in her country just last year, visiting an Argentine sailor whom I had met on the classic boat racing circuit in the Mediterranean.

Out of practice, my Spanish is just about good enough to keep up with the occasional contact I still have with my erstwhile paramour; but as being mocked for my poor language skills is super low on my list of things to worry about, I forge ahead and strike up a conversation with my new chemo compadres, telling them about my three weeks in Buenos Aires and Patagonia. Juan Peron’s not much of a talker but he’s polite. Evita’s the chatty one but, aside from a brief eulogy for Hillary Clinton’s dead campaign (as an aside I note that both the president of Argentina and the mayor of Pamplona are women), she mostly wanted to talk about Juan’s cancer, which I sensed was making both of us uncomfortable.

I don’t really like to talk about cancer unless it’s something hilarious, or I really, really have to, which I did today. In Dr. R’s vacation-induced absence two week ago, his partner, Dr. Genius, had caused a bit of a tizzy by suggesting that my prescribed four cycles of chemotherapy (two treatments = one cycle) might not be enough. This was not good news given that I was starting the fourth and final cycle today. To help grill Dr. R, I was accompanied by my oldest single girlfriend, my mom. There was also a resident in the cramped examining room, who my mother later proclaimed “really cute” and who I barely noticed, despite his introducing himself, shaking my hand twice, and making a little joke about the Jersey shore. Normally I appreciate little jokes but after six months at a teaching hospital, I’ve come to regard the residents as non-entities, treating them as invisible people.

Dr. R listened to all our concerns and explained the challenges of balancing the aggressive treatment needed to cure Hodgkin’s with the side effects and long-term risks of the treatment itself. While acknowledging the variables and the art of the science, he held fast to his original recommendation to complete the four months of chemo, followed by another PET scan and then a consult with the radiation oncologist, who most likely will advise in favor of the standard four weeks of daily radiation.

“I’m starting to freak out about the radiation thing.”

“That’s understandable,” said Dr. R, “but the good news is you can focus on your next steps because everything else is going so well. You’re responding beautifully to treatment.”

Dr. R always uses the word “beautiful” to describe how my treatment is going. Mostly I’m enduring it well, with no serious side effects, and the minor ones I’m loathe to whine about or dwell on too much because I’m an ardent believer that it makes it worse. If I’m tense or angry, my veins are going to hurt when Debbie sticks the needle in. If I’m cranky or pissed off at something or someone, I’m sure to be sick. It’s impossible to sustain a positive attitude without fail, but my record’s pretty good; I don’t know why my emotions are mostly in check but I haven’t had a complete meltdown since the Patrón incident before my first treatment.

That is not to say, however, that I am unwilling to talk about side effects. The journalist in me is obsessively compelled to record bizarre little details, like the fact that the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital parking garage on the southeast corner of 10th and Chestnut uses the seven great virtues espoused by Benjamin Franklin to identify its levels. Last week I parked on Level 2/Aversion to Tyranny. Today I was late and the garage was near full but I bypassed spaces on Levels 4 (Humility) and 5 (Compromise) and climbed until I got to Level 7 (A Free Press). I had another one of those Tuesday mornings where I lay in bed long after the alarm went off, hugged my pillow and cursed the ceiling. Humble and compromising would not be in my lexicon today.

The chemo drugs I’m taking can cause threatening heart and lung problems. I don’t have that, but sometimes I get pangs where I swear my heart skips a beat and it feels like there’s a weight pressing on my chest and the muscles in my legs feel like jelly. Then it passes.

I’ve got bathroom issues worthy of a regular spot on Howard Stern’s show, on days when his musings are scatologically inclined rather than prurient. And I thought enduring a month on a little boat with no toilet was something to brag about.

I look the same, perfectly healthy except for the hair loss, which is creeping down my body. I’m bikini-ready, chemo providing a most natural Brazilian wax. Now if the hair on my legs would stop growing, I’d be in business.

I don’t have pain or constant nausea or depression, but my days are lethargic and everything—my body and my life—just feels… off. Malaise might sum it up.

“HI!” shouts Dr. Genius, interrupting my thoughts. Dr. Genius has been very attentive since our tête-à-tête last week.

“¿COMO ESTAS?” HOW ARE YOU? he shouts at Juan Peron, next to me. “¿MEJOR?” BETTER?

“Dr. Genius speaks very good Spanish,” Peron informs me. “He gave a conference in Argentina last year. He also speaks fluent Chinese and Russian.”

Of course he does.

Back to my conversation with Kim. She tells me she cried during parts of the Sex and the City movie. A lot of my girlfriends did, but not me, and I’m a crier. I don’t cry at anything these days. There’s no crying in chemo. Cancer is hilarious.

Since we can’t go to Pamplona, we make a plan (which I will cancel when I’m too sick to get out of bed) to chat again in two days, share a glass of wine over the phone and celebrate the anniversary of our 31 Days of Being Wasted, which started at a regatta in Italy last June, continued through the America’s Cup in Valencia, and met a spectacular finish at San Fermin. It was hilarious at the time, and afterward, in the retelling, seemed a little silly or stupid—especially for a woman my age—but now, again, from where I’m sitting, earnest party-hopping around the Med seems a perfectly legitimate activity to which to devote a mere month of one’s life.

These are the things I imagine we will still be talking about when we’re old, immobile and too poor to go anywhere. What do people do when they don’t have good stories?

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