Archive for September, 2006
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
“Trey?”
“Hey, Trey? Where are you?”
Exercise room. Squad room.
“Trey? You here? Trey. Hey!”
Break room. Class room. Holding cells.
“Hey. Trey! You okay? Where are you?”
Sally port. Sergeants’ office. DARE office. Exercise room again.
“Trey! Damnit, don’t screw with me! Where are you?”
Lobby. Hallways. Behind the exercise equipment. Bathrooms. Call the bookstore. Call the Sheriff’s Office. Call my home.
And Sergeant Terry Polhemus’ heart rate kept climbing.
Finally, he called Sgt. Atkinson.
“Hey, I can’t find Trey. His stuff is at Post 40. He was exercising. I can’t find him.”
Atkinson — Officer Friendly — glanced at me. We were on an accident call together. “Uh…he’s with me.”
I’m not sure what Polhemus’ words were after that, but I’m pretty sure they were colorful and probably included images of impaling me on the treadmill.
I didn’t even think about leaving my stuff there, and maybe that’s the most distressing part of the entire — now funny — incident.
When I got done with the daily poisoning in December, I realized I had lost a great majority of my muscle mass. I had trouble, in other words, doing basic things like lifting meals at the jail or holding up whatever book I was reading.
So I began to exercise. A little weight lifting, a little running. Just trying to stay as healthy as possible through all this, trying to boost my immune system. Hell, even trying to find something to keep my mind off of being sick.
And through it all, there always seemed to be one of the boys in blue around. Making jokes and always just in earshot, listening for me falling down, passing out, or dying.
(Hah, wouldn’t that have been the funniest joke. I die and THEY get stuck with filling out all the paperwork and reports and insurance forms. Hah, bury them in paper!)
The point — please God make the point already, you rambling, bloviating fool — is that I wasn’t worried about leaving my stuff sitting on that table. It didn’t occur to me that Terry would see my keys and not my body and get worried.
In other words, I forgot he might be worried about me.
I felt that good, that healthy and strong and in control.
What the fuck? When was the last time that happened? Honestly, last October and November, when I was out shilling for my first novel. Then, in November, the Terrible Times started.
I wrote a few months ago that I had no good days. All of them were bad. Then, later, I wrote that I was having good days but they were few and far between.
Well, the ratio is changing. Call it 50/50 now. At least as many good days as bad.
Not only can I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s enough light now that it’s warming me up pretty good. Hell, maybe even enough light to tan my face a little.
Of course, I might feel great today simply because it’s sun-shiny outside, I’m on vacation from the jail for eight days, and I’m on a week’s break from the poison.
Plus, this week is Bouchercon, the mystery/crime convention, and I’m looking forward to seeing some writer friends, people who’ve managed to help me get through the bullshit by sending me free books and stuff.
I mean, yeah, their friendship is great blah blah blah, but send me loot, man, that’s what I’m all about.
By the by, 65 days….
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Monday, September 11th, 2006
Eight-two days….
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Monday, September 11th, 2006
Those damned white blood cells. It’s like they’ve got a mind of their own. “Hey, I know what’ll be fun,” I can hear them saying, “Now that things are going so well for ol’ Trey, let’s take a nose dive and see what happens.”
Went to the doctor last week and everything — save the white blood cell count — was good. Doctor actually was sort of bored. But for whatever reason, and he had no idea other than ‘chemo does that sometimes,’ my white blood cells are down. Still within the range of acceptable, the doc said, but lower than they’ve been since I was doing the daily crap back in December.
“Don’t catch a cold,” he said. “Could kill you.”
Uh…yeah, thanks Doc. How much am I paying you again?
So that was a little unnerving. Not quite as unnerving as finding a lump or discovering my heart was enlarged, but still….’chemo does that sometimes.’
* * *
In case you missed it, here are the highlights of a story that ran on ABC News.com a few days ago.
“Aug. 31, 2006 — Seven years ago, Mark Origer was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma, a sometimes curable skin cancer that can be deadly if it spreads to other parts of the body. By 2004, his cancer had spread to his liver, lung and lymph nodes.
Desperate for a cure, Origer enrolled in a clinical trial at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. The trial tested a very experimental therapy that had never before been used in people. The cancer institute’s researchers are using genetically engineered immune cells to shrink tumors in cancer patients like Origer.
“This is the first gene therapy for cancer. … That is why it is so important,” said Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, who headed the trial as chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute.
Researchers took immune system cells from the blood of 17 advanced melanoma patients who, like Origer, had not been helped by conventional treatments. Origer had only three months to four months left to live when the experimental treatment began.
These ordinary blood cells, called T cells, were genetically engineered to become cancer-fighting cells that could recognize and attack the life-threatening melanoma. The cancer-fighting cells were then injected back into each patient. Researchers hoped that the new T cells would multiply and fight off the cancers.”
Not only did the guy live, there isn’t a drop of cancer left in his body. In other words, he’s cured and he didn’t have to go to Mexico, have leeches attached to his balls while he spun around four times singing Ave Maria and handing over his AmEx card.
Very exciting. That guy’s cancer is my cancer. What started as skin cancer spread to his lymph nodes. That is what I went through. Obviously, his was much worse, much scarier. But now he’s cured. Now he’s safe and alive and all the rest.
Part of my new reality — new since I got the diagnosis last November — is that it will come back someday. Maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe not until way down the road. But I do believe I will get cancer again at some point, and stories like this give me some hope that, while I may get it again, it probably won’t kill me.
And yeah, I fully understand that something like 90 percent of the people in the study died anyway, that the therapy didn’t work for them, but there is that shred of self-involved hope, isn’t there? People may die, but not me, I’ll be the one person for whom it works.
* * *
From a letter posted by a reader — Kylie — a few days ago:
“Hi. I’ve been reading you posts for a long time now. It never ceases to amaze me how brutally honest you are with yourself and how mortal we all are, yet there is such grace and humour in your words. Makes me ashamed to whine about having a shitty day. Hypoglycaemia is NOTHING compared to you.”
It was a touching letter and I’m glad she wrote it, but it tickled something in my brain. Even at its worst, I found myself thinking, this is pretty small stuff. Compared to people with brain cancer and lung cancer and a seemingly endless string of cancer types, compared to people who had months or weeks or even days left, mine seemed pretty minor.
It sometimes seemed too petty to bitch about, in other words.
And yet, here is this woman, who’s been silently reading the installements, who has battled her own cancer and now lives with other health problems that affect her damn near daily (from the sound of it) and she says the same thing about me. Why bitch about my own situation when there are other, worse situations out there?
Exactly. Though my ego would never let me not write about it, that thought has been in the back of my addled brain since this started. What the fuck am I writing for? What do I think I have to say? I can’t compare to people who are looking at coffins or who are strapped down in a hospital room for days and weeks and months.
“…but sometimes,” she wrote, “It’s too easy to forget that as a decently healthy person, I’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Hah! If you’ve got nothing to complain about, you’re just not trying hard enough. (Thank you, very much, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be here all week and don’t forget to tip your waitress)
Seriously, that’s how I feel sometimes. Come on, Trey, this has been pretty minor, you’re alive, you’re healthier now than you’ve been in years (thanks to the Chemo Diet Plan and some exercise). What’s the problem?
There is always something else further up the line that puts everything in perspective, I guess. Regardless of how bad it is, there are people hurting much worse.
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Friday, September 1st, 2006
My Son’s Mortality
by Alison Evans
When Trey was a kid (age 34), his wife called me at our Trading Post and told me he was in the hospital and had suffered a heart attack. I asked her if this was some kind of bad joke. Trey is known for those. No such luck. Scared the peewaddley out of me.
Here’s the horrible part of being a mom. I am biased about my kids. Always have been, I guess. Any truly honest parent will admit to this failing. Well, hey – this one practically raised himself with nary a whine, whimper or teenage rebellion. No wonder he impressed me so much. So the first thing I thought was that I was going to lose my favorite son (oh, lord, he’ll have me over a barrel now) early in life – probably in retribution for my multitude of sins. No kidding, that was my thought process.
After that, Trey did well at his recovery and I slowly got over my fears. Case closed, right?
Again, no such luck. Now the kid was age 39 – still almost a babe. The removal of the lymph node didn’t worry me until the diagnosis came back. Now I’m scared shitless again. Am I still sinning so badly that the Great Beyond has it in for me? What? ME? Aren’t I supposed to be worrying about Trey?
And I did. As soon as the Inteferon started hitting him and he started suffering the effects of it.
There is nothing so hard as to watch your own child – favorite or not – suffer and not be able to do anything about it. A minor example: when Trey was 10 years old, he talked the Powers That Be at the Midland Reporter-Telegram into letting him be a paper carrier a year earlier than was their normal procedure. On his first day of throwing papers, I was driving home from work and happened to see him on his bike trying to haul all those papers and having a really hard time of it. I could have taken part of his load and done it for him. But I didn’t. I made him finish the route, then when he got home, we figured out an easier way for him to split the load from then on. But leaving him there in the middle of the street, struggling with that load, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I cried all the way home.
Now, with the Inteferon, there is no way I can even offer to take part of the load. So now all I can do is worry, pray, joke with him and be there for dumping purposes. And it hurts so badly that I can’t carry that load.
So now I check his blog daily, hoping for news – even if it’s bad. And I count down the days as avidly as he does. And I wish over and over that I could be the one suffering.
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Friday, September 1st, 2006
So, I’ve started this entry about 40 hundred times and nothing works. Can’t seem to write my way out of an old wino’s paperbag.
Damn writer’s block. I’m sure it’s the chemo’s fault.
Okay, less chemo than general stupidity but there it is.
But part of it, too, is that there simply isn’t much to write about right now. Yes, I’m tired. Yes, I have days of crankiness (ain’t that a movie? Days of Whine and Crankiness?). Yes, I still don’t eat much. But I’ve written about all that before, you’ve read about all that before. Right now, it’s the same old thing. To a lesser degree, but still the same old thing.
Honestly, I’m getting friggin’ sick and tired of the same old thing. But better days are coming. And here’s how I know that: a few nights ago, LuAnn asked me to make up some of my enchiladas. I haven’t done that for nearly a year because they tasted awful and I wasn’t hungry anyway.
She loves ‘em so I made ‘em up because she asked.
And then I promptly sucked up two like they were free Corona beer. And wanted two more!
Holy Chalupa, Batman!
They hit the spot in a way absolutely no food has done for nearly a year. That’s a good sign. Hell, that’s a great sign.
The other way I know things are getting better is that I don’t find myself fighting through the massive depression both the chemo and being a cancer victim brought with it. I still get agitated and angry, but I don’t often find myself sitting around depressed about it all. Sure, it still happens, but how often it happens, and the degree to which it hits me, is less than it was. That, damn near in and of itself, makes me feel like the light at the end of the tunnel is getting larger.
So, here’s what I thought I’d do, just to keep everything interesting. A few weeks ago, I had Ed Gorman write a piece about living with cancer. It occurred to me then that my cancer doesn’t affect just me, but everyone around me. Yeah, yeah, an obvious realization, so I’ll blame chemo-brain for not having it earlier.
The cancer touches LuAnn and my mom and family and friends on the force and writer friends and casual friends. In one way or another, it touches a great many people. So I asked a couple of them to write a little about the entire thing. And yeah, I realize that’s mostly ego — how does MY cancer affect how you deal with ME? — but I thought it’d be interesting anyway.
In the next entry, probably later tonight, I’ll have something from my mother. I hope you enjoy it. If you don’t, I’ll send you some of my enchiladas…assuming I haven’t eaten them all.
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