Cancer is Hilarious

One Fish, Two Fish...

2010-04-21T12:14:00.004-04:00

Long before the Virgin Islands, before sailing, before cancer... there was the school trip to Hawaii. Sanctioned and paid for by NYU. (Bet you'd like to know how we swung that...)

That's me on the right, my friend Cinder on the left (I think). We snorkeled in, I swear, couldn't have been more than two and a half feet of water. I still have the hazy snapshots of tropical fish from the disposable underwater camera.

We were a bit out of our natural habitat. Cinder is a true Manhattanite, and one of the most sophisticated people I know. She grew up in Greenwich Village, literally watching the World Trade Towers rise outside her bedroom window. She can still remember the first time she was out in "the country" at night and witnessed total darkness for the first time. I think she was 12. An art history and archeology expert, she gives a mean tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

How she wound up doing digs and raising three kids in Cincinnati is another story, but modern technology and her ability to talk really, really fast let us keep in touch despite busy schedules. When I was in Malta, whining about being homesick, Cinder reminded me to shut up and pay attention to all the amazing things she's studied and never had a chance to see (my words, not hers...) Photos of that amazing trip kept me company through lots of hours of chemo.

Anyway, now this middle aged, Midwestern mom (her words, not mine) is training for a 100 mile bike ride on Long Island to raise money for LLS--the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She has chosen me as one of her "heroes."

This is the second time this spring that I have been the subject of a friend's... let's say "project." My Philly partner-in-crime Ellen --who held my hand through a bone marrow biopsy (and also likes to be mentioned in the blog) -- wrote a speech of praise about me for a class. She got an A.

The term "hero" leaves me a little embarrassed. I suspect it applies more to the other person Cinder is riding for -- a little girl with Leukemia who, at last check, was back in the hospital. It is, however, for a great cause. In addition to providing all kinds of information and support, LLS writes checks directly to cancer patients to help with the exorbitant costs of treatment. I know because I got a couple. Also, Cinder's got the negatives of some incriminating photos from NYU in the 80s... so I was really in no position to say no.

To read more about how my face appears in front of Cinder as a mirage while she's training for her June ride, visit her site:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/soh/montauk10/cmillerfr3.html

To read how I found out I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma, go to the archive on the left and start with the March 08 story titled "Fish Gotta Swim..." The blog is displaying a little funky on some computers, so if you don't see it, just click around a little and it should appear.

One More Thing (Hair, Part 3)

2009-02-10T16:37:00.009-05:00

I know I said the blog was finished, but I had to post this photo of my inspiring friend Lauren... who just donated her beautiful long hair to a wig program in my honor.

This picture of the short-haired girls was taken at the Academy Ball in January. For photos of Lauren pre- and mid-cut, check out: http://picasaweb.google.com/L.A.Saul/TheBigHairCut#
Her hair was long enough to donate six eight-inch ponytails to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program: http://www.beautifullengths.com/en_US/makethecut.jsp

Thank you, Lauren!
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From Gills to Gossamer (AKA The Year That Wasn't)

2008-12-31T19:02:00.002-05:00

“We lived to die another day.”
--Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List

It has been almost a year since a doctor in the Caribbean told me I might have an infected gill. It was funny at the time, this idea that after so much time on the water, I might be turning into a fish, or a mermaid, so funny, in fact, that we were still joking about it even when it turned out to be cancer. Hilarious.

Looking back over the past 12 months, I am quite sure that had I stopped laughing, I would not have survived. I am also convinced that had I not documented it, I would not believe any of it happened. The truth is so awful and unbelievable, the story, post-by-post, such a fragile web of surreal detail, it could disappear in a gust of wind, or a quick swipe of the hand. Poof. Gone. A year that never existed.

I am right back where I was in late 2007, on the verge of figuring out how to make more time for writing and sailing while also paying my bills on time, yet the calendar tells me hundreds of days have passed. I’ve missed births and graduations and birthdays and deadlines and God knows what else. I keep saying I feel like I’ve lost a year of my life, but the point is driven home over and over as I reconnect with people I think I haven’t seen in a year, but really it’s been two. Weird.

I look at the photos on the blog and I am also quite sure, happy snapshots notwithstanding, I wasn’t smiling for most of the last year, but hey, who wants to take (or look at) pictures when you’re feeling sick, or weak, or bored, or tired or frustrated? Photos of bald girls getting radiation are creepy enough.

Here are the two most common reactions I got to the blog during the course of the year:

1. I read your blog. It’s so honest.
2. I read your blog. What’s really going on? How are you REALLY feeling?

This makes me think I’m a failure as a writer. I like to think it’s all there, the grim realities and vast range of emotions in between the jokes and funny stories. I tried to be honest and observant, both inwardly and outwardly, and still keep a sense of humor. Perhaps you can never fully tell the whole story.

My surgeon friend, complicit in the Cancer is Hilarious attitude, admitted halfway through the ordeal that she thought a positive attitude was a form of denial. She may be right, especially in circumstances in which the patient is gravely ill and treatments so devastating, they promise only Pyrrhic victories. How on earth do you get through each day when your prognosis is bad and you are almost surely going to get sicker and sicker until you die? I know people who are facing that right now. I don’t know how they do it. I only know that I am not one of them, and never was, and for that I am thankful.

I had dinner with a friend the other night who had a cancer experience this year similar to mine, i.e. a scare, but with a good prognosis and, so far, successful treatment. He said he felt almost embarrassed by all the support, and people telling him they were praying for him. I know exactly what he means.

Sir Ernest Shackleton, the famed Antarctic explorer and captain of Endurance, is quoted as saying that optimism is true moral courage. In that spirit, I like to think that my decision, for example, to color my hair after my first chemo treatment—just in case it didn’t fall out—was not so much, say, vain as positive. Optimistic. But certainly not courageous. Courage is a word for the people with cancer, and their loved ones, who are forced to stare down death on a daily basis. I am in awe of them.

People called me brave but I am not brave. I am fortunate. I got diagnosed with “the good cancer,” had the Cadillac of treatment and turned out to be the Chemo Queen. (“They poisoned her body, but the girl kept eating…”) I am not 100% yet and still have some minor complaints, but they are minor, relatively speaking. Treatment sucked, but it worked. Today I am cancer free and, as it turns out, not even in early menopause after all.

I go back to see Dr. R again in February. He is not the committed relationship I have been longing for, but he is the one I get for now. He has promised to be in my life for the next two to five years, at least. In other relationship news, I expect the chemo vs. sex ratio to improve dramatically in the New Year, if for no other reason than I don’t expect any chemo in 2009.

I expect all the follow-up news to be good. There is, therefore, no more need to write about this. I have more important things to do, like regularly update my status on Facebook. Also, I need to find a (paying) job, and write my book. I think there may also be a few oceans I haven’t seen yet. I may start a new blog (do you see the mental procrastination on the aforementioned already starting?) and if I do, I will post the address on this site. But I don’t expect any new posts here in 2009.

There are so many people to thank for getting me through this year. They range from my Mom who took care of me and cooked for me and worried about me every day to one of my girlfriends who kept calling and offering to come over and clean my toilet because she didn’t know what else to do. I can’t possibly name everyone, and I won’t risk leaving anyone out. If you are reading this, you are probably one of them, so let me just say, simply, thank you. I am overwhelmed by the vastness of my support network and deeply touched by the depths of generosity I have been shown.

I am lucky now to have spent the month in the Caribbean, first on a 15-day sail to the Grenadines, and now back on St. John where I will welcome the New Year with lots of good friends… far, far away from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. I am ready for this gossamer tale to fade away, banished to the place reserved for bad memories. I’m ready to stop being the daughter/sister/aunt/niece/friend with cancer and go back to being the daughter/sister/aunt/niece/friend who sailed across the Atlantic in a 30-foot boat. (With no engine.) (And no head.)

I still look in the mirror most days and don’t quite recognize myself, but perhaps that is more a product of five years of extraordinary change and experience, a time period which, despite serious illness, heartache, job insecurity, financial pressures and grief, has been the most rewarding time of my life.

In the movie The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two terminally ill men racing against time to complete a list of things they want to do before they die. The one that stuck with me—far more interesting than the parachuting and traveling and mountain climbing—was: Witness something truly majestic.

I am blessed to say I have done just this, not only in the vast and beautiful skies I have gazed up into in the middle of the sea, but also in the shape of the many, many people who have loved and supported me through the whole crazy journey. Which continues.

Here’s to 2009.

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Winter Solstice

2008-12-21T12:56:00.007-05:00

The calendar says today is the Winter Solstice but I am sure the longest night of my year happened some months ago. I could probably go back through all the missives here and pinpoint a more exact time and date, but why bother? This cancer blog is getting boring which is, after all, the goal. No news really is good news. I think this will be the penultimate post.

My November test results all came back clean. “Beautiful” was the word Dr. R used, which is as good as it gets in a world where people are loathe to use the word “cured.” There was much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Mom and I celebrated with turkey and cosmos.

After the holiday, I was lucky enough to fly back to the Caribbean to finish out the year in warmth and sunshine. This morning I’m writing from St. John, having just returned from a two-week sailing trip from the U.S. Virgin Islands to the Grenadines. The voyage, originally planned for last spring, was scuttled by chemo, and worries about fever (and not the John Masefield kind). Delayed but not denied, it was all there waiting: the friend with the boat, the 800 miles of blue water sailing, the tropical winds, the fleets of dolphins and oh, the star-filled heavens. I cried when I saw the sky.

With new saltwater adventures, it’s hard to think about illness. Looking through my year’s worth of notes, I find a few hilarious aspects of cancer I wanted to write about but never got around to, no doubt because some compelling rerun of The West Wing was on TV. Things like:

• Visa or MC? (That call I got the night before surgery, during which the unidentified caller told me what time to report to the hospital, and asked whether I would be paying my $5,000 bill by Visa, MasterCard or personal check.)
• Chemo Brain (Is it my chemically impaired faculties that make it impossible for me to remember I’ve put water on to boil for tea until all the water is gone and the pot is burning up? Or am I just genetically programmed to be a coffee drinker?)
• Pharmacology (Who knew there were so many people in my life with such an acute interest in medical marijuana?)
• Mirror, Mirror (Hair, Part 3) (So I still don’t recognize myself. But whoever she is in the mirror, she’s got great boat hair.)
• Little Victories (I am pleased that I made it through radiation without any permanent markings. Tattoos should be something sexy and exotic you get on your ass, not some blue dot smack in the middle of your chest. The question is: Why did I have to push for the markings to be on a mask instead of my body? Why did I have to find this alternative through my own research instead of the doctor presenting it as an option?)

I’ll save the Big Victories for the next post. Gotta go take advantage of what’s left of the daylight.

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Follow-Up

2008-12-20T13:01:00.002-05:00

Me and Mom, celebrating good test results!

The Princess and the PET Scan

2008-11-21T10:52:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time, a high-spirited woman went to St. Maarten for a holiday and got herself in a bit of trouble. The nature of the trouble was never mentioned, but suffice it to say she was in sorry need of a knight in any kind of armor.

The hero arrived not on horseback, but by boat. A sailor named Mark hailing from the U.K. but residing most recently in the hamlet of Coral Bay on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands witnessed the spectacle and bailed the lady out. "She started to go strange and we straightened her out," the modest Mark said with a shrug.

The good Mark's deeds did not go unnoticed. The damsel in distress turned out to be related to a certain Lord Gray (think Earl Gray tea) and Mark was richly rewarded with a title of his own. Thusly, Mark the Sailor became Lord Mark, Lord of Hillborough, Duke of Beltinge. The investiture ceremony was held at Coral Bay's unofficial town hall, the venerable Skinny Legs bar and grill. Most of the locals and a healthy number of donkeys were in attendance.

This story has absolutely nothing to do with me, except that I had the honor of having my picture taken with Mark just days before the Lordship Ceremony, when he was still a commoner, and it's a pretty good shot of what my hair looks like right now. (You didn't forget that it's all about hair, did you?) In addition, I like any story that illustrates the wackiness of St. John. Nobility in Coral Bay! Go figure.

The Tale of Lord Mark is also, I believe, more entertaining than the current reality, which is that I'm back at Jefferson's Imaging Center, getting pumped full of radioactive whatever and drinking the barium sulfate (Creamy Vanilla Smoothie Flavor!) in preparation for yet another PET scan. Three months have passed since treatment ended; now it's time for a week of follow-up tests. Anyone want to ride to the rescue?
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Latitude 18˚(The Other Radiation Therapy)

2008-11-06T10:38:00.013-05:00

Team Skinny Legs and C4th at the Budget Marine Women's Caribbean One Design Keelboat Championships, November 1-2 in St. Maarten.

Call Me Ishmael

2008-10-28T13:25:00.004-04:00

Ishmael knew it was time to hightail it back to sea when it was damp, drizzly November in his soul. For me, it was when I realized that I knew, without checking the Comcast guide, that the Lifetime network was channel 48 on my cable system, and also that I was highly anticipating the next episode of Army Wives. I’m no Melville, but I know a sign when I see one.

Thus, I am now writing from some of my favorite literary outposts: first a window seat on a US-Air flight bound for St. Thomas, and now, Captain Celia’s home in Cruz Bay on St. John.

This weekend, I’ll be sailing in the St. Maarten’s International Women’s Keelboat Regatta with Team Skinny Legs. In a few hours, I’ll head over to Coral Bay to meet up with the rest of the girls on the team who will, it’s a good bet, not quietly take to the ship. Sorry, Herman.
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One Resident, Two Resident, Three Resident, Four...

2008-10-25T12:59:00.003-04:00

If you’re being treated at a teaching hospital, time spent in the hilarious world of cancer can be measured in residents. I’m up to five. One for Dr. R, one for the oncologist I decided not to go with (primarily because I spent more time with the resident than with the doctor) and three for Dr. X, who has a steady stream of what appear to be brainy teenagers dressing up as doctors for Halloween.

There was the kind, pretty woman, who got me in my clueless stage last winter, and gently broke the fertility news. There was the earnest, geeky kid who hovered around all during radiation treatment, my freaked-out period, and did his best to answer all my technical questions. Then there was the guy who had the misfortune to be in the office last Tuesday. I am rapidly recovering to my pissed-off, greatly inconvenienced stage, and am back to being annoyed by strangers feeling around my neck and chest, especially ones who not only think they know more about this cancer thing than I do, but also look like jailbait.

I was back in The Basement for my post-radiation follow-up appointment. Since our rendezvous in hell, I’ve been soaking up the salubrious October weather of the Jersey Shore and Dr. X has been vacationing in China. Mini-Me’s poking around made me cranky, but it’s hard to stay in a bad mood once Dr. X walks in. I’ve come to like him, in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way.

Also, all the waiting around affords plenty of time to take in all the people who have it worse than I do—the man on the phone with half his face deformed, the guy who must have some type of throat cancer and is using an electronic device to amplify his voice—i.e., pretty much everybody. My complaint about feeling like there’s a heavy weight on my chest, making it hard to take deep breaths, seems suddenly insignificant. Dr. X says scarring of the lungs is normal. He tells me to keep doing yoga and sends me off for a chest X-ray. I try to complain about the joint stiffness that makes it hard to move my fingers in the morning, but Dr. X is not taking responsibility for that. That’s apparently a chemo gift, a topic for my next date with Dr. R.

It’s still too early for the first full, post-treatment scan and blood tests. That will happen in November. For now, my problems are boring, which is a good sign.

I’m getting a little bored of the blog, too. I do feel the need to wrap things up, but this is proving tricky. I keep thinking I’ll write a final post after the next appointment, but there’s always a next one, and a next one. I thought I was almost done with Dr. X, but he wouldn’t let me leave until I committed to a December date. The ending is elusive.
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P.R. for Pirates

2008-10-10T12:51:00.005-04:00

This is for those of you who insist on asking, "What's next?" Who knew this was a job?

From The New York Times:

Beware, Sharks. P. R. Agents, Too.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — It was probably my 50th call. The line had always been busy. Or the phone had been shut off.

But on Tuesday morning, someone actually picked up.

“Can I speak to the pirate spokesman, please?”

Pirate p.r? Strange. Stranger still to be interviewing, via satellite, a band of seafaring thieves bobbing in the Indian Ocean 700 miles away from my table at a sidewalk cafe in Nairobi. These were the buccaneers who on Sept. 25 hijacked a Ukrainian freighter crammed with tanks and grenade launchers, and by last week had the world’s two most fearsome navies, the Russian and the American, breathing down their necks.

Somali pirates may not go for eyeliner like Johnny Depp. But they seem almost as image conscious. In the 21st century, pirates have talking points, too.

Like: “You only die once,” according to Sugule Ali, their official spokesman.

Or: “We see people who dump waste in our waters. We see people who illegally fish in our waters. We see people doing all sorts of things in our waters.” Also Mr. Sugule.

And: “They can’t catch us like goats.” Again Mr. Sugule, who I was told in no uncertain terms was the only pirate allowed to be quoted. Or else.

Mr. Sugule seemed nonchalant. Maybe a touch gruff. I could, I imagined, almost hear a cavalier shrug in his voice.

Not a lot is known about this particular public relations professional. He sounded like he was somewhere between 25 and 40. His band of pirates is part of a group of former fishermen who hijack ships off the coast of anarchic Somalia and ransom them back to their owners, often for a million dollars plus. Mr. Sugule said he was from the central region of Somalia; in a country where the real geography is clan, “central region” is code for the Hawiye clan and most likely the Habir Gedir subclan, which has not exactly thrown its formidable muscle behind Somalia’s fledging government.

“Sugule may not be educated,” my translator said. “But he’s definitely street smart.”

I was given his number by a high-level contact in Nairobi who was involved in trying to bring this drama on the high seas to a peaceful end. In our 45-minute chat, Mr. Sugule educated me on all matters pirate, including what his group calls itself (“the Central Region Coast Guard”) to why he became a pirate (“We are patrolling our seas”) to what they want (“just money”).

I asked Mr. Sugule if he ever went to school. So many young men in Somalia haven’t. The central government collapsed in 1991, putting a whole generation out on the streets, where the only real authority is the business end of a machine gun.

“These questions are getting strange,” Mr. Sugule said. “Call back later.”

Click.

Salt Water

2008-09-27T11:13:00.010-04:00

“The cure for anything is salt water: Sweat. Tears. Or the sea.”
--Isak Denison

I thought my slate had been wiped clean back in May when, halfway through chemo and just after my last scheduled freelance job wrapped up, the second of two rejections for summer writers’ conferences came in the mail. “That’s it,” I whined to Dr. Lisa. “2008 is officially a bust. Every plan or hope I had on my calendar for the year is now either finished or scuttled.” But there was one more shoe to drop.

A few weeks ago, perusing in a bookshop with Captain Celia, we stumbled across a new memoir by a middle-aged woman who quit her job, bought a boat, and went to sea. The title of the book was the same as the working title of my book, the one I was a hundred pages into when I got diagnosed with cancer, the one about the woman who quit her job, moved to the islands, discovered boats and, well, you get the idea. Saying I feel like I’ve lost a year of my life has become a constant complaint, but in that ghostlike moment, holding that book in my hand, the belief crystallized. While I was getting chemotherapy and radiation, some other bitch was writing my book—and getting it published.

Six weeks after finishing radiation, I am, I suppose, beginning to settle into what the cancer books call “the new normal." My life was in such transition before all this, I’m not even sure there was an old normal.

This is the first month all year that I don’t have a single doctor’s appointment or hospital visit. Most of my treatment symptoms are abating, although new ones still crop up: Itchy, dry patches where my skin was radiated. Weird joint pain in my fingers. Pressure on my lungs that makes it painful to take a deep breath. In the great scheme of things, they are minor issues, to be sure, but lingering reminders nonetheless.

My day planner—one of those September-to-September ones, corresponding with last season’s orchestra concert schedule—runs out on Tuesday. I vaguely remember thinking I should buy a new one, but so far haven’t bothered. It’s not like I’m scheduling much these days. I am slowly picking up a couple writing assignments, but doing them mostly on my own time, still concentrating primarily on building up strength and energy.

I am fortunate to be doing this at the Jersey Shore, resettling into my condo in Ocean City as the town itself slowly retreats into its off-season pace. We have had glorious fall weather, perfect for beach walks and boardwalk bike rides. The ocean temperature is just right for swimming. I had a great day of sailing on Barnegat Bay last Saturday with old co-workers I haven’t seen in 14 years. We sailed for seven hours in bright sunshine and 20 knot winds; I spent Sunday on the couch. I started taking a Tai Chi class with the old ladies at the community center, and just this week felt strong enough to start lifting weights again (same community center, but with the old men). I can barely keep up with them. After class, I have to go home and rest. I think about that terrible writer who wrote my book and get restless, get up, do a few things, but after an hour, I’m back on the couch, wiped out again. I think about writing, but flip on the TV instead.

Doctor R said expect fatigue. Fatigue is normal. Fatigue will take a long time to go away. If a walk to the beach (one and a half blocks, not to be confused with a long walk on the beach) or a yoga class zaps the last of my energy, well, at least I got a walk to the beach or a yoga class into my day. I sleep like a baby, nine hours most nights, and often wake up, like a cranky child, on the wrong side of the bed. Frustration is fatigue’s constant companion. I am mindful of Dr. R’s warning to be on the lookout for signs of depression, but I don’t think this is depression, it’s more… decompression.

A few months ago, I was having brunch with my high school girlfriends, who are all married. We were talking about long-term future plans. Where do you see yourself in ten years? The one without kids was about to move to a new city, with all kinds of unknowns and exciting opportunities in front of her. But the ones with kids—all school-age now—pretty much know where they’re going to be for the next 10-to-15 years, with raising their children and putting them through college a priority.

It struck me, acutely in that moment, that I have this same period of time, completely free of liens. Through the haze of cancer-induced anger, and envy and longing for the babies I don’t—and now can’t—have, there was a glimmer. I caught a glimpse of tabula rasa as gift.

While it’s still too foggy to see it all clearly, I think I can capitalize on this alleged silver lining as justification for further inertia. If this has all been one giant transition, leaving me with a blank slate and, as a favorite co-worker once said, “nothing but open doors,” then it’s probably best not to rush into any of them. I don’t think I’ll bother seeking out a calendar for the rest of 2008, the year that wasn’t. I have worked hard. I have cried. It must be time—again—for the sea. From my spot where I am treading water, I can see the shore. I see all the people who have helped me through this, cheering me on. I know I can swim, just as soon as I’m ready. But my head’s above water, and I like the view from out here. And the water is so warm.

Cancer Vixen

2008-09-09T15:59:00.001-04:00

http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/cancervixen/

Limbo

2008-08-26T15:18:00.002-04:00

I woke up this morning to find my underwear on the kitchen table, right next to the bottle of tequila.

The Jose Cuervo was unopened; the party’s not until the weekend, when my college girlfriends come to visit. But after a morning visit to the doctor and a couple of afternoon errands, I was so wiped out when I got home yesterday, I apparently couldn’t even make it to the bedroom. I dropped the bottles on the counter, peeled off half my clothes right there in the kitchen (because I’m hot, and then I’m cold, and then I’m hot, and then I’m cold) and collapsed onto my couch for four straight hours of Law and Order. It is possible, I have recently discovered, to watch Law and Order almost incessantly, day or night.

This fatigue thing was first on my list of things to ask Dr. R about at our appointment yesterday, along with the flu-like aches, weird joint pain in my hands and extreme temperature swings. I had had a little burst of energy after my final radiation treatment, feeling great while I was sailing on Cape Cod for the weekend, and even during my first few days back in Philly, but after five days, I crashed.

I also needed to know what my follow-up care would be. How often will I have to get PET/CT scans and blood work in the years ahead?

To my surprise, Dr. R’s first concern was something completely different.

“Your tests are good, your blood work looks great. What I really want you to be on the lookout for now,” he said, “are signs of depression. Everybody wants to celebrate because treatments are over, and you look good so they think you feel good, too. But it usually takes three to six months to really start feeling better. Some people say it took a year for them to feel ‘normal’… whatever the ‘new normal’ is.”

Dr. R handed me tissues before I even realized my eyes were welling up.

“Everybody keeps asking me what my plans are now,” I said. “Jesus, I’m exhausted.”

I have discussed this with a few friends in recent weeks. One suggested I might be experiencing a little bit of survivor’s guilt. God knows I have seen countless people in the last eight months much worse off than I am. And of course I am grateful that my prognosis, my care, and my support were the best imaginable. And yes, I know that soon enough, I’ll be back to work, and things will be back on track. Relentless optimism takes a bit of a toll along with the treatment.

My first instinct is that the survivor/war analogy is a little extreme… but then I remember that all the cancer books use war analogies. Your body is “invaded” by “hostile” cancer cells. Chemotherapy and radiation are your “armies” designed to “attack” the invaders. During the fight, lots of good guys get killed. Whole platoons of healthy cells are victims of friendly fire.

“I do feel a little bit like a war survivor,” I confided to one friend. “The war is over! I lived! But then I look around at all the rubble. My world is hardly in ruins, but there’s a lot of rebuilding to do. I lost a year of my life. And I’m fucking tired.”

In some ways, this period of time coming up feels the most difficult and complicated. I wasn’t kidding when I told people I didn’t feel brave going through treatment. What’s the big deal? You just show up when they tell you. Once you make a few decisions about your care, the rest is out of your control. But now that it’s over, now what? This is the hard part. It’s not even interesting to write about. At least hell is perversely interesting, even sometimes funny. Limbo is just banal.

“You and your body have been through a lot,” Dr. R reminded me. “A lot of people report symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

I see Dr. R again in three months. I’ll get more blood work and another scan then. I’ll see Dr. R every three months for… a long time, I think. Any recurrence of Hodgkin’s is most likely in the first few years. After that, we start looking for secondary cancers… but we won’t talk about that right now. There are too many other things to think about first. But not today.

But Seriously, Folks...

2008-08-23T15:37:00.005-04:00

Here’s something you don’t want to hear while waiting for your daily dose of radiation:

There’s something wrong with the machine.

After more than a week of right-on-schedule treatments running like a Swiss subway, one day during my second week of radiation there was a backup and the waiting room was full. Normally, it’s pretty quiet in there, with everybody doing the look-at-the-ground-shuffle-your-feet-in-silence-or-maybe-whisper-quietly-to-your-radiation-date thing but on this day there was an edge in the air, with everyone not so furtively checking out everyone else. I honestly don’t remember who broke the ice, but it’s a safe bet that it was me.

“I picked the biggest gown in the joint,” I announced, emerging from the ladies locker room in a hospital robe down to my ankles. “You and I should swap,” I suggested to an older man, slumped in a chair with his arms crossed over his chest, his blue gown barely covering the lower portion of his thighs.

“They’re all the same size!” insisted the senior citizen volunteer, whom my mother calls Rosie the Riveter, the one with the gravelly voice who sits, unapologetically, in the cancer ward, talking about drinking and smoking.

“Oh, no they’re not,” protested another man, setting off a lively debate about gown selection. I twirled around in my floor-length number to help prove his point. “At least you’ve got nice legs,” I said to the guy in the mini.

Once the gown discussion was exhausted, conversation turned to the life-size, molded plastic masks (note to self: find out what they call these things) that hold you in place on the table and mark your radiation spots. The question: To keep or not to keep? One woman said she couldn’t decide. Her neighbor, she informed the audience, had his hanging in his backyard shed along with the gardening tools and lawn mower. An elderly gentleman sitting across from her said he didn’t know how he would get his home, since he rides the train in to treatment. Rosie suggested a big plastic garbage bag. Perfect! I said. It’ll look like you’re dragging a body onto the R-6. That could be fun.

Cancer patients have proven to be hilarious stand-up comedians, especially considering the limits of the material. Most of them just get quiet when they’ve run out of jokes, but those with the energy to continue talking tend to turn to the serious stuff, the stuff that prompted me not to talk to anyone during my months of chemo, a decision that seems wiser by the minute. This one has a brain tumor. That one has tonsil cancer. I had wondered why not all the patients in the waiting room changed into hospital gowns. Suddenly it dawned on me: These people are all getting radiation to their heads.

Rarely does someone come right out and ask you what’s wrong with you. The questions are more oblique: How are you feeling today? How much longer is your treatment? It doesn’t take long to assess that everyone in this room has it worse than I do. I recognize the woman sitting across from me from the skin care and makeup session I had attended during my first month of chemo in the spring. Her treatment for breast cancer had been well underway at the time. How much longer is your treatment? I ask. She has to get chemo until December.

My first week of radiation had been sobering for different reasons. Two people I had worked with in television died of cancer, one from lung cancer, and one from colon cancer. The sportscaster who died of colon cancer was just 46 years old.

I tell the lady sitting next to me, the one who just had 14 lymph nodes removed, the one with the scar all the way up the side of her jaw, that she should go to one of the Look Good, Feel Better sessions. There’s one coming up in September, I tell her, I saw the flyer in the elevator. It was worthwhile, wasn’t it? I say to the breast cancer patient. Yes, she agrees. You can see how much it’s helped us, she adds, dryly. I am sitting there with no hair, no wig, no scarf. Neither of us is wearing any makeup.

Two people with ports sticking out of their throats walk by. It’s all relative.

I am almost always the youngest person in the room. Kids with cancer must all go to special hospitals. Half the patients here call me “honey” or “dear.” How are you feeling today, honey? Good luck to you, dear.

I am relieved when they call my name. Renee, my awesome radiation therapist, has Motown playing. The Temptations are singing “My Girl” as I climb onto the table.

Because my normal machine is “down,” I get treated on one of the older machines. It takes three times as long to deliver the same amount of radiation. Instead of counting to ten for each zap, I count to 30. It feels interminable.

“How many X-rays is each of these treatments equal to?” I ask Renee.

“Nobody’s ever asked me that before,” she responds, promising to follow up with one of the physicists. She will later tell me that the physicist said the number was too big to calculate. She does know, however, that one trans-continental flight will expose you to the same amount of radiation as a chest X-ray, a random statistic, but no more random than saying “I’m getting 30 grays of radiation.” At least it’s a statistic I can remember.

On Friday, week three, my last day of radiation, the waiting room is practically empty.

“Where is everyone?” I wonder aloud.

“Friday in the summer. People take the day off,” responded Rosie.

“You mean the staff. But what about the patients?”

“Them too. People like their long weekends in the summer. They take Friday off.”

From radiation? You can do that? It makes no sense, but what else is new?

“Bye-bye, honey,” says one of the men. “Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you, too,” I say.

For all our chattering over the previous three weeks, no one ever exchanges contact information, or even names.

I know I will never see any of them again.

24

2008-08-19T14:24:00.006-04:00

August 15, 12:45 p.m.
Philadelphia
Last Day of Radiation

August 16, 12:45 p.m.
Cape Cod
Catboat Regatta Start Line

A Day at the Beach

2008-08-13T20:42:00.008-04:00

Radiation beachwear versus Caribbean beachwear.

There is no more right now... I just have no idea how to get rid of that "click here to read more" link...

Whirrr! Click! Zap! Holy Radiation, Batman!

2008-08-03T16:43:00.005-04:00

"What fresh hell is this?"
--Dorothy Parker

The entrance to Jefferson’s cancer center is on the street level, on the southwest corner of the hospital, at 11th and Sansom Streets. To get to the place where they do radiation, you get into the elevator and push B. According to the elevator buttons, there is only one level between S(treet) and B(asement)—a staff floor, full of offices and off-limits to patients—but it takes forever to get to The Basement. This is, I imagine, because there are several other levels of (unmarked) hell between the street and my destination at the final, bottom rung.

The first time I was ever in this place, Dr. X tried to tell me that the reason all the scary radiation equipment was located well below sea level is that it is all extremely heavy, but I am smarter than this. Did he think I didn’t notice all the warning signs, and the no-children-beyond-this-point message, not to mention the ghostly appearances of all the patients walking out of the restricted areas. Surely the fact that these machines spit out toxic amounts of radiation daily has something to do with their location.

When you get to The Basement, hereafter referred to as Hell, the first thing you do is scan in at reception. The technicians who made the mold for your head and the plastic mask that fits over your face and chest two weeks ago also snapped the most hideous digital photo of you imaginable. This will be used to identify you every time you visit Hell, which will be daily, Monday to Friday, for the next three weeks. As this is shorter than the average stay in Hell, you are reminded to count your blessings.

You change into your humiliating hospital gown, then sit in the waiting room. Men and women, patients and radiation dates, all wait in the same place. When it’s your turn, they call your name over an intercom, which sounds like a muffled announcement on a SEPTA train. You get up, walk the gauntlet of the damned, then turn down the hall to the treatment area where you scan in again, then lie down on the table. Hell, by the way, is freezing.

The radiation therapists place your head in the cradle that’s been molded to your shape, slip a pad under your knees, and secure the Friday-the-13th-Jason-like plastic mask over your face and chest. You are now the star in your own private horror movie. “We’ll be right back,” one of the extras says, as they all leave the room. It’s hard to tell the villains from the superheroes around here.

Here are some of the possible side effects of radiation therapy: Sunburned skin. Sore throat. Trouble swallowing. Fatigue. Hypothyroidism. Lung cancer. Breast cancer. Heart disease.

Here is what you feel: Nothing.

Here’s how long you have to worry about the possible side effects: The rest of your life.

Here’s how long it takes: Eight minutes.

That’s eight minutes from the time you lie down on the table to the time they are setting up for the next guy. The actual blasts of radiation take less than a minute. One five second blast, followed by 11 seconds with the beam underneath the table; then the machine spins 180-degrees and stops above you for another five seconds, followed by another 11 seconds. 32 seconds in all, by my calculations. It’s okay to keep your eyes open, Dr. X reassures, as the radiation, being delivered to the chest and neck is “nowhere near” the face.

The devil’s in the details.

The Bitch Advocate (Formerly Known as the Squeaky Wheel)

2008-07-28T12:12:00.007-04:00

My friend Ellen has threatened to stop reading my blog if I don’t start mentioning her again. “From now on, I’m not going to read any stories or articles that aren’t about me,” she informed me one day. “I just don’t have that kind of time.”

I was about to tell her that she should be more supportive because, you know, I have cancer, when I remembered that she has been the person most often reminding me that I have cancer. “You have CANCER!” she would console me, when I worried about slacking off at work. “YOU have CANCER!” she would repeat, when I was upset about another sick friend.

You hear a lot about how you need to be your own advocate in our modern health care “system.” What you really need is someone who follows you around like a faithful, bomb-sniffing dog, constantly prowling for little threats to your health and safety, ready to pounce when necessary: SHE HAS CANCER! LEAVE HER ALONE! ANSWER HER QUESTION! GET HER WHAT SHE NEEDS! STAT! GRRRR!!

A sailing buddy who recently spent six weeks in the hospital after “routine” surgery has another term for this: The Bitch Advocate. In his case, it’s his wife. Respected surgeons apparently run for cover when they see her coming down the hall. Clearly, I need a wife.

Ellen is an excellent candidate for Bitch Advocate, but she really doesn’t have that kind of time. My mother, my main sidekick at most of my appointments, is supportive and asks good questions, but she doesn’t fall into the bitch category. Ironically, I think I’d be a great Bitch Advocate… for somebody else. I was competent in the beginning, shouting into my cell phone while standing half-naked in the doctor’s office and demanding to speak to someone who knew something, but that was back in January. I’ve lost a little steam since then.

“Why is it so hard to stand up for myself?” I whined to Single Girl #1 and Single Girl #2 after my non-appointment with Dr. X last week, the one where I didn’t even get to see the doctor, the one I left on the brink of tears.

My girlfriends, sharing my status in possessing erratic emergency contact information, were empathetic. We all talk tough but those hospital gowns have the effect of a muzzle.

“I’ll come with you next week and yell at anybody you want,” offered SG #1.

“Yeah,” said SG #2. “If they don’t give you what you need, we will MESS THEM UP.”

Inspired, I vow to be stronger at my next appointment, go in armed with a list of questions. What the hell happened last time, anyway? I know my stuff. I might have followed Dr. Lisa’s advice to go shoe shopping instead of Googling after my diagnosis, but my reporter skills have been working overtime since then. I have read books and researched online. I have interviewed patients and professionals. I have become an expert in Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I have done my homework and made informed decisions about my treatment so far. So why does it now feel like I’m on a runaway train?

I consult the National Cancer Institute’s Radiation Therapy and You booklet for tips on talking to the doctor. Here are the suggested questions, complete with space to write down the doctor’s response:

What kind of radiation therapy will I get?

How can radiation therapy help?

How many weeks will my course of radiation therapy last?

What kind of side effects should I expect during my course of radiation therapy?

What can I do to manage these side effects?

These are rookie questions. Anyone who skims the NCI handouts knows these answers.

Here are my questions:

What dose of radiation am I getting? 30 gray? 40 gray? Do you consider this low-dose radiation? Am I getting involved field radiation therapy (IFRT) or mantle field? How do you determine the length of treatment? Why is radiation better than two more cycles of chemo?

If my latest tests show I’m in remission, how do you know how much more treatment I need for extra insurance?

Last time I saw you, you said 30 different doctors would recommend 30 different courses of treatment. Really?

What are the chances radiation will give me breast cancer? Lung cancer? Thyroid cancer? Heart disease?

Will I ever menstruate again? What’s up with my toenails falling out?

When will you show me my latest scans?

This last one fascinates me. On TV, the doctor always holds up an X-ray, points to some spots, and announces, “There’s the cancer!” This doesn’t happen in real life, at least not in mine. I have had thousands and thousands of dollars of PET scans, CAT scans and X-rays and not once has anyone shown me what’s on them without my expressly pushing for it. (I always request CDs to take home, but they are indecipherable if you don’t know what you’re looking at.) Also, no one directly involved with my care ever used the word “cancer” until I was sitting in the oncology wing of the hospital, which was four doctors, one surgery and numerous tests into this whole process.

I am reviewing these questions in my head when I arrive for my appointment Thursday, the final radiation planning session, but once again, instead of seeing the doctor first, I am whisked into another scary room of The Basement and greeted by four new faces.

“I’m Renee,” I hear, as they start moving me around on the table. “I’m Fran. And that’s Danielle and Calisa.”

“Who are you guys?” I ask, as they fit the mask molded last week over my face. “You’re all different from the people I saw last time.”

“That was the CAT scan team. We’re radiation therapists.”

“The people who actually deliver the radiation treatments?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re the people I have to be really nice to.”

“This girl is smart!”

“Is Dr. X coming in for this?”

“Yes, but you don’t have to be nice to him. You start treatment Monday, right?”

“Depends on how Dr. X answers my 17 questions.”

I hear Dr. X come in, talking sci-fi babble, all numbers and formulas, to his resident. I’m an expert, but this stuff is over my head.

“Dr. X, we need to talk, I say.”

“What’s wrong?

“Nothing.”

“She just has some questions,” Renee adds, helpfully.

I spend the next 20 minutes or so lying on the table while the team takes “port films,” more X-rays used to tweak the exact spots the radiation will hit. Then all the prep work is finished. Radiation therapy can begin. Ready or not.

A few minutes later, I’m back in the examining room, still in my gown, and waiting to talk to Dr. X. I choose to sit on the examining table. I know Dr. X will sit in a chair, and this gives me some height, so I can look down at him while going through my list of worries. (Do not laugh at or underestimate this technique until you’ve tried it.)

I got through my list. Dr. X patiently addressed all my concerns, although I confess, the entire time I felt like I was imposing, asking too much, which is ridiculous, I know, but it was effort to ask every last question I had scribbled in my notebook, and I’m a professional interviewer, the proverbial squeaky wheel. What does the average person do? Just say, “Oh, okay,” and go with the flow?

In the end, the two most resonant arguments came from two other girlfriends. The first was from a sailor on St. John, most famous for goading me into a long-distance voyage on a very small boat by proclaiming me a “candy ass” if I chickened out. Too bad she lives in the Caribbean; she is the prototype Bitch Advocate.

For most of our discussion, she took the devil’s advocate “the risk of breast cancer might outweigh the benefits of radiation” position. After all, breast cancer and ovarian cancer, they’re the scary cancers, right? The ones that kill so many women. Not like this bullshit cancer I have. “Then again,” added my friend, “you don’t want to be the schmuck who gets the recurrence of Hodgkin’s because you didn’t get the radiation,” a conclusion that can also be distilled as: “If I get the radiation and end up with a secondary cancer, I can blame the doctor; but if I don’t get the radiation, and the Hodgkin’s comes back, I can only blame myself.” Again, don’t mock this thinking until you digest it. Psychology is more than half the battle in fighting this thing.

The second argument came from a good friend’s sister, whom I’ve never met, but who had been treated for Hodgkin’s last year. For six months, I’ve avoided calling her, despite my friend’s insistence that she’d be a good person to talk to. I knew she had had a rough go at chemo, and I didn’t want to hear those stories. But last week, out of the blue, she called me.

I had just dropped off my Mom after attending an information session on radiation at Jefferson, and was heading down the shore in the Popemobile, the black Chevy Cavalier owned by my uncle, a retired priest. When the phone rang, I pulled over on a side street not far from his old parish, and listened to my friend’s sweet little sister, young wife and mother of three explain why she opted for radiation, how she wanted to do everything possible to make sure this deadly disease was no longer a threat to her life, how she reasoned she’d deal with secondary cancer and other long-term side effects if and when they materialized. And right there on a little dead-end street in South Philadelphia, I had an epiphany:

I have cancer.

For seven months I’ve been dealing with this, trying to make good decisions, while still living my life and keeping my sense of humor. I know it’s serious, but there’s also been this underlying drumbeat of “It’s not a big deal,” from the surgeon who diagnosed me and pronounced it “good news” to the oncologists who smile and tell you they can cure you (“cure” meaning you’ll be alive in five years) to the people, well-intentioned or otherwise, who call you lucky and remind you how much worse it could be.

“It is a big deal,” says the voice on the other end of the phone.

I have cancer. People die from Hodgkin’s. Sure the odds of survival are good, but they’re good because they blast the shit out of you to cure you, killing the cancer and leaving you with a whole new set of potentially fatal problems. As for the odds, well the odds say I shouldn’t have gotten this in the first place. The odds say no one should. Hodgkin’s is rare. I don’t fit the age or gender demographic. There will be 8,220 new cases in the U.S. this year. 1,350 people will die from it. You do the math. Okay, I’ll do the math: the odds of dying are 1 in 16, which doesn’t seem so bad until you consider the odds of being diagnosed with it this year were about 1 in 36,000.

I start radiation today. I think I’m ready. The bitch is back.

###

Know Thyself

2008-07-20T16:14:00.003-04:00

Here is a philosophical question: If one goes to see the Dalai Lama speak at a sold-out Kimmel Center appearance, but scams her way in by asking old co-workers to spot her a ticket, does that cancel out the spiritual value of the pilgrimage? Does playing the cancer card give a person bad karma? Do Buddhists even believe in karma?

Karma seems more up the alley of the yogi whose meditation class last Monday night was attended by a woman who had never been there before. The intense but welcoming Yogi Shanti wanted to know what the woman was looking for, which was a very good question indeed, even if somewhat horrifying when asked in front of everybody else in the room. The seeker didn’t have a good answer, but she had ponied up the $18 fee for this one and wasn’t about to wimp out so she mumbled something about “stress relief.” This appeared to be the wrong answer.

Clearly the seeker had wandered off her regular path. Her preferred yoga class is taught by an ex-journalist friend whose old beat included some of the most heinous murders in Philadelphia. That yogi has retained a healthy bit of newsroom cynicism, and every now and then throws Talk To The Hand pose in with downward facing dog and the sun salutations. Sometimes she can even be persuaded to go out for Jameson's and gossip after class, the better to exercise the sarcasm chakra.

Stress and anxiety spiked this week. With my last chemo treatment a couple weeks behind me, I was feeling physically better, but the looming date with Dr. X and his extreme X-Ray agenda had jump-started my nerves. I’m not really an X-Games kind of girl, no matter how fast my mind is racing.

Desperate for a rest stop, I opened the book that Yogi Shanti gave me. “The purpose of meditation is to know thyself,” reads the first line, knowing thyself being a prerequisite for knowing and communing with the Divine.

Know thyself, that dictum of the ancient Greeks, has been an oft-repeated mantra during my last couple years of mostly self-imposed life changes. “You’ll really get to know yourself,” people would say. “You’ll find out what you’re made of.” Knowing yourself is a worthy quest, right up there with one of my other personal goals: being known.

I know myself well enough to know that for me, high stress equals hair-trigger emotions. This might explain why I can cross an ocean in a 30-foot sailboat, but an unkind remark shakes my confidence to the core. Better to channel all that stress into rage in order to keep some modicum of control over the situation, the situation currently being preparation for radiation therapy.

The morning of my prep session, I followed my standard chemotherapy regimen, i.e. lying in bed, staring at the clock and calculating how long I could stay under the covers and still make it to the cancer center within a reasonable period of lateness. (The answer, from my mother’s apartment in Center City, being 7:38 a.m. for an 8 o’clock appointment.) I arrived at the Bodine Center for Cancer Treatment at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital at 8:04. Radiation oncology is in the basement.

Things started out okay, despite the nightmare of the one-size-fits-no-one-except-maybe-the-XXXL-guy-in-the-corner radiation gown. This is not about fashion, folks, I’m talking about decency. There are acres of common area in The Basement and there was no way to tie this thing without leaving gaping holes and I am hardly the most modest person on the planet, as anyone who happened to be at the Willy T on my 40th birthday can attest. For anyone more decorous, this would have to be humiliating.

I double wrapped the thing around myself, knotted it like a sarong, and stepped out of the ladies locker room into the first waiting area. In addition to the plainclothes waiters, there were two men dressed like me, one bald, one wearing a baseball cap. I gave them a sheepish grin, resisting the urge to curtsy, or maybe do a pirouette.

“I forgot the matching heels,” I said as I walked past them.

The bald guy laughed. Apparently radiation was going to be as hilarious as the rest of cancer.

“At least now you know what color they are so next time you can wear a head scarf that doesn’t clash,” baseball hat guy called after me, as I began the two-mile walk down the hall to the nurse’s station.

I didn’t know I was so attached to the ugly gown until I was required to take it off and lie down, naked except for my underpants and flip-flops, on the cold CAT scan table. The air conditioning was on high. Three women (nurses? technicians?) were making dozens of minute adjustments to my position. They tilted my chin up a little, pushed my shoulders back, twisted my hips. They taped my breasts out to the sides and covered the lower part of my chest with a heavy sandbag, efforts to protect those areas from the radiation field, which would target my neck and chest.

Once happy with the position, it was time to make the mask. A large, flat piece of plastic with holes to breathe is heated up and placed over you. “Keep your eyes closed,” said one of the women. “It will feel like a hot, wet towel over your face.” I tried to imagine some exotic spa treatment but the smell of plastic and chemicals just doesn’t compete with lavender. While the women deftly molded the plastic around me, I tried to contemplate my Dalai Lama quandary but the present moment is less Zen, more Twilight Zone. What did Dr. X say? Each radiation treatment was equal to how many CAT scans? 150?

Just then I heard Dr. X’s voice. “How are you Miss Smith?” What is he, a dentist? He knows I can’t speak, or even blink my eyes with a yes or no answer, at this moment. A friend later suggested a hand gesture might have been an acceptable response given the circumstances, but even they are in a particular position, and the nurses can’t stress enough how important it is to remain perfectly still because, you know, one false move and the wrong part of your body gets blasted with some lethal amount of radiation.

I got a CAT scan, which the doctor will use to help determine exactly where the radiation will go, and pretty soon I was finished and the nurse handed me an appointment card for next week when they will simulate an actual treatment. She casually added that they might start the treatment for real that day, which was not at all my understanding from my last conversation with Dr. X, but he was nowhere to be found.

Then, just as I was starting to freak out, and forcing myself to do that anxiety-to-anger thing, I learned that there’d been a scheduling mix up which meant waiting four more hours for my second scan. This scuttled my plans to sneak in and hear the Dalai Lama, but on the upside (a) potentially preserved my karma and (b) gave me someone appropriate to direct my rage at: Brian, the guy with the misfortune to deliver this news.

Is it a big deal, a delayed scan? No. But in the fragile balance of this wacky cancer world where daily survival means holding the big issues at bay, it’s the little injustices—scheduling conflicts, a minor misunderstanding—that sometimes bring my walls tumbling down. It’s like those “quality of life” crimes they’re always talking about at city hall. Sure, that double homicide on the drug corner a few blocks away is serious business, but it’s those damn drunk kids who keep pissing on your lawn after the ball game that are really wearing you down.

Brian must have good karma because he smiled through our entire exchange, conducted with absolute sangfroid on his part, and in the end I just pushed all the rage down and cried anyway.

Know thyself.

I always thought that by this age, wife and mother would be part of who I was. Quitting my job took away another label. If you ask me if I ever defined myself by my occupation, I would say no, although for many years, I often said, “I am a reporter.” Conversely, I never defined myself by my last full-time job—waitressing—even though other people did. (“If you’re such a good writer, how come you’re a waitress?”) Traveling alone stripped away a few more layers. (Where do I want to go? What do I want to do? How am I going to make this work by myself?) Just when a clear picture of what’s going on inside was finally starting to emerge I walk past a mirror and—quite literally—do not recognize myself.

So here I am, sitting in another recliner with another IV and typing away because writing is part of what I do to try to figure things out and God knows it’s hard to meditate when they keep sticking you with needles. Before I can get the PET scan, which will be fused with the CAT scan to determine the radiation dose, we have to wait for the chemicals I’m drinking to kick in. (Barium Sulfate Suspension, "Banana Smoothie Flavor." What the fuck is barium, anyway? I seem to remember seeing it on the periodic table of the elements that Fun Kim sent me as a joke from Oregon where she is student teaching at a high school, serving her sentence for the sins of Pamplona.) My talisman for the afternoon is a piece of cloth touched to the relics of St. Theresa, pressed into my palm by my Mother, who also informed me that our neighbor would be praying the rosary for me that day.

I am overwhelmed by the number of people who pray for me from devout Italian Catholic family members to a dear friend who insists her mother is a member of Our Lady’s Heavenly Bowling Team. I’ve done my share of talking to God in the past few years—mostly in magnificent European churches while the mass was going on in some language I didn’t understand, or in remote, natural locations involving expansive sky and sea—but I’m not as comfortable with prayer in the traditional sense.

It takes me a long time to count my blessings. By the time I give thanks for all the amazing people in my life, and ask God to take care of their needs, and then pray for the homeless and the nation’s leaders, and all the people with bad shoes (that’s a joke, for the readers who think my hilarious cancer posts are getting too serious), and all the cancer patients who are much worse off than I am—and I know there are so, so many of them—and then move on to the impoverished children in Third World countries, I’m exhausted, not to mention fraught with worry about all the people I might have forgotten. “Shit, I didn’t even get to world peace,” is the last thought in my head before I fall asleep.

When I do get around to it, I ask for strength and love but, oddly, never to be healed or cured. That’s always felt like a deal between me and my body, somehow wrapped up in whatever else it is that ails me.

It is natural, almost cliché, to become more of a spiritual seeker when faced with serious illness and death, both of which have crossed my path in the last 8 months. My diagnosis came shortly after my father’s horrible and sad death from metastatic lung cancer—horrible because of the disease, sad because of the circumstances surrounding his death, circumstances dictated in large part by how he had chosen to live.

These days, my religion is a bit of a Chinese lunch buffet. An amalgam of East and West. A little insight from Atheist Lover or Cynical Yogi. A helping of inspiration from Fake Redhead or a woman named Mean, who is anything but. Angels come in many forms. Mrs. Jagger has been known to quote a Stones song or two (“You can’t always get what you want…”)

For the record, I always feel like I get what I need. And I am willing to accept that there is something I’m supposed to learn from all of this, something I missed, even with all the re-evaluating of the past few years. Which means I’ll probably be spending more time at Cynical Yogi’s studio, where I can leave some negativity at the door, then go home and work the rest out on paper.

I like a little edge with my enlightenment, an attitude that says sometimes you have to grab the Universe by its you-know-what and shake some truth out of it, and sometimes the truth isn’t pretty. Sometimes it’s hard or scary. Sometimes it’s just whiny, self-indulgent or self-pitying, unreasonable or un-p.c.—which doesn’t seem very enlightened at all—but it’s what I feel on some days, and I am not afraid to own it.

I’ll pray for strength to be a diligent student. When you don’t have all the answers, you ought to keep studying. Especially when you’re paying for the class.

###

Absolutely Hilarious

2008-07-17T18:15:00.005-04:00

http://www.buckcash.com/cancerisland/images/toons/absolut16_560comp.jpg

Is That All There Is?

2008-07-08T15:39:00.005-04:00

Dr. R thinks it’s time we start seeing other people. In stereotypical bad break-up timing, he delivered this news on a Friday, just before the weekend, after making me wait an hour to see him.

No, he informed me, he didn’t want to keep that PET scan date we had been planning for a month, and he thought it best to cancel our weekly blood test rendezvous. Better just to finish up the chemotherapy and then go our separate ways for awhile.

Except for this not entirely unexpected development, the last day of chemo—June 27—was utterly uneventful. After an anxious build-up, the 8th and final treatment went so smoothly, it barely registered. I had expected to write through most of it, raging about headaches and chemo farts and the creepy way my veins feel, like they’re just going to burst and send blood spurting all over. I thought I would detail every last minute, but once I was in the chair, it was too much effort to open my laptop. Maybe I’m suffering from chemo brain after all.

Since Friday was not my regular day (treatment was pushed back a few days because I was so sick the last time around), I didn’t know any of the other people hooked up to IVs. There were two women, both of whom were sleeping, and one man, accompanied by his wife, who was getting his first treatment. The Little Infusion Room on the 13th Floor was quiet. I listened to music and chatted with my chemo date, who brought me lunch and stayed until the end, which came even sooner than expected when Kristin, the nurse, unhooked me before the last saline drip was finished, declaring “you don’t need it.” I got up, gathered my things, hugged Debbie, the nurse who usually administers my chemo, and that was it. It felt like the last day at some stupid summer job you didn’t like all that much. You met a few nice people, but other than that, the experience was entirely forgettable. (What was the name of that funny lady? You know, the one at the front desk at the place I worked that summer in Philly? Remember? The summer that sucked?)

I had one last, fleeting thought that I should wish the new guy luck and offer some words of encouragement, as someone had for me on my first day of treatment, but he was in the bathroom when I was wrapping up and if there’s one thing I’d learned in my four months of chemo it’s that you don’t wait around for that stuff. When you’re done, you get the hell out of there, which I did, without looking back, without making my usual stop at reception to schedule the next appointment with Dr. R, the erstwhile main man in my life.

Which is how I ended up, five days later, sitting in the basement of the hospital--where they keep all the scary equipment--and sizing up the proposal of Dr. X.

It is not a blind date. I had met Dr. X, the cancerologist specializing in radiation therapy, once before, about five months ago, and I liked him. He was the first one to explain what the treatment for Hodgkin’s would entail, calmly going through all the horrific details and ramifications while my head spinned. He was also the first one to use the word cancer. Isn’t that hilarious? The whole first month of this process, from discovering the lump in my neck in January through surgery and diagnosis in February, none of the experts ever used the word cancer, not even the surgeon, not even when he was referring me to oncology.

Now Dr. X and I are again face to face or, more precisely, knee to knee. Dr. X has pulled his chair up very close and is looking me directly in the eye and gently running through the list of potential side effects of radiation which include burning skin, extreme fatigue and almost certain loss of thyroid function and range in severity from sore throat to heart (why is the heart always in the balance?) and lung problems to—my personal favorite—other cancers. Breast cancer. Thyroid cancer. Leukemia. Other lymphomas.

These are my choices?

The latest scans indicate the chemo is doing its job. The parts of my body that were glowing with cancer cells aren’t glowing anymore. The radiation, Dr. X explains, is designed to ensure that all the cancer is killed, even, or, I suppose, especially, the cancer you can’t see. If I don’t get the radiation and I start glowing with Hodgkin’s again, they can still treat it (Good News!) but it’s harder: heavy doses of radiation and even heavier blasts of chemo, maybe even some other things involving phrases like bone marrow and stem cell transplant.

Dr. X is very complimentary. He compliments my scarf. (Gucci.) He tells me I look good. I roll my eyes. He asks me for the third time when I completed my last cycle of chemo. “Friday,” I tell him. “Friday, five days ago?” Yes. He looks surprised. “Most people, five days after chemo…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm the Chemo Queen. Whatever.

Dr. X wants a committed relationship. Unlike Dr. R and his casual every-other-week dates, he’ll insist on seeing me every day if we decide to get involved.

These are my choices.

A bubble bath and good book never looked so appealing.

###

Circling the Wagons

2008-06-26T23:36:00.001-04:00

I have a sneaking suspicion that people are being nice to me because they’re afraid I’m going to die soon.

People are cooking me meals, and sending me gifts, and offering to buy me plane tickets to fly all kinds of good places. My best friend from college, on her way to a family reunion last weekend, made a brief overnight stop in Philly, her three year old and all their gear in tow, allegedly to visit, but I’m convinced she just wanted to make sure I’m still breathing. She is suspicious of this whole Internet thing and probably thinks some poser is ghost writing my blog.

If only. Writing—or ranting, rambling, call it what you want—feels like way too much effort, much like everything else lately. I don’t return phone calls or e-mails or read the books people are sending. I skipped a summer solstice party last Saturday night that I had been looking forward to for a month. The thought of getting showered and dressed was exhausting, never mind the drive, or the small talk. Better to stay prone with back-to-back episodes of The Wire, my latest addiction. I’m like one of the junkies on the show, shutting out the daylight, the rest of the world, except for my TV and my couch, my latest drugs of choice. Benign compared to what they’re pumping through my body.

Here are some other things I don’t do: Pay my bills on time. Look for work. Write thank you notes. (Who knew cancer was such a gift-receiving opportunity?) Buy gifts or cards for other people, even people who do it for me, even people who are having birthdays. Work on my book. Deal with my insurance paperwork.

There was no rebound after the last round of chemo. It made me sick. It made me tired. Really tired. Dr. R says that’s normal. There’s a cumulative effect. Some people say it takes a year to feel normal again, he told me. I had resigned myself to the fact that my summer is toast. Now it’s my entire year?

My friends who are sailing the Pacific just sent an e-mail saying they had reached the Marquesas. “You’ll be back out there soon,” said another sailor when I told him the news. Back? Feels like I was never out there. That was some other woman, some other lifetime.

2008 is a bust.

All I want to do is be around the people who know me best, who let me be cranky and don’t care what my hair looks like.

I couldn’t even get to chemo on schedule this week. Being sick after the last treatment prevented my getting the immune-boosting $3500 Super Shot on time so everything got pushed back. No big deal, said Dr. R, probably just as well to have a few extra days to recuperate. I took recuperation seriously and did next to nothing for two weeks and two days.

So now I go for my last treatment Friday. That’s right: My last round of chemo is tomorrow. Please don’t cheer, it will make me bristle. I’ve got my split of Veuve, a gift from the well-intentioned girls during the Sex and the City weekend (it comes in its own pink purse, the Clicquot City Traveler. Again, who knew?) for this exact occasion, but I’m not ready to break out the champagne (not for this, anyway) and celebrate anymore than I wanted to freak out when they first told me I had cancer. It’s too long of a road and right now it’s still uphill.

Here’s the thing: People say it’s okay to break down, and have weak moments, and cry, and complain and be angry, but see, I’m on to their tricks. Because you know what happens when I do? They try to cheer me up! They remind me that treatment is curing me, tell me that it’s almost over, insist that radiation won’t be so bad, no matter how anxious I am about it now. When did everybody become such an expert in radiation? Cheerleading is very annoying when you’re trying to unload, especially when you’ve been lulled into letting down your defenses.

It’s nobody’s fault. Most people mean well and want to be supportive. It’s only natural to want to help, look on the bright side, try to make your friend feel better. I’d probably do the same thing, even as I’m trying valiantly to honor my own pace. It’s a catch-22.

###

Don't Cry For Me

2008-06-15T16:47:00.012-04:00

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?

###

Sex and the City

2008-06-06T16:24:00.022-04:00

"Miss Truvy, I promise that my personal tragedy will not interfere with my ability to do good hair."
--Steel Magnolias

“Look at yourself right now and tell me you don’t feel sexy.” The order came from Captain Celia.

I turned around to face the mirror in the entryway of the hotel suite. Almost ready for bed, I had shed my dress and bra, but was still wearing heels, black and purple lace panties, and my wig. Long, dark tresses spilled halfway down my back and curled over my naked chest, covering just enough to keep the shot PG-rated. So far.
Twisting sideways, I cocked my head over my shoulder, thrust a hip out in my sultriest stance and peered out from behind wispy bangs. I’d have to work on the seductive look but I had to admit I looked pretty good. The reflection also confirmed my belief that without the designer dress borrowed from Dr. Lisa’s South Beach collection and my own good jewelry to class things up, the hair was definitely tawdry stripper material. To be sure, I twirled back around and struck a few poses for the girls. You wouldn’t think a group of straight, 40-something women would be my target audience but they were quite enthusiastic. Must have been the Moët. Or the Glenlivet.

Captain Celia, Dr. Lisa, and Hurricane Lilly, my partner in crime when I first quit city life and moved to the islands, flew in to join Ellen and me in Philadelphia for a Sex and the City sexandthecitymovie.com girls weekend. The four of us with Philly roots hadn’t all been together since before Hurricane Lilly and I moved to the Virgin Islands three and a half years ago. Our reunion had been in the works for months at my request, as it seemed a much more fun alternative to flying in for chemo treatments, which all of them had offered to do.

My real life versions of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love my married girlfriends equally, and not just because most of them are also responsible parents who always answer their phones and drive reliable SUVs, making them great in-case-of-emergency contacts. But there’s a special affinity for this group of women who are smart, successful and, none of them having ever been married, know what it’s like to not go home every night to that one person who’s required to be there for you. We share what the Washington Post called “another important painful life passage—being single in a couple-centric culture.”

We laughed and cried through the entire movie outing, then spent the rest of the weekend retelling our favorite parts, like when the women, all decked out for a night on the town, piled into a cab on their way (late, of course) to the theater. One of them, spotting an old lover on the street and wanting to show how fabulous she was, leaned out the window with her glass of champagne and waved. Her well-manicured hand, unfortunately, also held the theater tickets, which blew away as she toasted, the wind, like the ex, snatching her moment of triumph and threatening to spoil her immediate future. Sex and the City-esque panic ensued. “Stop the cab!” yelled one woman while two others hopped out and ran after the errant tickets, Manolos click clacking on the sidewalk, hair and skirts flying up in the breeze, nary a drop of Veuve Clicquot spilled.

This, incidentally, was not a scene from the movie but rather something that happened on the way to the movie, made more poignant by the fact that the two women chasing paper down Walnut Street had nearly come to e-mail fisticuffs the week before, squabbling over who was more competent to procure, in advance, what were sure to be coveted tickets for a sold-out show. (They were, and it was.) This is what happens when too many Type-A women try to plan too short a trip home after too long an absence. As a footnote, I will add that the brouhaha delayed the entire entourage getting to the theater, necessitating that our pregnant and married friend—the only one meeting us there—hold two rows of seats until almost-showtime, fending off a mob of over-excited, seat-hungry girl groups, all the while desperately needing to pee. (See props, above, regarding responsible married friends.)

Fashion was also as much a part of the real fun as the movie fun, and I had an edge there, not only because I had all the good hair accessories (strawberry blonde curls on Saturday to match my Pebbles—as in Pebbles and Bam Bam—T-shirt, brunette with bangs Sunday) but also because I was the only one with cancer, and cancer is very trendy. Just last week Katie, Brian and Charlie were all on Good Morning America, talking about the big three networks’ joint prime time cancer special. They were chatting with GMA host Robin Roberts, who, undergoing treatment for breast cancer, had whipped her wig off live and on the air a few weeks earlier, announcing that from then on, she’d be going without. huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/22/robin-roberts-sheds-her-w_n_97920.html Poor Diane Sawyer. Her fair blonde hair and classic look suddenly seemed… so last year.

The rest of the weekend was filled with ab-firming laughter and guess-you-had-to-be-there moments. We caught up on new flirtations and analyzed the shortcomings of old boyfriends like we were talking about them for the first time. For 48 straight hours, my girlfriends told me how fabulous I am, and how gorgeous I looked. Surrounded by so much love, I slept like a baby and woke up, for the first time in ages, without my chronic hangover, previous night’s parties notwithstanding.

We laughed and ate and drank and laughed some more and then I blinked and it was over which, as the Haverford grad in the group so eloquently put it, “sucks ass.” If only life in Philly wrapped up as neatly as it does in Hollywood. We’d need a lot more cash to live the big screen lifestyle every day. Among the five of us, there’s not a relationship in sight. But we’ve got the friendship thing nailed. Monday morning came and the bravest, most beautiful women I know all got on their respective planes to head home to… whatever’s next. Flying solo, but not alone.
###

Moment of Weakness

2008-05-29T22:51:00.007-04:00

I am awake but my eyes are still closed, sunlight angling to invade my throbbing head. My stomach is churning like the Mediterranean in a mistral. The bottle of Zofran is on the table, six feet away, but that's five feet too far. Anticipating the wave of seasickness that will wash over me the second I stand up, I choose to lie still where maybe I'll drown in my misery. I feel sick and tired and, irrationally, utterly defeated that I had to start taking the anti-nausea medication after this last round of chemo. Now I can't even reach the drugs. Humiliating.

I recall a conversation I had with a sailor friend shortly after my diagnosis. His call came during one of the endless waiting room waits in the office of some specialist or another.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Pissed off," I hissed into the phone.

"That's understandable," he empathized. "The problem is, you don't know who to be pissed off at!"

Yes, I do. Everybody.

I'm pissed off at the doctors who say I might need radiation after the chemo is finished and pissed off at the nurses who keep sticking me with IVs and making my veins hurt. I'm pissed off at the people who said they'd be here for me and aren't and even more pissed off at the people who are here for me because they're the easiest people to be pissed off at, what with them hovering around all the time, always asking me how I'm feeling. Why do they keep doing that? It's so annoying.

I am pissed off at myself because I have girlfriends flying in from all over the country this weekend for a Sex and the City movie party, something I've been looking forward to for months, but I am in a piss-poor mood that I can't shake. I feel blue. A misunderstanding with some guy leaves me in tears. I want to let it out, cry, wallow in self-pity. I know this temper, it's PMS, but then I remember that I'm not getting that these days. Which reminds me, I'm pissed off that I'm probably going through early menopause and don't have any kids, or a husband. Also, I'm pissed off about my lost yachting job, my trashed financial plan, and my evaporated travels. If I think about it a little longer, I'm sure I'll come up with a few more things about which to be pissed off. Surely there have been other miscellaneous injustices, scarcely noticed in the onslaught of the past five months.

Getting up on alternate Tuesday mornings is torture. This past Tuesday was #6 of 8 chemo treatments. Other people like to cheer that statistic ("Another one down! Only two to go!") but not me. It's getting harder instead of easier. The alarm goes off and I pull the pillow over my head, the little girl who doesn't want to go school. Mommy, I don't want to go! Please don't make me go-o-o! I wail to myself. It's too ha-ard! The words of a book I read as a child run through my head: "I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day..." I don't remember what the kid in the book was whining about, but he's got nothing on me.

Chemo this week lasted all day. I thought I'd get right in to start treatment since Dr. R was on vacation, but instead, I had to wait two and a half hours to see his partner. As usual, the effervescent Dr. Genius was quick to assure me that my cancer is CURABLE! that as soon as we were done talking we were gonna go in there and get me CURED! but then he let slip that he thought 8 rounds of chemo wasn't going to be enough. This is like being told, as you're approaching the finish line of your 10K, that the race has been changed to a half marathon. Don't forget that I hate running. Fuck cancer and all its stupid races.

Two cups of tea later, I can sit up and type. I try to psych myself up to shower and get dressed to go out, but I feel immobilized. I hate how I look in the mirror and I hate that my eyelashes are falling out and I hate that I don't have the energy to fight every hateful minute. I eye myself warily, wondering what offhand remark later today or tomorrow will trip the suppressed rage.

I troll through pages of saved (still unanswered) e-mails to remind myself of all the support I have.

"How can you be going through so much and showing so little? No anger or resentment?" writes my best friend from college. "I cry sometimes when I think about everything. Please tell me you have moments of weakness too."

Does this answer the question?

"Marge, you are one the bravest women I know," writes another friend. I don't know about that. I am strong. Resilient. I can't get comfortable with brave. I am pissed off that I have to be any of them.

###

A Flashing Insight Into Infinity

2008-05-22T15:36:00.010-04:00

Although there are oceans we must cross
And mountains that we must climb
I know every gain must have a loss
So pray that our loss is nothing but time
--The Mills Brothers “Till Then”

Anyone who knows me knows it was only a matter of time before my weekly Wednesday posts started showing up on Thursdays. Chronically late, I am the quintessential procrastinator, the reporter who never missed a deadline but always made the editor sweat, still writing, tweaking, making changes up until the last possible second.

Everything I read tells me I’m supposed to take it easy, not work too hard, don’t do anything I don’t want to do, but if I didn’t have a self-imposed deadline, I wouldn’t write at all. My original plan was to post on Wednesdays and Sundays, like my favorite New York Times columnist, but I accomplished that exactly zero times. It may not seem like much, but writing twice a week is a tough schedule, especially without the incentive of the Times paycheck.

As you might imagine, I adapted rather well to the no-worries, no-hurries Caribbean lifestyle, where even the newspaper might come out a day late if the beach weather was particularly fine. I thought time had taken on new meaning in the islands, but that was nothing compared to the melted-clock, Dali-esque world I inhabit now, where first the winter and then spring were measured not by snow and lilacs but doctors appointments and chemo treatments. Is it really almost summer?

Although I had to give up my yacht job for the season, I was fortunate enough to keep my part-time gig working on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Internet 2 Global Concert Series, essentially a closed-circuit, high-definition, telecast transmitting live performances into university theaters around the world. I host the show and do the backstage interviews during intermission and between pieces.

I cannot say enough about how wonderful this experience has been. My orchestra co-workers—who have been with me from the head-spinning days of my January diagnosis through my dog-tired midpoint of chemo treatment just last week when I was napping between meetings and rehearsals—could not be more supportive. I am honored to work with this outstanding group of smart, dedicated and compassionate people.

And then there is the music.

It is not an overstatement to say that sitting in the concert hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and listening to this most venerable of orchestras play (Beethoven’s majestic Fifth, Bernstein’s beautiful West Side Story, Tchaikovsky’s first symphony, the one he called “a sin of my sweet youth,” Mozart’s last symphony, the exuberant Jupiter) is life-affirming.

I produced a piece for the concert featuring Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, known as the “Symphony of a Thousand,” about how the Philadelphia Orchestra came to give the first U.S. performances of this massive work nearly a century ago. A young Leopold Stokowski—the visionary conductor who would team up with Walt Disney years later to produce Fantasia in 1941—was in the audience for the world premiere in Munich in 1910. The composer himself conducted what Stokowski described as “a flashing insight into infinity.” There’s a great story about Stokowski, a few years later, fleeing Europe amidst wartime tensions, leaving most of his luggage behind, but with the score safely stowed in his briefcase.

Our final broadcast of the season was a performance of Schubert’s last two symphonies, “Unfinished” and “The Great.” The young composer, responsible for some of the most sublime music ever written, died at age 31.

Perhaps it sounds trite to call music a universal language, but I am often at a loss to find words for what I feel while listening. Before January, it could be simply joyful. Now I find it healing.

For a less esoteric but equally life affirming example of the power of music, I take you to a catering hall in the suburbs where, last Saturday night, my godparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The highlight came early, when my godfather serenaded his wife with an old Mills Brothers song:

Till then, we’ll dream of what there will be
Till then, we’ll call on each memory
Till then, when I will hold you again
Please wait till then…

A sweet and simple declaration of love, without accompaniment, brought down the house.

In the search for something bigger, proof is often glimpsed in brief flashes. In the meantime, we focus on what’s in front of us, liking pushing back little blog posts another day and another day until there is nothing left to say about cancer. Till then.

###

The Big Casino

2008-05-14T14:30:00.013-04:00

The morning of my 43rd birthday I woke up with a hangover. Sadly, there had been no party the night before.
Most days these days I wake up feeling hungover.

“I don’t get it,” I whined to a friend over the phone on one especially brutal morning. “I ate a healthy dinner, I didn’t drink, I got a good night’s sleep. Why do I feel like shit?”

“Maybe because they’re poisoning your body.”

Oh, right, I keep forgetting. Fucking chemo.

I pop an Advil, put the water on for coffee and turn on the computer so I can complain in cyberspace. Fun Kim has a suggestion:

Maybe you should start strategically placing remnants of a party around the house so when you wake up with the “hangover” you can trick yourself into the party. Maybe not. Just an idea.

Next I check my horoscope. Free Will Astrology is my guilty pleasure:

Alison Covarrubias is a mentor for female entrepreneurs. Her "Ladies Who Launch" program inspires women to be brave and brazen as they develop their own businesses. One of Covarrubias's prime pieces of advice: "If you don't feel like you're going to throw up, you're not taking enough risks." That's also my message for you, Taurus. In the name of smart gambles and tricky success, I dare you to push yourself way out of the comfort zone.

The phrase rattles through my aching head. You’re not taking enough risks.

True enough. I haven’t gambled on much of anything since being diagnosed with, as Junior Soprano dubbed it, “The Big Casino.” I haven’t had to figure out how to make 100 euros last for three weeks, or decide in a split second whether the captain of that gorgeous 1928 Fife about to sail to Valencia is a psychopath or not. Come to think of it, I don’t really make any decisions at all these days. I go to chemotherapy, see my cancerologist, get lots of tests and let all the people who love me worry about what one reporter friend calls “the C word.” Apparently the biggest chance I take is saying the word CANCER out loud. With TV mob bosses and tough journalists so faint-hearted, God only knows who else I’m offending. Cancer is not hard, but as a game it stinks. There’s no calculated risk and the payoff is lousy. Even if you win, the best you can do is break even.

I forward the horoscope to another Taurus friend who recently quit a well-paying job to open her own risky business. She, appropriately, has been puking her guts out. Me, my stomach’s so settled even chemo fails to make me sick.

“Work” consists of fulfilling the obligations I committed to before January and nothing more. I haven’t solicited for new paying jobs, nor have I been working on my book, stuck on a hundred pages in. A few rejections—one from a writer’s conference, one a short story contest—have left my unfinished manuscript shelved, along with a stack of novels I have neither the concentration nor inclination to read.

Scheduling chest X-rays and PET scans, making dates with Dr. R and generally trying to stay as healthy as possible is my new full-time job. Ladies who launch? I’ve become a lady who lunches. If I get up, get dressed up, make it to Center City for a morning meeting and meet a friend for lunch, I’m toast.

Last week my wigs and I spent two exhausting hours at the salon. You can call me vain, but trust me it was a necessity, unless you think it’s acceptable for a relatively young woman to look like an aging bald man with a bad combover. My excellent stylist did the best she could, cutting what’s left of my thinning locks super short. Then she cleaned up Karina’s flyaways and gave the Lindsay Lohan a bang trim.

My hair doesn’t look hip and cool short, it looks like some old-lady beauty-parlor cut, thin and teased, except it’s not some shade of unnatural red or inexplicable blue. In an attempt to draw attention to other assets, I got my toes painted purple, splurging on the Balinese pedicure, inspired by the ancient secrets of the Indonesian salon owner’s grandmother. I breathed in the all-natural floral and ginger scrub and drifted away to the Pacific aboard little Carina which, another e-mail informed me that morning, had safely arrived in the Galapagos. Captain Kid and his girlfriend were probably swimming with sea lions and photographing the prehistoric giant tortoises at that very moment. Then my mind wandered over to another friend sailing in the other direction, across the Atlantic from New York to London. Okay, so he’s on the Queen Mary 2 and not a 30-foot sailboat, but, as he’s never been on a boat before, he is no less adventurous. It makes me happy to know a few people more fully immersed in salt water than me and my toes in the South Philly footbath.

Not all of my adventures are vicarious. I spent my birthday with one of my oldest friends, doing pretty much what we would have done to celebrate our birthdays back in 7th grade, i.e. going shopping at the mall and talking about the boys in our life. My girlfriend is married with two kids and lives in the suburbs, but has cultivated a double life as a rock star groupie, and not a fantasy life, either. Thanks in part to her brother’s status as a bona fide Atlantic City high roller, my friend frequently finds herself in the front row of sold out concerts. The Stones are her favorite so I address her as Mrs. Jagger over bad Chinese in the food court. She refers to me as Mrs. Bono and we buy clothes we think our fake rock star husbands will like.

The day after my birthday, Ellen and I took a road trip to New York to see the sublime Patti LuPone in the Broadway revival of Gypsy. We savored the legendary stage star from the second row of the St. James Theatre, another perfect detail in a day also blessed with perfect traffic and parking karma. After the show, we met up with one of my journalist friends for drinks at the Museum of Modern Art, where the cabernet cost $25 a glass.

“So how are you?” asked the Gotham newsman.

Well, I’ve been sick for three weeks, and I had to get a chest x-ray and I’ve been obsessively taking my temperature every few hours because, despite being an adult, proof is now required when my friends or family ask if I have a fever. My white blood cell counts are low, and I’m tired all the time, and might have to get that $3500 Super Shot that makes your bones hurt again. Meanwhile, I’m really losing my hair now and my excitement about all those fabulous scarves I bought during my last trip to New York lasted about three days. Now I’m over it and I just feel ugly when I look in the mirror.

“Fine, thanks.” I replied.

“Beautiful scarf.”

“Versace.”

Gotham Newsman told us about his efforts to convince his boss to send him to Myanmar, a shift in the conversation that made trendy Manhattan bars and temporary hair loss instantly insignificant, silly even. (It did not, however, detract from the importance of Patti. Good theater remains up there on the list of Things That Really Matter.)

After several more glasses of $25 wine than originally intended, Gotham Newsman picked up the tab and sent us on our way. Ellen, another 40-something single gal, had borrowed her Dad’s car for this trip. Like a little kid pooped after a full day in the big city, I collapsed into the front seat of the Chrysler sedan, whipped off my scarf, and fell asleep listening to Howard Stern on satellite radio grilling Steve Guttenberg about the size of his penis. When I woke up half an hour later, Ellen was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike and Howard was still talking about Guttenberg’s evidently generous endowment.

I don’t know why this tidbit sticks in my head, maybe because it’s no more off-color than the rest of my current life, but a few days later, I am still laughing about it as I am typing away at three o’clock in the morning. Despite being a chemo day, which makes me really tired, I can’t sleep—which is truly obscene—probably because of the steroids they give you to help the anti-nausea medication work. I am a junkie, so wired from whatever all those drugs are they’re slipping into my cocktails, I might as well drag myself out of the comfortable bed in which I’ve been tossing and turning for the past two hours and head back downstairs to the floor with no clocks for a few more rounds of… whatever it is we’re playing.

Maybe I’ll get lucky. It was, after all, a decent day in the cancerologist’s 13th floor office. My latest PET scan showed no illumination in my neck and chest, indicating the cancer cells have stopped their frenzied dividing dance; inspecting the scan on Dr. R’s computer, I noticed my brain was the only area of glowing hyperactivity, which might also explain tonight’s restlessness. Dr. R was “not ready to jump up and down yet,” but my response to the chemo, he said, has been “phenomenal,” proving, I think, that I am, in fact, the Chemo Queen.

“Woo hoo,” I responded, minus the exclamation point. “I don’t have enough energy to be more excited than that,” I apologized. “This lingering cold has kicked my ass,” I added, neglecting to mention the two days of birthday celebrations.

“Don’t forget the chemotherapy has a cumulative effect,” said Dr. R, “so you probably will feel a little more tired.” Still, Dr. R pronounced the overall picture—you guessed it—good news (!) but I am on to him and the rest of his ilk. Here in the land of relativity, it behooves the patient to know the house rules. Sure the PET shows the chemo is beating the cancer… but are we covering the spread? When can I cut my losses and go home?

Later in the infusion room, I saw a woman who, on my first day of treatment, gave me some helpful advice and a positive assessment of her first round of chemo. Her presence as a veteran was comforting on that day, but today, well into her own treatment for a recurrence of cancer, she was gaunt, pale and, having also suffered a stroke, slurring her speech. She told me she was upbeat because her latest scans also show cancer retreating, but she is a shadow of the woman I met two months ago. I am always uncomfortable talking to her because, having watched her deteriorate before my eyes, I can’t help but wonder what the odds are of ending up like her. The more she wants to talk, the more I need to bolt. I mumbled something lame, got the hell out of there, and went to lunch.

###

Voice of a Sailor

2008-05-07T12:56:00.014-04:00

The great thing about editors is, when they're not busy chopping up your latest example of genius, they can be pretty good for the ego. Sometimes they even have good timing.

Since I am still not feeling well (not feverish--98.2 at last check--just not well), I was happy to discover that I don't have to write about me this week because my editor at Sail magazine did it for me. He's not a bad writer, either...

http://sailmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/05/voice-of-sailor.html

Fever

2008-04-30T19:40:00.009-04:00

April 29, 2008:
Dr. R, I suspect, is not pleased. Since the day we started chemo, seven weeks ago, he has impressed upon me that I need to call him immediately if I have any signs of fever. Today I let slip that I don’t own a thermometer.

I have a theory that only three groups of people own thermometers:

1. Mothers.
2. Newly married women who are either (a) trying to get pregnant and become mothers or (b) trying not to get pregnant because they’re not ready to be mothers (yes, I know people who employ this method of birth control).
3. Hypochondriac ex-boyfriends who can’t face down a simple cold without whining for their mothers.

I may be a failure at Fahrenheit, but as an ex-reporter, I can take the pulse of the people. I am sure that a simple Single Girlfriend Poll (“Do you own a thermometer?”) will bear out my theory. Flash returns of the SGP (conducted while writing this) indicate mixed results, but when all votes are counted, I am in a clear majority. Even Dr. Lisa doesn’t own a thermometer and she’s a surgeon. Neither does my weather girl friend in New Orleans, which really struck me as funny since, you know, it's her job to know the temperature.

If I am under a pile of blankets, shivering, sweating and alone, I figure it’s time to call the doctor. Anything less than that? Take two Advil and suck it up. (This, by the way, is also why I don’t own a scale. When the jeans start to feel tight, it’s time to start skipping dessert and stop skipping the gym for awhile. I don’t need a flashing red LED display to tell me that.) Besides, with all my moving around, a thermometer is just one more thing to break, and then you have to worry about the mercury spilling (that’s right, and just imagine my surprise at the CVS this afternoon…)

The last time I felt truly feverish, it was more in that Peggy Lee you-give-me-fever-when-you-kiss-me kind of way, no trip to the ER warranted, except maybe for dehydration. I suspect most of my poll respondents also live in the world where fever (Fever! In the morning... Fever all through the night…) is desirable.

In my defense, after my first few rounds of chemo, I stayed with my mother who, naturally, owns a thermometer (see #1 above) and is also exponentially more worried about my health that I am, so no fever was going to escape her unnoticed. Also, I left chemo today, immediately bought a thermometer, and have been compulsively checking my temperature every half hour (97.9 at last check, nowhere near the 100.5 required to call Dr. R at home on his cell phone). Now if I could just get a consensus on normal. Back in the day (of my hard-to-read mercury thermometer) you had to be exact. (98.6? 96.8? I could never remember…) Now you’ve got a digital device that gives you a precise reading to the first decimal, and two pages of instructions on the vast range of “normal.”

Anyway, I am now being punished for my negligence because I am sick (although not feverish.) Not from the chemo, mind you (I am, evidently, the Chemo Queen) but from a nasty cold that started Friday night (“They always start on Friday nights,” observes the wise Dr. R) and now has me in the infusion room red-eyed, miserable, and hacking like I’m the dying diva, about to bring down the curtain on the final act of La Traviata. Today’s chemo date (my mother) is alternating between giving me “my poor baby” looks and trying to pacify the cancer patients in the room (“She’s not contagious. Really. She’s been getting this since she was four. Usually when she’s really tired and run down.”) Hodgkin’s they can handle, but tuberculosis tends to put people on edge.

The good news (!) is that chemo treatment #4 goes on as scheduled AND Dr. R says it’s okay to take the heavy duty anti-cold medication (what’s a few antibiotics and a generous helping of narcotic thrown into the alphabet soup chemo mix?) He prescribes a Z-pack and the biggest bottle of Robitussin with codeine I’ve ever seen. (My second drugstore surprise of the day.) Don’t even ask if I have an appropriately sized teaspoon for measuring the exact dose. If you don’t know the answer to that, you’re not reading closely enough.

The bad news is, I have to work this week, the kind of work where I’m on TV so I’m supposed to look good. On Monday, I guilted my friend Cynthia into sending her own sick child to school so she could schlep me and my stuff into Center City for one of my on-camera interviews. When I complained about how awful I looked, my childhood friend, who never says an unkind word about anybody, conceded, “It’s not your best day…”

It is, however, amazing what fake hair and a good makeup artist can do. A quick check in the mirror, and I am passable for the task at hand. I feel like one of those golf courses in New Jersey, built over a sealed landfill… my exterior is all finely manicured landscape masking a toxic waste dump beneath.

I feel like shit but I finish the interview, and, in another weird twist, the photographer doesn’t blink when I ask if, instead of dropping the DVD off at the office the next day, he can swing by the infusion room so I can screen during chemo.

“You’re going through that, too?” he asks.

Pre-chemo Monday nights have been identified as good drinking nights since I usually feel pretty good, but with the cold/possible TB, I decide it’s best to cancel. I call the girls at the bar.

“Are you finished with the interview? Come join us!” says Single Girl #1.

“I need chicken soup, not alcohol,” I cough into the phone. “Do they have soup over there?”

“They have lobster bisque.”

A few minutes later, steaming crock in front of me, I am still in the game, regaling my girlfriends with my latest discovery from Cancerland:

“Did you know there’s an online dating service for cancer patients?” I announce, in the just-try-to-trump-this-one approach I’ve adopted since being diagnosed.

There is a moment of silence.

“You mean there’s an entire, untapped pool out there?” says Single Girl #2, incredulously.

“Apparently.”

“So, are you going to do it?” asks SG #1.

“She doesn’t like to associate with those people,” SG #2 reminds SG #1. “I’ll bet all the men are sensitive and caring, though.”

“Maybe you should do it,” offers SG #1, suggesting that SG #2 go online and apply with my information.

We consider this. Given that I have no desire to participate, we rationalize, in a two-martinis-in kind of way, that this might just be acceptable.

Then again, we could all be suffering from delirium, which, while sometimes brought on by severe cases of fever, can also be caused by (according to my Webster's) "intoxication and other disorders."

Now you’ve listened to my story
Here’s the point that I have made:
Chicks were born to give you fever,
Be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade.

They give you fever
When you kiss them
Fever if you live and learn
Fever! ‘till you sizzle
What a lovely way to burn…
What a lovely way to burn…

The Ghost in the Room

2008-04-23T23:36:00.025-04:00

A few weeks after my surgery, when I was busy shopping for an oncologist, is about the time I started making regular, unannounced appearances in an old lover’s living room. This would not necessarily be unusual except that we had not spoken for a very long time. Also, I was shopping in Philadelphia and he lives in the Midwest.

He does not believe in the supernatural but knows I do and so he, somewhat haltingly, told me the story, perhaps not quite believing all the details himself, of how one day, there I was in his house out there on the prairie. “A presence” is how he described it. I wasn’t an apparition, and I didn’t speak, I was simply, on more than one occasion, there.

“I must have been waiting for you to call me,” I said.

When, a month later, he got a new job, moved to another state, and I started showing up in his living room there as well, he figured it was time to do just that. Our volatile relationship didn’t survive its torrid highs and destructive lows, but there was no denying we had some kind of cosmic connection from the moment we met, almost 15 years ago. Since this was also the day we both met Beyoncé (all three of us started working at the same television station on the same day), it was, metaphysically speaking, inevitable that the call would come the very day Beyoncé and I were together in New York, shopping for wigs and savoring our first face-to face gossip lunch in years.

“God has a funny sense of humor,” said Beyoncé.

My atheist ex, however, doesn’t get the joke, which is how we ended up this past Sunday night, a few weeks after our initial contact, having a conversation that started like this:

Me: How come you haven’t said anything about my blog?

Atheist Lover: I haven’t been able to read all of it.

Me: So you don’t like my writing.

Atheist Lover: I’m not even going to respond to that.

Me: What then?

Atheist Lover: It’s the subject matter. It’s difficult.

Me: So you don’t think it’s any good.

Atheist Lover: That’s not what I said.

Those are not direct quotes but you get the idea, not only about the dialogue, but also about why things didn’t work out between us. Well, that and something about me being fickle and noncommittal, but that’s another story.

Being a tough-edged newsman who recently lost his best friend to breast cancer, he got straight to the point, no softball warm-ups: What if? What if you’re not in the 80% who make it? Do you really think this is routine? Are you scared? Leave it to somebody whose last words to you were “please don’t call me again” to resurface out of the blue and bring up the tough stuff. Do people besides reporters do this?

After my January “this is not a death sentence” diagnosis/prognosis and the handing over of a pamphlet on how to execute a living will, death left the room for awhile.

Most people are happy to tow Dr. Genius’s Hodgkin’s-is-CURABLE!-LET’S-GET-YOU-CURED! party line and the few people—mostly family and close friends—who were more upset than I was at the beginning of all this, I had effectively shut down by yelling at them for crying. Who had time to cry? There’s no crying in this cancer!

I had to laugh so I wouldn’t lose it. I get that making fun of this is not for everyone. It’s not meant to be. I started writing because it was cathartic. It still is. I like that people read me and thrive on feedback. I am flattered when someone says they think what I write might help somebody else, but make no mistake: This is not altruistic. This is my therapy.

Atheist Lover, for one, is not buying my hilarious cancer crap. This is somewhat puzzling because he is a funny guy. I also believe I inherited irreverence from him and attribute much of my no-holds-barred ability to talk about damn near anything—in public—to the years we worked together. I don’t know if everyone would consider those traits valuable parting gifts from a love affair, but I do. (To be fair, I also walked away with a fine appreciation for art collecting, a really good recipe for swordfish and vivid, steamy memories of long weekends where we never left the bedroom, but that’s definitely another story…) It’s okay, though, that we don't see eye to eye on this. The Universe knows when you need to be challenged.

“It’s really not necessary to sound so chipper all the time,” wrote another skeptic in an e-mail.

Okay, yes, I give! I confess! It's exhausting being upbeat. But dwelling on the negative is even more work. People die from cancer, yes. They also die from heart attacks, drunk drivers and freak accidents. When people asked if I was afraid of drowning at sea while sailing across the Atlantic, I told them the odds were greater of dying in a traffic accident on the Schuylkill. To this day, I worry about meeting my demise on that expressway (maybe while driving into Center City for chemo). If nothing else, the Zen-meets-fun philosophy I’ve honed during a couple years of island life and unstructured travel has taught me not to waste precious time fretting about things I can’t change.

I have had my meltdowns, yes—but not since I started chemotherapy. I am conserving energy by not dealing with anything I don’t absolutely have to deal with right now this minute. The other day, another 40-something single girlfriend asked if I harvested my eggs before beginning. (I did not.) Her tentative question made me realize I had completely stopped talking about an issue that consumed me in the early weeks of this whole mess. I did what I had to do—cried, researched, weighed my options, cried some more, and made the most thorough and thoughtful decision I was capable of in the brief time allotted to consider my future fertility without perilously delaying life-saving treatment—and locked the ramifications away in a box to be opened…later, after this is all over, preferably in a nice exotic locale where the fate of not having children might be equated with freedom instead of loss.

This is not denial; it is a practical approach that works for me. It lets me live my life as normally as possible while my doppelganger—the one with cancer—goes to chemo biweekly and spends her free time flirting with the other side, making spectral house calls to unwitting ex-boyfriends.

Am I going to die? Yes. But most likely not from this. The fact that cancer could potentially kill me is, for now, stowed away in the box with the baby. If I go through six months of chemo and radiation and the tests show it didn’t work, then it’ll be time to think about it. Either way, I’m pretty sure I’ll be glad I didn’t spend the next/last six months of my life obsessing about dying.

Am I scared? I am probably about as scared of death as your average person, which is to say even though I believe there is some kind of afterlife, and sometimes can consider this peacefully and in a semi-enlightened way, I am often utterly gripped by fear. The fear is manageable when death is back there in its place, lurking in the shadows with the rest of the ghosts, but sometimes it insists on getting all up in your face, like it did on Sunday, and not just long-distance at the end of the day, but at the start of the day as well, at brunch with Ellen.

Ellen’s dad has been gravely ill, in and out of the hospital, for months now. Our conversations always start with an update on how he’s doing. On Sunday morning, however, Ellen’s sad news was that another friend’s father, believed to be in perfect health, had died suddenly, apparently suffering a heart attack while snorkeling in Martinique.

I told Ellen about one of the cancer books I’m reading in which the author describes a workshop on dying she attended at a Buddhist retreat. The first exercise goes something like this: What is the best-case scenario for your death? (Ellen and I looked at each other over our Bloody Marys and mimosas. Our grieving friend couldn’t be ready to hear this, but passing in a blissful, underwater heaven in some idyllic tropical setting with your spouse at your side had to be the right answer.) What is the worst-case scenario? What do you have to do to make the best-case scenario happen?

Maybe the dying exercise is macabre. But the point, I think, is that in the end, the questions about how you die become a lesson in how to live which, barring suicide, is the only part we have any control over anyway.

Exactly one year ago, I was in Antigua, racing in a classic boat regatta with my friend, Captain Kid. He had been debating whether to keep sailing on toward the Pacific or do the practical thing and head home to Cape Cod, get a real job and sock away some money. At a rum party one night, he announced he had decided to sail the Pacific.

“If I only had a year to live, that’s what I would do,” I remember him telling me. “That seems like a good enough reason to do it now.”

Two days ago, he and his girlfriend took their 30-foot sailboat through the Panama Canal. Next stop: the Marquesas, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Not too long ago, I was on a plane with my St. John friend Fun Kim. We had just spent two weeks in Venice. Prior to that, I had made my first trans-Atlantic crossing, sailed around the Mediterranean with a crew from Malta and traveled solo through central Italy. Fun Kim had been sailing the Aegean and cavorting around Istanbul. Before all that, we were both living and working in the Virgin Islands. We were on our way to Palma de Mallorca to look for yachting jobs.

Security was especially tight as there had been another terrorist bombing scare in London the day before. We decided to fly anyway and, while sitting there waiting for take-off, agreed that if the plane went down, well, we couldn't complain too much about how things turned out. We had done more in the previous few years than many people do in a lifetime. And we had both called our mothers to tell them we loved them.

That doesn’t mean I want to die, and I know Fun Kim doesn’t want to either (even on the days when working full time and getting her masters back home in Oregon is so bo-ring). That plane conversation happened in 2006, a full year before the summer in Spain when we saw the running of the bulls in Pamplona, sailed to the America’s Cup, and discovered the vending machine on a dock in Valencia that dispenses that coldest Heinekens on the planet for only one euro. Clearly there is more life to be lived.

I do, however, like to think I contemplated What If? three years ago when I first quit my city job and moved to paradise in search of…more. There were many good reasons the timing was right to make the move--I was healthy, my parents were healthy, I had money in the bank and no major responsibilities--but the final motivator, the real kick in the ass was…What if? What if a year (or three) from now, something happens and I’m no longer in a position to do it?

I thank God every day I did not fail to seize the moment. Having that regret in this moment would truly be haunting.

###

Dispatch from the Infusion Room

2008-04-16T15:30:00.008-04:00

It is Tuesday, April 15, and I am stressing, not because it is chemo day (it is), or because of the tax deadline (got that wrapped up right on schedule early this morning), but because I’ve been obsessing for two days now that I don’t have anything interesting to write about this week. Half a dozen blog posts and I’m plumb out of ideas. And then it hits me: Of all the creepy aspects of this whole surreal cancer thing, the creepiest just may be that the creepy stuff is all starting to feel normal.

Doesn’t everybody go to chemo on Tuesdays?

It has been three months since I discovered my gills a.k.a. the lump in my neck. The Three Month Rule is a handy predictor in life. The first time you feel disillusioned in a great new job, check your calendar. It’s been three months since you started. When you’re seeing somebody new who is so infatuated with you he starts naming your kids after the third date, it will take your wary, conservative self three months to give in to this intensity and decide he’s probably not a stalker and it’s okay to like him back. Which, in a paradigm of mathematics (or maybe it’s metaphysics), is exactly when he will stop calling. Now, after three months, cancer is dull. Powerful tenet, the Three Month Rule.

There is, however, a self-imposed deadline looming. Fortunately, I have been taking notes on all this, even the parts I now think are boring. (Cancer? Been there, done that!) Maybe I’m not the best judge of normal these days.

I am writing this from the infusion room, typing away on my laptop, my cadence off due to the compensation for the IV and the occasional stop to pluck an annoying hair off the keyboard. (No big deal.) The infusion room (See? The infusion room. Ho-hum. As if just the words didn’t make me nauseous in February. But that was only a month in.) at Dr. R’s office looks like your standard-issue waiting room except there are recliners mixed in with the standard-issue waiting room chairs. The recliners come in two colors, hospital almond (the four new ones, assembled since my last visit) and hospital green (the two old ones). Each recliner has a pull-up plastic table on the side, and is situated next to an IV pole with an infusion pump (not to be confused with Manolo Blahnik pumps, you’d have to bring them yourself, or ask Dr. Lisa to be your Chemo Date) attached.

Two prints depicting billowy curtains framing windows opening out onto water scenes adorn the north and south walls. The real windows on the west side of the infusion room overlook the Philadelphia city skyline but the blinds obscure most of the view today. The room is uninspired, but not nearly as depressing as the hospital’s assembly-line infusion room (one factor in deciding against the doctor based there, another being the snarly woman at the front desk).

Four weeks ago (two months in) I was the new kid on the block. Accompanied by my mother for my first day of chemotherapy, I was such a nervous wreck I don’t think I rolled my eyes at her all day. Not even once.

Now (Three Month Rule in effect), I plop into a recliner (scheduling my treatments early so I can get a good chair, which is of utmost importance, and not guaranteed. “Get a good chair!” my mother texted me this morning. “Did you get a good chair? That’s all I thought about ALL DAY!” my island friend Celia will say when she calls me later tonight) and switch into airplane mode, nodding a quick hello to the travelers around me while quickly popping in my earphones to thwart any attempts at engagement. I don’t mean to be rude but I don’t want to talk to these people. I am not one of these people. Besides, I am worried that a few of them might have overheard Dr. Genius shouting two weeks ago how my cancer is CURABLE which made me a little self-conscious around all these, you know, cancer patients. I don’t know anything about them, but I presume most of them have the NOT CURABLE kind of cancer, and I’m afraid maybe they won’t like me because even though I’m new to all this, I’m already the A-student of cancer treatment.

Here are my classmates:

On the left is an elderly Asian man. He is always here when I arrive, always in the same corner chair, lying back with a camouflage cap, eyes closed and shoes off. He appears to sleep through treatment. The same two women, perhaps his wife and daughter, are always there as well, sitting nearby, never speaking or reading, just keeping silent vigil.

Sitting directly across from me is a well-dressed black woman, about my age, looking like she’s squeezing treatment in on her lunch break from some high-profile job. Her chemo date is an older woman, about my mother’s age.

Next to her sits an attractive, white grandmother decked out in pink pants, pink flowered blouse, a pink turban and lots of gold jewelry. Are her eyebrows drawn on? I can’t tell. She is knitting, her nimble fingers unhampered by the IV in her right hand. Her husband and granddaughter, who appears to be about 8 (Why is this child here? Why isn’t she in school?), are sprawled in the chairs on the adjacent wall. Neither looks up from their personal electronic devices.

Then there’s me. I’m wearing sweatpants, my MOST WANTED crew T-shirt from the Caribbean, a zip-up Guinness jacket (souvenir from my only visit to Ireland, spent entirely in the Dublin airport) and my high-top Converse All-Stars (brown with pink and white flowers). We could be a photo for a National Cancer Institute “Cancer affects everyone” public service announcement.

The commonality that everyone in this little room is either sitting there hooked up to an IV, or sitting there staring at someone hooked up to an IV, seems normal to me today, but something in my brain insists that I fact check:

“Weird, huh?” I hiss in the general direction of my chemo date.

Chemo Date is self-possessed.

“Don’t you think it’s creepy?” I persist.

“I think it’s life-saving,” says Chemo Date.

Chemo Date is right, of course, but this is my disconnect. Because I am not thinking about dying (not from this, that is), I am thinking of this not as a life-saving miracle but as a colossal inconvenience and one that is getting fairly (yawn) routine at that. A routine that goes something like this:

9:00 a.m.   Appointment. (Alas, I am not here on time today because I am at the post office at 9 a.m. [See reference to making the tax deadline, paragraph 1.] Who could blame me for not wanting to be on time for chemo?

9:13 a.m.   Walk down Chestnut Street. Wonder who buys the cheap (but well-accessorized) satin Naughty Nurse, French Maid and Lady Cop outfits in the display window of the shop next door to Dr. R’s building.

9:14 a.m.   Wonder how many people take an elevator to the 13th floor to visit their oncologists.

9:15 a.m.   Sign in.

9:15:05 a.m. Wait.

The waiting room is mobbed. I’ve got two bags full of stuff to do, but know as soon as I pull something out, they will call my name and everything in my lap will end up on the floor so instead I look around and try to guess who’s got the cancer, and who’s just freaking out about the cancer. That skinny lady? Hard to tell. The skinny lady with thinning hair? Definitely. What about that healthy looking Irish guy? How about the sulking teenager?

9:40 a.m.   Vitals. Blood pressure: 110 over 60. Weight: 126. Complete Blood Count (CBC): Counts Excellent.

9:45 a.m. Wait.

10:10 a.m. Move into examination room.

10:10:05 a.m. Wait. The examination rooms look north. I can see the approach to the Ben Franklin Bridge. I can’t see the water, but I know the river is just beyond. I daydream about sailing for a few minutes, then dig out the iPod. I always listen to Christina Aguilera’s “Soar” in this room. Dr. R usually comes in about two minutes into the song.

10:20 a.m. Enter Dr. R. Begin witty banter.

“You never write. You never call.”

Dr. R chuckles. It is not a successful appointment if I don’t make Dr. R laugh.

Dr. R, just back from vacation, is delighted with my progress. My gills are disappearing. I feel strong and healthy. He seems impressed that I haven’t needed to take the anti-nausea pills. My Barry Bonds bone marrow has pumped my white blood cell count to super-normal levels.

Dr. Genius had seemed anxious to put me on the $3500 Super Shot as part of my regular routine, but Dr. R wants to take the wait-and-see approach. He thinks less drugs are better. This is one of the reasons I picked him, along with his concurrence that we would try to do the entire treatment without a surgically implanted port to deliver the chemo. (As an aside, I have to mention that last time around, in between gushing about how fabulous Dr. Genius is, his nurse lamented that I didn’t have a port. I’m sure she didn’t intentionally miss my vein on the first try—“That never happens!” she informed me—but I’m keeping an eye on both of them. You gotta watch these guys.)

We look at my scans, something I hadn’t been able to concentrate on before (not three months yet). Dr. R calls up the PET scan images and there, on the screen, is Lois Lane, as seen by Superman. The hour I spent last February in that crazy machine with better-than-X-Ray vision has produced an amazing outline of my body, bones, and vital organs. Parts of me are glowing.

“Here are your ribs,” explains Dr. R, “and here are your lungs, and heart,” he says, pointing to two of the glowing areas.

I comprehend about 18% of the glow explanation, something about the radioactive dye used in the PET scan, and sugars, and how the two main things that suck up sugar are the vital organs and fast-growing cancer cells.

Above and below the heart and lungs are two areas of ultra-glow.

“Down here is your bladder,” says Dr. R. “It’s glowing intensely because that’s where the dye is exiting the body.” I shudder as I remember the two, “fruit”-flavored, radioactive “shakes” I had to down before that test.

All the rest of the ultra-glow is in my neck and chest. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to correlate the glow on the picture of my neck with the lump that I can touch. It is the navigational star, marking the starting point of this little cancer chart. A little bit to the south is a big cluster of bright objects. The Pleiades, I think. The whole top of my chest is lit up like a winter sky on a moonless night. It reminds me of ET, with that big glowing heart shining through his extra-terrestrial body. But now that I can so clearly see my own heart, down there to the right, and not quite so bright, I realize the location of ET’s alleged “heart” light is, relative to human anatomy, right where his lymph nodes should be! Maybe ET had Hodgkin’s! (I keep this thought to myself.)

After one more treatment—which completes two cycles of chemo—we’ll do the PET scan again and see how much is still glowing.

10:40 a.m. Prep for treatment. (Tylenol and Benadryl pills to combat flu-like symptoms; intravenous anti-nausea medication.)

11:00 a.m. Start ABVD chemotherapy. First the V—Vinblastine. The oncology nurse injects this directly into the vein. Then the A, Adriamycin, also injected, the orange one that turns your pee fluorescent colors and makes your hair fall out. “A” for aesthetic. A few saline flushes, then the B. The Bleomycin will drip for awhile.

Everybody’s chemo is different. Different drugs, different cocktails, different schedules, different prognoses. The drugs are serious. They make you sign a two-page waiver before they’ll give them to you. My chemo takes four hours, and is a proven cure for Hodgkin’s. Since I’ve been feeling good, I think maybe I misunderstood the intensity level of my treatment, but the oncology nurse says on a scale of 1 to 10, I’m an 8-and-a-half, which makes me feel tough.

Noon: Lunch.

After two treatments, I figured out I was not going to get sick, at least not during or right after chemo, and in fact, I was finding I was fairly hungry, especially since all the waiting was pushing treatment into the afternoon. Still, I didn’t want to bring much besides saltines or animal crackers for fear that smells, or even the sight of someone chowing down on a tuna fish sandwich, might offend another patient. Wrong. Not with this crew, anyway. High noon and the infusion room morphed into Greyhound’s Saturday NYC Express, where the passengers, without fail, unzip their backpacks and pull out the most pungent of snacks the minute the bus hits the New Jersey Turnpike. It is borderline disgusting. The nurses are pumping us full of anti-nausea drugs and these people are eating hoagies.

12:45 p.m. Now the Dacarbazine. The D hurts going in, so the nurse will dilute it. This hurts less, but makes me need the bathroom every 8 seconds, a bit of a project with two IV’s in tow. This is the long drip.

After two hours of typing, I am usually ready to switch to reading for awhile.

There is a small, low bookshelf in the infusion room with a paucity of worthwhile reading material, the contents consisting of a few abandoned paperbacks and a pathetic assortment of magazines. (My childhood friend Cynthia has another friend blogging about her cancer experience. She recently posted about the abysmal state of literary offerings in doctors’ waiting rooms, vowing to make replacing back issues of Prevention and pamphlets on hospice care with trendy, more upbeat fare her post-treatment charity mission.) “Horrendous,” is what everybody says the first time they come here and peruse the shelves, which is what I said, too, during the first 2 months and 29 days, but now I am unfazed, and besides, I bring my own books.

Today I have Chemotherapy and Radiation Therapy for Dummies but I am suddenly shy about opening it. Last time I had Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips, by a young and hip filmmaker with a rare, incurable cancer and a big emphasis on nutrition, meditation, and fun (and a forward by Sheryl Crow). The time before that it was Cancer Vixen, drawn and written by a New Yorker cartoonist with a sardonic take on her battle with breast cancer. By comparison, Dummies is pretty mainstream, but the infusion room is crowded today, and I am concerned that the cancer patients might think I’m insensitive, or stupid. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but I am a little gun-shy after the recent incident.

It happened two weeks ago at the Look Good, Feel Better makeup program I went to with Celia. The volunteer cosmetologist was explaining the importance of moisturizing “during this time.” I raised my hand and asked what kind of effects the chemo was likely to have on my skin.

“Okay,” responded the volunteer in a tone of voice usually reserved for third graders, “we don’t like to talk about chemo or radiation, but I would say that during this time, you can expect your skin to dry out significantly.”

Was she kidding? She was talking to a conference table full of women with no hair. Did she think they don’t know they’re going through chemo? The nice lady next to me had just come from treatment and announced that she was worn out as she collapsed into her chair. I’m reasonably sure she knows the treatment that’s making her so tired is called chemo but maybe there’s some cancer etiquette I need to learn, stat. I can talk about my experience of defecating in a bucket for a month for as long as anyone wants to listen so maybe I’ve lost all touch with social mores.

Since I am on shaky ground, I leave the book in my bag (the gray one, with tiny, pink skull and crossbones printed all over it). Best not to upset anyone who might not know they’re getting chemo. I focus instead on the assistant nurse who is filling in today. I think I hear her complain about having a cold. This seems rather unfortunate in a roomful of people with compromised immune systems but, as is clear from the above story, what do I know? Common cold germs are probably no match for the unlimited supply of toxic chemo drugs in this room. My money’s on the poison.

1:30 p.m. About an hour to go.

The elderly man in the corner is finished. The women with him are still straightening up the chairs and collecting belongings, but the man has his shoes on and is headed for the exit. People bolt out of here like you wouldn’t believe once they are sprung. As he approaches my chair, he slows down, turns slightly, and gives a little bow. I smile. He leaves, free from the infusion room, at least for the rest of today.

###

Day 17 & $200 Martinis (Hair, Part 2)

2008-04-09T16:27:00.005-04:00

For my second wig-shopping extravaganza, I chose a second TV reporter friend. Not having seen each other in a few years, we both gave a pre-rendezvous heads-up:

“After three years of island and boat life, I don’t exactly have TV hair anymore.”

“Well, I’m blonde now. About as blonde as a black woman ought to be.”

My journalist friend—let’s call her Beyoncé—arranged for us to meet with someone from the American Cancer Society’s free wig program. Having seen some of the ACS publications, with all their photos of (gasp!) CANCER PATIENTS wearing (ugh…) horribly outdated 80’s-styles, I was snobbishly skeptical about this. I was not one of those people.

My friend, however, had a plan. This is what I love about reporters. Tell them in the morning what you need, and by 6 p.m. they’ve got names, locations, prices, consumer reports, testimonials, maps and, in the case of this assignment, a list of 25 establishments ranging from the most basic downtown retail wig shop to the best custom services Park Avenue money can buy. Beyoncé was on a roll and unstoppable. I acquiesced and agreed to meet her in the lobby of the American Cancer Society’s mid-town Manhattan headquarters.

“Margie!” Beyoncé squealed when she saw me. “You look great!”

“YOU look amazing, Blondie!” I shouted back.

“No, I mean you look REALLY good,” Beyoncé gushed.

“Thank you! You too! Really!”

“No, I mean, you look TOO good…”

“Because I’m supposed to look sick?”

“No, it’s just that, well, I told them you weren’t working, and they asked me about health insurance, and I said I didn’t know if you had it or not, and I also didn’t exactly have a current address for you…”

“So they think I’m homeless and destitute?”

“Maybe let me do the talking…”

Inauspicious start notwithstanding, the following two hours proved invaluable. The young woman who runs the program—auspiciously named Karina, spelled differently, but the same name as the boat on which I sailed across the Atlantic (That’s a good sign, right?)—was superb, compassionately and expertly explaining what to expect from chemotherapy-related hair loss. She had pre-selected several wigs based on photos my girlfriend had sent her, and patiently showed me how to wear and style them, all the while stressing that the program had no financial need prerequisites. She even listened while we complained that perhaps their marketing materials could use a makeover.

By the end of the session we had chosen a wig we all agreed would work for my upcoming TV appearance and named it Karina, in honor of our benefactor. (Most mass-produced retail wigs come with names. Even before our get-together, Beyoncé had procured a Raquel Welch from one of her sources. “The names are really queer,” warned the woman sitting in the chair next to mine during my first chemo session. “You feel kind of stupid ordering a Tiffany or a Shirley, but you just have to get over that.”) Karina pronounced us the highlight of her day, and packed my free wig, free hat and free scarf into a cherry red tote bag so en vogue, Beyoncé leaped out of her chair when she saw it. “I’m sure she’ll share it with you,” commented Karina. We all cried and hugged. Beyoncé promised to feature the wig program on her radio show and I promised to go home and write a check to the American Cancer Society.

Afterwards, we stopped in a retail hair and beauty shop (Wigs And Plus!) where Beyoncé bought me a package of nude skullcaps, a wig brush, two Styrofoam heads and a pair of fishnet stockings. I was ready for, well, apparently pretty much anything.

It was another former TV colleague who told me my hair would start falling out on the 17th day. We were having beers about a month ago at an Irish pub in the town where I grew up and he told me the woman he’s been dating was just starting to get her hair back after going through chemotherapy.

“I call her my punk rocker.” My buddy likes to tease.

“The doctors say it’ll come out after the second treatment, usually three weeks after you start,” I told him.

“Day 17,” he stated, with anchorman authority. I figured he was pulling a random number out of his ass, but didn’t argue, especially since he offered to be my emergency contact person. (Relationship to patient: Former co-anchor.)

I got my second round of chemo on April Fool’s Day and every morning after that my city friend Ellen sent me a text message: “Do you still have hair?” My island friend Celia chose this week to fly up for a visit so I would have moral support for shaving my head. My girlfriends are amazing. First Dr. Lisa flew up from Miami to hold my hand through surgery. Now Celia was flying up from St. John to hold my hand through a bad hair day. The locals have been flying into the city on a moment’s notice whenever a dose of cheering up is warranted. My childhood friend Cynthia even showed up in my oncologist’s office with a gift party bag containing pink napkins, Disney princess paper cups, Tabasco, personal-sized bottles of vodka and Bloody Mary mix.

The normally light-traveling Celia arrived at Philly International on Day 16 with two pieces of checked luggage.

“I had to bring an extra bag because of all the gifts for you from St. John,” said my captain friend. “I had people chasing me down at the ferry dock this morning giving me stuff.”

She handed me a yellow envelope.

“This one’s from Texas Rose. I think she stuffed some mad money in it.”

Texas Rose rewrote the get-well card to read: “Every cancer has an angel that watches over it and whispers… Die, little cancer! Die!” Her southern twang jumped off the words. I opened the card and four $50 bills fell out.

“She sent $200!”

“Yeah, well, she said have martinis on her,” said Celia, “and I guess she knew what that was gonna cost her. She’s seen us drink.”

On Day 17, like clockwork, I started shedding. Washing my hair in the shower Friday morning, I thought maybe there was a little more than usual in the drain, but couldn’t be sure. My scalp was tingling. That wasn’t normal, was it? Throughout the day, I compulsively ran my hand over my head, each time ending with a fistful of strands, but each subsequent check in the mirror confirmed that everything looked the same.

In the bathroom later that night, Ellen and Celia were both running their fingers through my hair. Definitely not normal. My tresses lined the tub like blonde moss.

Ellen told me she had a fleeting thought (“emphasis on the word fleeting”) about shaving her head in solidarity, but decided against it as she had just started a new corporate job. (She has, however, already made a much more substantial commitment by offering to go through menopause with me.)

Since Celia’s Virgin Islands work commitments have no dress code, she insisted she was going to shave her head. Celia, however, is The Breck Girl and I don’t want her to lose her gorgeous locks. We argued but, as I have cancer (and, for now, hair), she conceded the first round. (We went a few more rounds during her stay, but I was ultimately victorious, not because I have cancer, but because Celia decided I look so good in my scarves, hats, and long red curls, she no longer feels sorry for me.)

Celia accompanied me to another ACS-sponsored program, one on makeup tips for cancer patients which, naturally, I dismissively scoffed at when my mother first sent me the information. My experience with Karina, however, swayed my opinion and as usual, Mom turned out to be right. The women at the session—who all sat around a conference table and whipped off their wigs before applying moisturizer, eye shadow and blush—confronted themselves in their mirrors with good humor and grace. It was disconcerting trying to imagine applying makeup without eyebrows or eyelashes but to help with the challenge, everybody left with another red bag, this time stuffed with Clinique, Aveda and Estée Lauder.

That same day I had to stop at the oncologist’s office for another check of my blood counts. The white blood cell count, which dropped drastically after chemo, was back up, thanks to the $3500 white-blood-cell-stimulating injection I got the week before. Good to know the Super Shot did more than just leave a giant bruise on my arm and a red flag on my file with the insurance company. Dr. R was back from vacation, but tied up with another patient. “He says your counts are excellent and he doesn’t need to see you unless you’re having problems,” said the nurse. What did a girl have to do to get noticed around this place?

Since I was momentarily problem free, Celia and I decided that called for a celebration, perhaps even the $200 martini kind. We cozied up to the bar at trendy El Vez, conveniently located just a couple short blocks from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and ordered margaritas and guacamole. Okay, so the tab was more like 30 bucks. Truth is, I’m more likely to drink tea than tequila these days, and when I do imbibe, I can usually only handle one before I need to go take a nap. But it’s good to have goals.

Today, Day 22, I still have hair. Celia returned to St. John this morning and took her electric shaver with her. We figure I’m prepared now to handle it when the time comes. I am picking hairs off my laptop as I type, but I don’t look different. I tried out my Karina wig during an on-camera rehearsal yesterday, just to get used to it. Nobody said anything rude, and more than a few people remarked that they liked my new haircut.

I also don’t feel all that bad. So far, I don’t have any of the more insidious side effects like nausea, mouth sores, or excruciating bone pain, although from time to time I do feel these weird aches, this creepy sort of movement deep in my core. It’s like I’ve got the Barry Bonds of bone marrow, knocking out white blood cells with unnatural force to take on the despised rivals, the visiting cancer/chemo team, their combined bad sportsmanship shaking the bleachers of my little ballpark body. The season has just begun, but at least I won the opener. Hey, that’s more than you can say for the Phillies.

###

The Chemo Versus Sex Ratio

2008-04-02T13:19:00.007-04:00

“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.

###

Wigwam (Hair, Part 1)

2008-03-26T10:40:00.011-04:00

Quitting my job as a TV news anchor and reporter was the perfect opportunity to test my belief that life is not all about hair. Novice steps at first, of course—a few minutes less with the blow dryer each morning, a couple of months without highlights—but by the time I was living on boats full time, I was indoctrinated, hair spray and salons supplanted by salt water and sailors. For over a year, nobody cut my hair except the captains I crewed for. I was a master, completely liberated from hair cares just in time to discover…

...it really is all about hair after all.

In the past two months, I’ve been confronted with a grave medical condition, threats to my mental state and emotional well-being, the early demise of my reproductive system, and, oh yeah, mortality, not to mention, given the compressed time frame to deal with all-of-the-above, probably shock. What's left? Hair.

What day will I start shedding? Does it get loose first? Like a tooth? Will I lose all of it? Eyebrows? Eyelashes? What about bikini waxing? How will being bald make my ass look? What does my scalp look like under there? What if I can’t get a wig to stay on straight? When will it grow back? Will this forever change the meaning of “bad hair day”? How long until everyone finally figures out that TV Blonde is not my natural color? These questions keep me up at night and then haunt my dreams when I finally do fall asleep.

Which, I suppose, is why I’m sitting in my hairdresser’s chair, obsessing over how to cut and style it, even though it’s all supposed to fall out in the next week or so. Just when I was starting to forget I have all these toxic chemicals running through my blood.

“How are you feeling?” asks Dr. R at our one-week-after-starting-chemo-how-are-you-feeling appointment.

I give him my standard response: “Great! That’s the right answer, right?”

He chuckles.

“Okay, seriously? All things considered, not too bad,” I say.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes.”

“Nauseous?”

“A little funky in the stomach, mostly in the morning.”

“Did you need the medication?”

“No.”

“Fever?”

“No.”

“Any pain?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling any other side effects?”

Yes. Restless. Caged. Angry. Trapped. I got an e-mail yesterday from Captain Kid, the young shipwright with whom I crossed the Atlantic last year. He and his girlfriend and the little boat are in Panama, waiting to go through the Canal, to sail the Pacific. On their horizon: The Galapagos, the Marquesas, New Zealand, freedom. And I’m scheduling chemo infusions? What was the question?

“Symptoms? Any other symptoms?”

“No. But I keep waiting for them. I keep looking in the mirror, expecting to see something weird.”

Dr. R thinks this is hilarious. Dr. R laughs at all my jokes. He has also called me twice this week, which makes me happy, but then he breaks the news that he and his wife are going to Florida next week, meaning even my oncologist isn’t available to be my chemo date. Dr. R promises his wingman, Dr. S, will take good care of me, and we make a date to look at all my CT and PT scans when he gets back in town. I can’t decide if this will be more or less fun than shopping for a wig.

Wig shopping is daunting. Who knew there were so many choices? Fake tresses range from about 25 bucks to thousands of dollars (the Website for one posh Manhattan salon has an entire page devoted to financing). Some insurance plans will cover a portion of the cost. Guess what they call it. Dr. R wrote me a prescription for a “cranial prosthesis.” I was so busy gasping at the terminology, I forgot to ask Dr. R if he prefers blondes or brunettes. Me, I’m thinking of going red. My fake-redhead girlfriend in St. John has offered to go fake-blonde “in order to keep balance in the universe.” See? Hair. Cosmically significant. Trust me. The fake-redhead is very spiritual.

To ease into what I’m sure is going to be a traumatic experience, I asked a former TV colleague to go hair shopping with me, “just for fun,” one Sunday afternoon about a week ago. She agreed, but warned she’d have to bring her 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. Perfect! (“At least you know they’ll be honest,” remarked another girlfriend Sunday morning.) If nothing else, it’ll make a good story, I tell myself. This has been my rationale for many of the what-the-hell decisions in my life the past few years. Maybe I should make a note NOT to default to this approach when making health care decisions. (Four weeks of radiation when this chemo thing is over? Why not? Think of the material!)

Another co-worker whose Mom had breast cancer recommended a place called Wigwam. This is where I wanted to go because, come on, the name! I have to buy a wig at the Wigwam. What a great detail! Wigwam, sadly, is in Western Pennsylvania so we head to HAIRTOWN instead. It’s our lucky day. They’re having a wig sale! Right up front, there’s a whole table of wigs for $9.99 (NO TRY ON! warns a handwritten sign). If nothing else, I can grab one on the way out.

TV Reporter Friend marches to the display in the back of the store with her little girl and me trailing behind. (Her son stays in the SUV with his Game Boy, or whatever it is kids play with these days.) It takes me 20 minutes to work up the nerve to try something on, but the other two jump right in. TV Reporter Friend has donned a long, blonde hippie wig that she thinks makes her look like a South Jersey girl on the way to a rock concert. “Atco Meets The Allman Brothers” she calls it. Her precocious daughter, meanwhile, has a black stocking cap pulled tight over her 8-year-old locks, accenting the impish face beneath. She is following me around, shaking her head at everything I touch. “Not that one. Nope. Not that either. Here, try this!”

“What do you think of this?” asks TV Reporter Friend. She’s got a sexy, black bob now. Her daughter giggles. “I want to play a joke on Daddy,” she explains.

I try on the kid’s pick: Reddish-brown, waist-length, straight with bangs. We decide I look like Lindsay Lohan, but it’s not a bad match for my face. The 8-year-old’s got a good eye. I’m not ready to commit, so I ask her to help me choose something from the $9.99 table. We settle on a long and curly strawberry blonde number. I pay, walk out to the parking lot, and try on the wig. I adjust my black shades, toss my messy mane, and whip around to check out my reflection in the storefront. Wow! A pair of stilettos and I’m ready for my close-up with Client #9.

“You look beautiful!” gushes the 8-year-old.

Kids are easy.

We get back in the car, where the 10-year-old glances at me, expressionless, for a second before returning to his game.

“Mom,” he sighs, “Is Margie going to be with us ALL afternoon?”

No. Margie has to test out this wig thing with another audience. Like the one in the Superfresh. I have to pick up dessert on my way to dinner at another friend’s house, so decide to keep the hair for now. Despite the bed head, with sneakers, sweatpants, and dark sunglasses, I think I look less like a hooker, more like a B-movie actress with a hangover, but even that’s out of place at a grocery store in suburban Philadelphia. I’m sure that guy in dairy is staring. All those people in the checkout line, too. Nobody says anything, though (who would dare?) so I stand up straighter, smile, and notice that their hair doesn’t look all that great either.

I wear my hair to dinner. “This one’s just for fun,” I announce to my friend. “It’s not bad!” she laughs. Her kids stare at me suspiciously over spaghetti and meatballs. They think I look like Hannah Montana.

Truth be told, I’m happy with Hannah or Lindsay. I’d like to think I’d be okay with scarves, hats, alter-egos, and maybe even au naturel, but I really do need a decent wig because, and here’s the irony: I’m back on TV! I’m hosting one of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s live performances on April 10. Most people lose their hair three weeks after their first treatment, which for me is… April 8. Seven years after quitting TV, I am going to be on TV—in high-definition—two days after I lose my hair. How did this happen?

I am still clinging desperately to strands of the It’s-Not-All-About-Hair philosophy. I want to be a true believer, I really do. I haven’t given up the faith yet; but like any thinking believer, I do keep questioning it.

###

Cancer is HILARIOUS

2008-03-19T14:57:00.008-04:00

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.

###

Fish Gotta Swim...

2008-03-12T17:59:00.012-04:00

February 29, 2008

Between lunchtime and happy hour, the situation went from daunting to dire.

Over quiche and salad at the Caribou Café, I had been joking that I needed to find a boyfriend before my hair falls out. Now, apparently, I may have to secure a sperm donor by noon on Tuesday.

Maybe I should back up.

Things started going to hell six weeks ago, when a doctor in the U.S. Virgin Islands told me I was turning into a fish.

Okay, that’s not exactly what he said. It was something more on the lines of “that lump in your neck might be a branchial cleft cyst which is essentially residual gill-like tissue left over from the embryonic days before your lungs were fully formed,” but I stopped listening after “gill.” Three years after trading in my “real job” in Philadelphia for a waitressing gig in the islands, followed by a year of adventures on the high seas, was my body finally morphing into something saltwater-based, like a mermaid? What a great ending for my book! Even better than crossing the Atlantic in a 30-foot sailboat.

Promising to see a specialist when I returned to the States in a few days, I walked out of the medical office into an 80-degree-and-sunny, postcard-perfect tropical scene. Spirits boosted by two of Whitey’s Bloody Marys at JJ’s bar by the ferry dock, I bought a new bikini (spending more than I did on the doctor) then went sailing with my island friend Celia in her new boat. My biggest worry that balmy afternoon was that I had colored my hair a few shades too dark, Deep Moonlight being the closest thing to blonde I could find in the drugstore in the West Indies. Celia assured me I looked great as a brunette. If, in fact, I did turn into a fish, under her mooring in St. John’s Chocolate Hole would be a nice place to live.

The doctor, unfortunately, was wrong about the gills. Turns out it was just cancer. Not the kind that kills you (at least not 70-95 percent of the time, depending on which statistics you’re reading), just the kind that land locks you and makes you sick for awhile and mostly is a colossal pain in the ass, ruining your plans to work on a yacht in the Caribbean and keep traveling to exotic places.

This, by the way, is how you find out:

You make an appointment at a prestigious teaching hospital in a major East Coast city. You see a couple of stone-faced receptionists, then a medical technician, then a nurse, then a student who looks about 14, then a physician’s assistant. Then, when you are out in the hallway, yelling into your cell phone that apparently there ARE NO actual DOCTORS in this prestigious institution on this particular day, someone makes a call and then hands you the name and address of the ear, nose and throat specialist in the next building. Six hours later, the chairman of the ENT department looks at your neck for 90 seconds, a couple of pathologists stick your lump with a whole bunch of needles, then the top dog comes back in and cheerfully announces, “Good news! It looks like lymphoma!”

This is a little confusing, because your surgeon friend, Dr. Lisa, told you good news would be “a reactive lymph node,” which sounds kind of the same, but isn’t exactly what you think you just heard from this specialist guy who has now launched into this hazy string of words that includes “surgery,” “chemo,” “radiation,” and “not a death sentence.”

“Makes you glad you didn’t get the ‘bad news,’” a friend would later remark.

Because the specialist never says the word “cancer,” I am still confused when I walk out of his office into the gray, bitterly cold, Philadelphia winter afternoon. Tears freezing on my cheeks, I dial Dr. Lisa who, in her take-charge voice, confirms what I think I heard, agrees that perhaps “good news” is not the best way to describe my preliminary diagnosis and assures me that what I have is very treatable.

“Do NOT go home and Google anything,” she orders. “Go shoe shopping. I’ll call you later.”

“You’ll be fine,” echoes a co-worker. “This is just a speed bump in your life. And in the end, it might be one of those things that make you re-evaluate what’s really important.”

Was he kidding? Wasn’t anybody paying attention? I had already quit a high profile, well-paying job, sold my car, sublet my condo, put my belongings in storage and completely upended my hard-earned Stable Life in search of What’s Really Important. Re-evaluate life? Check! Already crossed off the list! There must be better candidates for forced introspection.

“Besides, I feel great!” I protest to my city friend Ellen over green tea martinis (those are healthy, right?) later that night. “How can there be anything wrong with me?”

“You don’t have cancer, honey,” replies Ellen. “What you need is a week at a spa. Give me that doctor’s phone number. He needs to send you to Canyon Ranch. And your insurance should pay for it.”

Back at lunch at the café, my dining companion asks if I read about Smith magazine’s six-word memoir contest. The winner, Not Quite What I Was Planning, could apply to me, but we try to think of something original. We settle on: Bring It On, Baby. What’s Next?

I leave laughing, but walking home in the new, high-heeled, black leather boots purchased on diagnosis day, my heart is sinking. Not quite what I was planning? How about: “How fucked up is this?” I don’t need six words. “This sucks.” Two words suffice. “Not fair.” I am quite the wordsmith. Is this what people mean when they say, “This will give you plenty to write about”? My old material was better.

“Chemotherapy will make you sterile,” the radiation expert told me last week. “Do you want information on egg harvesting before starting treatment?”

Really, you shouldn’t get cancer until you get a husband. I love my mother, but the fact that I’m 42 and still have to put her down as my emergency contact person is, frankly, depressing. On top of everything else, I have to revisit this baby thing? Does anybody believe now would be a good time to undergo the hormone therapy needed to boost egg production?

The first meltdown is thorough.

“Pour a glass of wine!” Celia demands, her voice crackling over the phone 1500 miles away.

“I don’t have anything here,” I despair, “except the bottle of Patrón I bought for my friend’s tequila party tonight.”

“Open it! They won’t care if you have your share a little early.”

I break the green seal, uncork the bottle, and fill a shot glass to the brim. It is warm going down.

“Okay, I’ve never done shots alone before,” I say.

“So what?” says Celia. “Besides, you’re not alone. I’m drinking too.”

One hour and a couple of shots later, I am rallying. Before hanging up, we toast:

“I’d rather be Patrónal than hormonal!” (Six words.)

The medical oncologist told me if I can get drunk without puking, then chemo probably won’t make me sick. She appeared impressed when I assured her I could hold my liquor in 20-foot seas. It seems the responsible thing to do, keeping up my tolerance while stuck on land. Especially since it’s this so-called solid ground that feels a little shaky.

###