Thursday, October 19th, 2006
Okay, not really wasting away, but WTF?
Went to the doc today. He was bored, which is good. He said all my counts look good; white blood cells are back up to a normal level of low, reds and platelets and everything else looks good. In other words, he was bored. (Actually, we spent the better part of the appointment talking about writing, which his daughter recently discovered and is very into.)
But — the caveat — I’m still losing weight!
For the last four days, I’ve been starving. Hungrier than I’ve been since last November when the good times started to roll right the fuck down hill. I’ve stuff myself with all kinds of food, scratched the itch, in other words. To the point where even LuAnn warned me to be careful. This from a woman who called me “old man skinny” more than once in the last few months.
I get there today and I’m at 166 according to their scale. Now, 166 ain’t bad, ain’t as bad as my home scale. Puts me down about 40/45 pounds. But I would have thought it was all coming back because I’ve been eating so much more recently.
When the nurse wasn’t in the room, I snatched the chart, dashed down the hall, and made a copy.
12/8/05 (after a week of chemo and not eating), I was 200 pounds.
12/15/05 — 195
12/29/05 — 190
1/26/06 — 189
2/23/06 — 187
4/20/06 — 180
5/18/06 — 178
6/9/06 — 173.5
7/13/06 — 171
7/20/06 — 170
9/7/06 — 169
10/19/06 — 166
A couple of interesting things in those numbers. First, according to their records, the weight didn’t come off as fast as I thought I remembered. After that first 10 pounds down to 200, it went much slower than I realized. Secondly, I’m still exercising, growing muscle mass. My arms and legs are both way stronger than they used to be. So how is it I’m eating more, adding muscle, and still losing weight?
Officer Friendly — who stole me away for lunch today and never yelled at me about the amount I ate, but did look askance when that amount wasn’t what he thought it should be — said I’m obviously not feeding the machine enough to counterbalance the exercise.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve gotten used to eating less and I like it. I like the weight I’m at, the way I feel. I don’t want to get back into eating anything and everything in sight. So it’ll be a delicate balancing situation. I need to eat a bit more for the exercising, but I don’t want to gain a ton of weight, or the wrong kind of weight.
There isn’t really a point to all of the above rambling, it’s just where I am right now, forty-five days from the end.
Forty-five days! Makes me wanna giggle like a school girl. An entire year — actually slightly longer because of the surgery and whatnot — down to the last few breaths. Man, I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am to be here.
Speaking of here, for any and all of you who might be in the area, December 4 is my chemo free party. At the bookstore in Princeton. If you’re around, pop in and have a Corona with me.
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006
The bar was dark, a band playing in the background except they were so loud it was more foreground than anything. Bodies packed tightly into the joint like crack rocks in an Altoid’s tin. Smell of booze and piss and stale sweat and pheromones.
And all I saw was the amber. Four splashes of it. Beautiful, life-sustaining, arousing Jack Daniel’s amber.
“Time for a non-memorial shot,” they said.
“Non-memorial of what?” I asked.
Writers Sean Doolittle, Jeff Shelby, and Lori Armstrong. And me. Sitting in the stinking bar, crowded by body parts that we were pretty sure we didn’t want to touch, crowded by lame-ass conversations, by sex trollers, by pompous, pretentious, bloviating writers and drinkers.
“To the fact that you’re not dead,” one of them said.
And when it went down, when I got the first taste of whiskey since all this started last November, when I got that soft, soothing burn, I’m pretty sure I was pitching a tent.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t drink a ton, but I do love the taste of Daniel’s. And I hadn’t had anything since we started the chemo. Some people said it wouldn’t be a problem to drink while getting the poison, some said it would. Beyond the medical, there was the financial. I’m paying so much to doctors and procedures and chemo juice that I couldn’t afford it anyway.
And by the by, I’m not sure who paid for the shots, but I do appreciate it!
It was that way all weekend, at the Madison, WI Bouchercon. Bouchercon is a mystery convention for writers/editors/fans/readers/agents/etc. Anyone who loves crime and mysteries.
It was an incredible weekend, punctuated by a gratifyingly high number of kisses from women saying “Oh, Trey, I’m glad you’re not dead!”.
Uh…me, too.
I met some incredible people over the weekend and most of them had a cancer story of their own, either themselves or someone dear to them. Listening to those stories — a woman’s sister who had colon cancer for the third time and maybe she’d make it to next month and maybe she wouldn’t — made me realize how large the cancer community is.
There were a couple of people who I would never have spent time with. Don’t like their politics, don’t like their books, don’t like them, whatever. But when cancer came up, all the rest of that shit was out the window.
For that moment, it was like the Lethal Weapon movie where Gibson and Rene Russo compare scars. My cancer was this while his was that; my treatment was this way while hers was that.
While we talked and joked about the cancer — Sandy Loper-Herzog and John Purcell and myself using “You know (I)(he’s) dying of cancer!’” — it never defined me, even during those conversations with people I wouldn’t normally have talked to. We talked about the disease, but we all understood there was so much more to each story than just the disease.
In fact, I had more people talk to me about the book and the short stories and how I did what I did and how I managed the creative process and did I meet that editor or that writer or where were we going for dinner or boxers or briefs, Corona or Corona Light. The cancer was something we could all talk about, but it wasn’t the only thing we could talk about.
Part of me had nervously expected otherwise.
With my close friends, obviously, I’d expected other conversations, but for those writers I was just getting to know or had met the previous year, I was worried it would be about the cancer.
I wanted people, in a nearly petulant school kid kind of way, to talk about my writing and my career and whatever. In other words, I wanted to be noticed for something other than being sick.
When I was in second or third grade, I snatched some money from Mama’s purse. Anson Jones Elementary was selling these little First Aid kits as some kind of fundraiser (I think). Vinyl folding cover, stuffed with Band-Aids, antiseptic cream, little scissors, gauze wrap, aspirins.
Desperately, I wanted one of those. And as soon as I got it, I was ‘Da Man. Kids would go running around, ‘fall,’ and need medical attention. I handed it out like fucking Dr. Kildare.
I was noticed. I was respected. More importantly, to both the second grader and the adult writer, I was the center of attention.
Here’s the thing: I still wanted to be the center of attention at Bouchercon, but not for medical reasons, for arty reasons.
All writers, regardless of how shy they might be, want to be that center of attention, want the world to hear what they have to say (otherwise they probably wouldn’t write for publication, right?). That was what I wanted, to stand in a conversation with people like Ken Bruen and talk about what brought us all together.
Not that Ken didn’t yell at me about keeping my health up. Actually, to be brutally honest, he sort of vaguely threatened me. I take seriously anything that sounds even remotely like a threat from an Irish man who was a security guard at WTC and spent time in a Brazilian prison for a bar fight. (And can you imagine the fight that would land you in jail in Brazil? Holy crap.)
On Friday, Lori Armstrong and I went to go shoot handguns. A few of her friends went with us, people I like to think of as friends of mine now: Jeff Shelby, Alison Gaylin, Karen Olson. We taught them how to shoot and at one point or another, the better part of that group took me aside individually and asked how I was doing. When they were satisifed with my answer, they snatched my gun and started shooting.
What I’m trying to say — and forgive me if I use 100 words where 10 would have sufficed, I’m a writer and just as pompous as you can imagine — is that I appreciated everyone’s good wishes. I appreciated their asking how I was doing and wishing me the best. But what I might have appreciated even more was their total awareness of the awkwardness of those very conversations. No one danced around the subject, no one tried to sugarcoat their own cancer stories even if the patient died.
No one tried to smoke me, in other words.
“Trey, heard you had cancer. How’s that going? Good? Good. Feeling okay right now? Good, let’s go get some pizza.”
And for the entire weekend — shooting, signing books, talking with Jennifer Jordan about how her year was MUCH worse than mine, congratulating Jon and Ruth on the award for their fabulous magazine Crime Spree, meeting cool new people like the incredible Tribe, realizing just how much you loved old friends — that might well have been the highlight: not getting noticed for the First Aid kit from second grade.
It was a brilliant weekend and damn me if I didn’t desperately need it.
Except now that I’ve written about swiping $$$ from Mama’s purse, I’m sure she’s gonna call me and demand that money back.
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