don't mind me

February 3, 2012

A new month. A new round of chemo. How am I holding up so far? you ask. Quite well actually, and thanks for asking. Although, to be honest . . . I haven’t started this month’s chemo. Theoretically it was to begin on Tuesday given the original treatment schedule which is apparently flexible. I find this disconcerting, I’m not going to lie. Maybe radiation spoiled me. You came, they saw, it conquered. Each day as scheduled, as near to the same time of day as possible.

It seems to me that timing should be an integral factor in this process. Though how can you call one instance a process? After all, I’ve only had one round of chemo and the next round is pending. Pending what? A good question, gold sticker-stars all around. Red tape snipping. Pending where? All of you, get up here, head of the class for everyone. The ol’ Circumlocution Office, is where.

[Chapter 10 of Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit concerning The Circumlocution Office is comfortably in my top five favorite pieces of satire in all of English literature. If you are bored and want to be more bored, read Little Dorrit—it’s a dandy. If you are bored and want to be amused, read Chapter 10.]

After several phone calls, transfers, voicemails, retransfers, and personal offences taken without offence intended, one of my sources tells me I am likely to have my chemo pills by tomorrow. If, that is, of course, a certain fax, officially authorized by an official authorizer in the Medical Authority Office , passes muster in the Muster Passing Department--an office very high up, you may count on it, its walls arrayed with Crosses and Shields of Blue and teeming with dour personages—and if a facsimile of the original fax of the original reaches the outmoded, rattling fax machine in the Outmoded Equipage Department in a timely manner (by 4:52 PM) then the process proceeds to the Procedures Department-- an entirely unrelated department having to do with the process of processing intra-office affairs and nothing whatsoever to do with process of proceeding with the personal case of the personally offended chap holding on line 37 in the Crossed-Wires, Untouched Bases, and Dropped Balls Department--from there, if all is still going well, that is, in the hands of a zitty intern, the now wrinkled facsimile will need to be transported to the All Systems Go Department located in the basement adjacent to the All Systems’ Goo Department which of course is where a gelatinous Jabba gorges on misplaced miscellany, deferred documents, and ill-fated, zitty interns who need to get their eyes checked.

Will I get my pills tomorrow? “It being one of the principles of the Circumlocution Office never, on any account whatever to give a straightforward answer, Mr Barnacle said, 'Possibly.’” (LD, CD, 80)

I’ll be waiting.

In my office.

In the Tumor Incubation Department. [take the tour]

Don’t mind me.

daring decimation to do its worst

January 24, 2012

I have to say, I expected a more emotional response from yesterday’s visit to the Kirklin Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. For its proximity to my house, the KCCCC is where I will be getting my three week (after chemo rounds) blood work done—keeping up with those red and white counts, reportedly important numbers.

But my point is this: Nearly five years ago, I came to that building five days a week for a month to have my brain irradiated. For a month, I had friends who were variously dying, slowly like the rest of us, on a speeding train like some others of us. We were a band of five or six whose appointments with post-space-age-disintegration of cells coincided. Some of us, like me, were neck-up patients, the rest were neck-down patients. All of us were fast friends. We knew each other’s illnesses, of course, but we also knew each other’s hopes and loves, things we had done, things that come hell or high-water, we would surely do. We told stories, some of which were vast conflations—for the tickle of lies and the ensuing laughter. [For a fictional account of one of these days, I refer you to my story living online @ http://mixedfruitmagazine.com/issues-3/waiting/]

Actually, I think my real point is this: I expected a surge of sentimentality as I approached the doors of the KCCCC, as I rolled into the waiting room, as I looked down the hall where the radiation techs stood in front of their complicated imaging machines, as I waited. But nothing registered. Perhaps because my name was called almost immediately. Perhaps because five years is a long time in neuro-oncology terms. Most likely, though, was the sense of disconnection between myself and the five or six freshly fast friends in the partitioned back room comparing scars and life-expectancies, waiting for their names to be called, daring decimation to do its worst. Come hell or high-water.

A poem I’ve been working on--the narrative is true in as much as the memories are accurate.

Uncle Ben and the Eye of Charley

Uncle Ben, unrelated, just a friend

Of the family: his tumor grew too large,

Too fast, I learned

Of his death too late

To love him more. To catch

One more croaking cat from his Pop’s

Pond deep in the Carolina

Tobacco acres, or another stringer

Of pompano from the Nag’s Head surf.

We tripped along the rows

Of his Pop’s farm—unearthing arrowheads.

Uncle Ben chunked our wishful

Thinking back into the field, spat

Upon the genuine articles, like Christ

For blind eyes, and presented

Them as if now a buffalo stampede

Would surely follow.

Those were all the early years.

Fish-fries and whacking thick brush

With his gleaming machete.

It’s fine if other things happened,

It’s fine if that was all.

*

Uncle Ben’s pick-up woke

Up angry and stayed sour all day.

Me and Christopher

Rode with Ben. Rain pelted the window—

Splattery novae keeping

Me wide-eyed. I tried to see the lines

Uncle Ben claimed to see

Clear as day.

The hurricane shoved us,

Lane to lane. Eastbound the bridge

would close, said the radio.

Ben leaned forward,

An earnest effort to gather

Momentum. We had come too far

To turn around. Tire-spray and fumes

Sneaked through the broken floorboard.

*

We burst through the rain—

One second in, the next second out.

The bridge rose, brilliant,

In front of us, stretched beyond sight

Toward the Outer Banks, toward

Another orbing terrace of charcoal clouds.

A caravan of evacuees jammed

The mainland route and Uncle Ben

Laughed. That’s right,

That’s more fish for me. He punched

My thigh (a bruise I cherished

For a week’s worth of showers).

More fish for me! More fish for me . . .

He kept saying as the sun

Sparked the chopped-up sound.

I pictured him jabbing marlin,

Mid-Atlantic, with his pants rolled.

*

The radio called the storm Charley.

My grandfather’s name.

My father’s name.

A cousin’s name.

Ben was just a family friend

Whose tumor came on fast,

A misfired cannonball to the head.

In the eye of Charley, on the closed-

Down bridge, which of our brains

Had begun to betray us?

Neither would know until long

After the junk-covered beach streets

And the shaking shack

On stilts, bearing Charley’s brunt.

Long after fish-foul shores—

A wreckage of dead horseshoe crabs

And battered jellyfish—the cold walk,

All of us, grit-shot and gust-sprayed,

Toward the lighthouse—the pride

Of Hatteras, the pride of us,

Having ignored the storm.

Having braved the bridge.

Having caught no fish,

But in theory, oh in theory—the fish

My Uncle Ben could’ve caught

One man left to his ocean, pant-legs hiked,

Spearing marlin, laughing,

There’s another for me!

And another for me. And another . . .

And so forth, forever, or as close

We come—Ben as far as he could,

Me as far as I can. And so forth, all

Of us, toward the lighthouse.

January 18, 2012

grease the pistols

Not all good intentions pave the way to hell. In fact, some may really get you along quite felicitously, coming upon air-conditioned way-stations of hard-earned respite and discovering undreamed-of wildflowers possessed of (and forthwith illegalized) palliative properties.

More often than not, intentions just go awry. Not so much damnable as delay-ful. More like this poetized anecdote from the rural duties of Robert Burns in which, plowing a field, he disrupted the home of an unlucky mouse:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

[Visit here for the rest of the poem and a translation from English to English—it’s lovely and sad, do yourself a favor and chalk-up the time spent to a literary field trip. I’ll sign any slips your teachers or employers may require.]

Ado is done. I had intended to start this blog at the very turn of the new year, to undertake a project worthy of an auspicious occasion regarding an inauspicious calendar of events. That is, the commencement of my chemotherapy and a periodic journal of its consequences.

I was made aware of my need for chemo in late December of 2011. (It occurs to me that not everyone is apprised of my chronic health condition. Loooooong story short: Doctors discovered a brain tumor over 14 years ago. Since, I have kept tabs on the thing by innumerable MRIs. Seizures and minor motor debilitation were the main botherations. Five-ish years ago, the growth grew, a biopsy was performed, and radiation was dialed up. In as much as it stopped the growth and shrunk the tumor a skosh, the therapy was a success. Back to chill-pills, MRIs and biannual, brief visits with my splendid team of doctors and nurse-practitioners. Fast forward to December 2011. Because time flies when your tumor is dormant.) The wascawy gwioma was in season again and it was time for Yosemite Sam to grease his pistols.

Chemotherapy*. I had been hoping for wildflowers. Something organic, free range. But poison it was and poison it is. I was to begin January 1^st. I was thrilled at the coincidence. This very blog began to form in my mind. The chemo was to last a year. And not just any year. The Mayan/ Nostradamus year. I would defy my own slow decomposition in real time with the steady yearning of earth towards its December-ish decimation.

I started chemo on January 2^nd. Mousie, thou are no thy-lane.

Here’s my excuse. On December 29, 2011, finishing a meal with my brother, his wife, and three awesome kiddos, I collapsed rather gracelessly into what would become a 9 hour seizure event. Efforts to stabilize my convulsions were pain-shakingly slow. I was transported to a hospital in Mobile and from there, still via ambulance, to Birmingham. At some point during that ride, I lost track of things--a day, it seems, evades my remembrance (drugs and exhaustion) though I am told I was conscious enough to flirt with nurses and to shower obscenities on my dear, undeserving family.

Eventually, the worst was over. (All hail Ativan!) But I continued to seize every hour or so in the hospital, even when I got home for another couple of days. The trauma laid me up for a while but now, with walking accoutrements [pronounced uh-cooter-mints, trust me, I have English degrees] and Herculean upper-body strength (you heard me, ladies), I am mildly mobile again and done with my first week of chemo. To which bulky pills, I say, “Psht, is that all you got?”

To which the bulky pills are undoubtedly wringing their little chemical mitts and twittering (not tweeting, don’t embarrass yourselves), “You just wait, Hulkamaniac, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t rent that tank top of yours.” *gleeful giggles*

So there you have it. I hope you’ll follow along. I promise on Robert Burns’ sideburns that I will be much less glum than jocose and complain much less than entertain.