Archive for January, 2006
Monday, January 30th, 2006
Wendy Wasserstein died today.
Who?
If you aren’t much into theater, you probably don’t know the name. She was a Pulitzer-winning playwright whose first novel, “Elements of Style,” is scheduled for an April publication.
I have to admit I don’t know a ton of her work, but I do know her 1993 play “The Sisters Rosensweig.” For a production in Denver a few years ago, I designed the lighting.
I never talked to her, never emailed her about her writing or cancer, nothing like that. I knew of her without knowing anything about her, didn’t even see enough of her plays to get a sense of what was going on in her head.
What caught my eye was not only that she died, but that she died of lymphoma.
In today’s earlier post, I talked about bitching about the minor stuff. This is the kind of thing that proves to me my situation is fairly minor. I’m griping about getting some shots and now Wasserstein’s daughter, 6-year old Lucy Jane, has no mother.
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Monday, January 30th, 2006
Tom Piccirilli sent me a note recently (and if you want to know why I want to be Tom when I grow up, check out damn near anything he’s written) and he made a great point.
Basically, quit whining.
Okay, that’s only the most superficial way to have read his email, but that’s how it hit me. I sent him a note bitching — again — about the side effects of the shots and he wrote back, saying he understood the three times a week shots were tough, but weren’t they better than the daily treatments?
In other words, as long as the side effects aren’t as bad as December, then my situation is getting better.
In still other words, quit whining.
He’s most definitely right. I realized I was getting into a complaint funk. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to complain — it’s what I do best — but overall, I’m in a better position than I was in December.
I knew that, obviously, but sometimes I guess I’ll need a little reminding. Why? Because I’m so tired of being tired. Because all I really want is to be normal again. Don’t want to have to worry about eating at the right time (an hour before a treatment so I can take the medicine), or should I drive or not, do I need to call in sick, can I remember my wife’s name, etc.
(And yeah, I realize my bitching is fairly well petty compared to people in stage 4 lung cancer or with heart failure or Alzhiemer’s, but there it is.)
I just want to go back to the end of November before it started. Except not really then because I was healing from lymphnode surgery then. Maybe September, then. Except not really then because that’s when the lymphnode was swollen to its largest and most painful.
I guess I want to go back to when I was ten and didn’t have a single damn care in the world except getting to the skating rink and hoping Robby’s mom (a tall hot blond who owned the rink) was there in those incredibly tight Jordache jeans she used to wear. Welcome to ten years old; “I ain’t sure what I’d do with it, but it sure looks great in those jeans!”
What I’m saying is over all, compared to others with cancer, I’m doing pretty well, even if I have to rant sometimes.
Actually, a dispatcher at the Sheriff’s Office put it more succinctly: shut up about it or die already.
She laughed so I’m pretty sure she was joking.
I don’t know…maybe not…they’re a pretty tough crowd.
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Sunday, January 22nd, 2006
I might have died.
On the other hand, I know my imagination sometimes gets overheated. Maybe that’s as far as it would have gone.
Zip, bango, and I’m light-headed – or in what would be a blood sugar crisis for a diabetic — at 75 miles an hour and the car crashes. Flips, explodes, tosses me out like an unconscious ragdoll and suddenly LuAnn is collecting life insurance.
Saturday morning I had a treatment, about 10:00. I also had a signing scheduled at the Bloomington, IL Barnes and Noble for 3 p.m. I wasn’t worried about side effects from the treatment because they’ve been so mild and so predictable. And they seemed to be getting better. Thursday’s treatment made me light-headed — as usual — but not until six hours later and then only for an hour.
Great news. A huge step forward.
By a bit after 11 a.m. Saturday, I was light-headed. I stopped at my wife’s bookstore to steal her car to take to Bloomington and when her eyes got big and scared from seeing me, I knew there was a problem.
I crashed on the little couch for about an hour and felt a little better. I was preparing to hit the road when Sgt. Atkinson came in. I thought, cool, haven’t seen him in a few days, I’ll talk for a minute, then leave.
I sat back on the couch and watched Ben get more and more concerned. Then LuAnn came over and started talking to me. I had no fucking clue what she was saying. Her mouth flapped and flapped, spitting something out, but I had no clue. It was creepily like when she’d tried to explain email to me in early December. I couldn’t understand then, either.
It was then I decided I was good to go get some water.
Hah. Nice try.
Five, maybe seven feet and I found myself staring at the shelf of Harry Potter and Unfortunate Events. From beneath it.
Ben’s standing over me, white with fear because he’d never seen an actual event before. His jaw is flapping and flapping and once more I had no clue. Very odd sensation, that. Like waking up one day and everyone in your family is speaking Gaelic or maybe Sudanese.
I called and cancelled the signing while LuAnn kept freaking Ben out by saying, “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine, this happens all the time.”
After a while, it was better. I could hear, I could understand. Ben and I went to eat — I thought that might help, it didn’t — and then he drove me straight to the hospital.
Tamara, the nurse, worked me over for a few minutes, told me to drink LOTS more fluids and to get some sleep, and suddenly, I was back in the middle of December. I was back on the daily treatments with all the side effects. I was just as angry, just as whiny, as I had been in December.
I drank. I slept. (And I dreamed of being back in high school, unable to complete some stupid class assignment. Yeah, that dream actually comes along relatively regularly. We’ll analyze the insecurity of that later.)
Today I’m still tired but my head as as good as ever (ha…you can supply your own joke there).
So even though Ben revels in calling me retard when I get foggy, he might well have saved my life yesterday. Had he not come in, I probably would have been on the road when the light-headedness hit. I would have been on the outskirts of the county, entombed in a single car roll-over.
And you know my co-workers would have worked the accident and radioed the sheriff, “Hey, we can use badge number 30 again, I’m pretty sure he’s cashed it in.”
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 6 Comments »
Monday, January 16th, 2006
So I think I’ve got a handle on the shots.
After a couple of weeks of getting them, I see a pattern. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday are the days, usually mid-morning. About four hours after the shot, I get incredibly light-headed for about two hours. Once that goes away, I’m simply tired for the rest of the day.
The freaky thing is that the light-headed happens so regularly I can damn near set my watch by it. I assume it’s my body reacting to the new batch of medicine.
Last Saturday, I mentioned the light-headedness to one of the nurses. She said my blood pressure tends to run low right now as a matter of course, and wondered if, during the dizzy spells, it was running even lower.
“Anybody at the jail who can take your blood pressure when you get dizzy?”
Uh…yeah, all kinds of inmates…they all have some medical experience.
Actually, I kept the smart ass answer to myself and enlisted the help of a deputy who also works a local ambulance service.
Holy crap. At the hospital, my pressure was lower than normal but not much. I can’t remember exactly. But during my dizzy phase, it was 89 over 63 or something.
Uh, yeah, maybe that’s why I get so dizzy. Hmmmm…could be a causal relationship there.
So that’s what going on medically. No more throwing up so far, but lots of dizzy and tired. I’m getting tired of being tired all the time. Yeah, it’s less than during the daily treatments, but it’s still there. Rarely do I feel 100 percent, like my old self. Mostly there is a tinge of fatigue around the edges of everything I do.
And guess what? Dr Pepper taste like crap again. Actually, all soda does. Where it had been salty, now it’s bitter. It doesn’t matter what kind of soda, it’s all bitter. I assume that has to do with the CO2, which is the only thing they all have in common. So that sucks, although it is keeping me from drinking lots of heavily sugar laden drinks so that’s probably good.
It’s been good to get back to work. We’ve been full up but don’t have any problem inmates right now so I haven’t had to worry about fights or discipline or whatever. But simply getting out of this house where I’ve been cooped up, to get back to the people I work with (most of whom I actually dig pretty well), to get outside and remember the larger world outside my door, has been great. I think it’s probably done more for my outlook than anything else.
During the daily treatments, I tried to keep up with the journal. Every day or every other day or whatever. But with the shots, there isn’t as much going on. And the side effects don’t build like they did. So there probably won’t be as much to write about cancer wise.
Which is odd, when I think about it. Have I become so inured to this bullshit of the last two months that I have nothing left to say about it?
Back in 2000, I found out I had a half-sister. For months after that discovery, the words ‘my sister’ felt really odd in my mouth. It was the same way at the first diagnosis. ‘Cancer,’ when applied to me, was just strange.
Now it seems normal. Writer. Deputy. Cynic. Cancer.
It all fits as though that’s the natural state of my life, and that fucking sucks.
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Saturday, January 7th, 2006
A few days ago, Bureau County Judge Scott Madson asked me if I’d kissed the angels.
“What?” I asked, puzzled.
“LuAnn told me what was going on,” he said.
Ah yes, the cancer, the giant white hippo hanging out on my shoulder.
In other words, did I think I was going to die?
Tough question…one that has come up before.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2001, my friend writer Richard Laymon died of a heart attack. Four days later, while racing back and forth between three different theater gigs in Denver, I had a heart attack.
Aside from the pain, the only thing I thought about was Dick. He was why I called 911 as quickly as I did. I spent 24 hours in cardiac ICU and the next five or six weeks recovering at home.
A month later, I went to the World Horror Convention in Seattle. Amidst the well wishes from writer friends and memorials for Dick, one publisher sat me down and asked, “So, was this a publicity stunt?”
Yeah, let me show you the picture of the cardiac before and after. Yeah, because I’ve made so much money, gotten so much press, from having a heart attack. What an ass. He followed that up with, “Did you think you were going to die?”
There are quite a few things that scare me, but death hasn’t yet been one of those things.
In neither case, the heart attack nor the cancer, did I think I was about to cash it in. In neither case did I cozy up to any angels and give them a big wet smack on the lips.
That’s not to say there weren’t days when I wasn’t terrified. During the ‘cardiac event,’ which is what the doctors called the heart attack, I was quite scared. On the ground in front of Denver’s Temple Events Center, listening to the siren and knowing it tolled for me was enough to get some juices flowing. In the cardiac ICU, listening to someone a few beds down flatline was more than enough to give me a jolt.
Hearing my doctor calmly say the lump was malignant and then say stage 3 was enough to keep me awake at night.
During the days between the diagnosis and the results of the PET scan I had a talk with LuAnn about the logistics of death, what to do with any literary work I had unfinished or unsold, that I wanted to be cremated, where to scatter the ashes, no machines to keep me alive, etc. We talked about death, but the conversation was somehow more obligatory than necessary.
Not once in either case did I think I was going to die. The question is: does that matter? Could I have died even though the thought that I might die never really took hold?
Obviously, yes.
But it felt to me, back in 2001 and four weeks ago, that I wouldn’t die because I didn’t think I would. And I’m not talking about positive mental attitude kind of bullshit. I’m talking about absolute certainty, the kind of certainty that doesn’t even allow you to question where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Yeah, the sun rises in the east. Naw, this won’t kill me.
Which leaves me with an obvious flipside, doesn’t it? What happens when I have some medical problem and do see an angel or two coming at me, lips all smacked up and raring to go?
Hell, who am I kidding, it probably won’t be an angel at all.
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Friday, January 6th, 2006
Holy guacamole! It’s all so different.
Friday, Dec. 30 was the last of the heavy duty treatments. Tuesday, Jan 3, was the first of the easier treatments. I went from an hour a day, five days a week in the hospital getting about fifty gallons of Interferon to three times a week getting something like 20 milli-somethings.
It’s great but the best news first.
Dr Pepper is beginning to taste good again. Not always and not completely, but it’s getting there. And there are all kinds of foods I can eat again. Hah, the challenge now will be to not gorge myself on friggin’ hamburgers and fries and garbage so that I can keep the twenty pounds off.
Tuesday I went back to the hospital, my stomach in knots because I had no clue what was going to happen, how the injection portion of all this was going to work. The nurses, as they had been for four weeks previous, were fabulous. They seemed to have learned how to read me, how to know when I wanted to gab and when I was surly and needed silence.
The shot came in a syringe with an incredibly fine needle. It was like hair, and when she pinched up a bit of my abdoman and jammed the needle in, I felt absolutely nothing.
And for those of you who know me a bit, you know how incredible that is. I am a complete lunatic about needles. Show me a needle and I might well start to cry. Shit, the inmates in my jail ever figure that out and I’m screwed.
It took me longer to ride the elevator up to the third floor than it did to get the shot.
I was a little tired afterward, but not much. I went to work to talk with my boss about getting back on the schedule, talked to a few others, laughed a lot — almost giddily because I couldn’t believe I wasn’t having any problems.
And promptly threw up.
I’d only done that once before during the treatments and it was quite the little surprise. But I hosed myself. I have meds that will take care of the nausea and I didn’t bother taking them, thinking the shot wouldn’t be a problem.
Then I fell asleep for about five days.
Uh…okay, maybe the shot’s a little tougher on me than I thought it would be.
But still so much better. I’m pretty sure I’ll have the same side effects, but to a lesser degree.
Hell, as long as Dr Pepper tastes good again, I’ll take the rest. Yeah, there’s a priority. Not health, not white blood cell count, not nausea…Dr Pepper.
Thursday, I had another shot — this one with a fucking 14 inch needle that was about four inches in diameter. The nurse jabbed me like a kid jabbing at found roadkill and three days later I still feel it.
I went to work right after the shot and had to drive three inmates to Stateville Prison in Joliet (remember the Blues Brothers movie? That prison.). I did pretty well most of that trip (the other deputy drove just in case I passed out or something). We stopped for lunch on the way back and while I was able to eat, I did get fairly dizzy. No throwing up or anything. I just swallowed some Tylenol and was fine a while later.
So I’m still not sure exactly how the shots are going to go, but today I feel more like myself than I have since before the surgery that got all this started the first week of November.
I’m 39 years old now, as of last Friday, and while it doesn’t feel like I’ve started a new chapter or dodged a bullet or gotten a new lease on life or any of the other sappy cliches, I do feel like I can stop looking backward or sideways or whatever.
I got through the harshest part of all this and I’m back at work, back to writing, back to having fun with my wife.
All in all, not a bad place to be.
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Monday, January 2nd, 2006
Friday was my birthday.
Friday was also the last day of daily Interferon treatments.
Not quite the birthday I had planned but given the context, not bad at all. Hey, no more going to the hospital every day, no more getting stabbed (my hands look like friggin’ pin cushions from all the IVs), no more of the one nurse’s perfume.
No more of any of that crap.
I consider this the end of the first part of all this bullshit; of initial tests and surgery and what a writer friend of mine called Interferon Boot Camp, and all the rest of the bullshit that goes with being a stage 3 cancer survivor (and how odd is it to think that about yourself?).
Now we move on to the thrice weekly injections (from now until December, 2006) and I have no idea what that means. Will I be as tired, sleeping 15 hours a day? Will I be able to eat anything? Will I be as cranky and pissed as I have been?
It’s the same medicine but only three times a week rather than five, and a smaller dosage. I suspect I’ll begin to feel somewhat normal again.
On the other hand, even today (Monday, four days since my last treatment) lunch still tasted like crap. Of course, it was week old Hamburger Helper so maybe that had more to do with the food than the medicine.
It is entirely possible I’ll have all the same side effects for the next year. It’s possible they’ll be less than they are now, but it’s also possible they’ll be just as bad.
Yeah, can you see me at the jail, feeling tired and hardly able to walk, just as a drunk who likes to fight gets arrested? “Uh, excuse me, sir, I’m kind of tired, can you wait to fight until the next shift? I’d appreciate it.”
I don’t think it’ll be that bad. I think I’ll feel much closer to my old cynical self than I do now…though I suspect it’ll be next Christmas before I feel completely normal.
Here’s an odd tidbit about the injections. It might be more expensive to do it myself. Yeah, welcome to modern American insurance bullshit. More expensive to do it at home than it would be to go do it at the hospital, where I’d have to take up a nurse’s time, use an ambulatory services room, labs and registration, all the rest of it.
WTF? And insurance companies wonder why people hate them.
Last week, the oncology nurse began working on how I’d get the injections. We don’t know yet because the insurance company hasn’t returned any calls. In other words, yeah, they’ll take my money every month but won’t pick up a damned phone.
In the middle of everything I’ve been through in the last six weeks, here is the thought that makes me the craziest: I’ll never know if the treatment worked.
Thousands and thousands of dollars and it’s basically to prove a negative. Regardless of the treatment, the cancer might come back (do I get my money back if that happens?). Or it might never come back because the surgery got it all. I have no idea.
I want to say — as publicly as I can — thanks to two writers who have been absolutely incredible during the last six weeks. You’ve heard of both of them and you’ve read their books and stories, and both of them are either currently fighting cancer or are currently in remission. Without them, I’m not sure I could have done as well as I have. I realized in the last few days how much I love both of them…for things I’ll probably never be able to tell them.
(Hah, how funny is this? Isreal Kamakawewo’ole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is playing right now on the bookstore stereo.)
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