Coming Soon: Broccoli Sprouts

Every book written to advise friends and family how to best help their cancer-afflicted loved one strongly suggests that it is most respectful to not offer medical advice unless it is asked for. That's why it is mostly the grossly uniformed...and those who don't read those kinds of books who call, email and interrupt conversation to suggest all manner of surefire cures for my kind of cancer (which is exactly the same cancer their sister, cousin, best friend's boss (fill in the blank) had and was miraculously cured of).
So why does my long-time dear friend, who is sensitive in every way imaginable, refuse to stop talking to me about the healing powers of eating broccoli sprouts daily? Even at the risk of straining our relationship? Even though I have asked her repeatedly to not bring it up again?

Stay tuned.

Humor Rhymes with Tumor

There were several of us women, around the same age, hanging around the place where we all volunteer. One woman, down on her knees unpacking boxes of books, wanted to know if I had thought about my retirement. What was I going to do when I couldn't work and had to live on Social Security and probably couldn't afford to live in Santa Cruz?
I took a deep breath and passed up the opportunity.
I said, hm, I hadn't really thought about it much...What did she think about it?
It was a rare moment for me, a consummate party pooper. I'm the one who talked about childhood sexual abuse on my first date. I've silenced more than one family Thanksgiving...Easter...Christmas table with conversation starters like nuclear annhialation, U.S. foreign policy in Central America, apartheid. Since I was diagnosed, I have shared the tragic news with just about anyone who ventured anywhere near that territory and even with people who didn't ask.
But this woman wanted to talk about retirement, not the statistics that say I don't have to worry about aging.
So I shut up and thought about Richard.
Richard was a figure skater. When I met him, he was emaciated and could no longer get out of his bed at the hospice where I worked. I met a lot of men in the same straits as Richard over the three and a half years I worked at Rosehedge. It was the first hospice of its kind in Seattle: a six-bed facility for people with AIDS who were knocking on heaven's door. Richard was one of the crankiest of the men I met (and fed and bathed and dressed and tended herpes and kaposi and radiation burns) out of nearly 100 guys who lived and died in that old Victorian house surrounded by rose bushes.
He was mean and he was funny and he had lots of great gossip from the days he skated with Dorothy Hamill and others in the Ice Follies.
One day there was a documentary crew visiting the hospice and they were in Richard's room interviewing him about his religious beliefs about death (Richard was Catholic). In a break from shooting, one of the filmmakers noticed Richard's portable morphine pump and marvelled over it.
"How did you get one of these?" he asked innocently.
"Bend over and I'll show you," Richard replied.
I still laugh when I remember the look on the guy's face.
But I got to where I didn't want to go in Richard's room. He'd told all his Ice Folly stories and the only thing he wanted to talk about was being sick. Sure, it was pretty much the center of his life and it got more and more dramatic with every opportunistic infection that attacked his frail body; more and more compelling with the pain that wracked his days and nights despite the morphine pump.
And he wasn't the only one with a sad story to tell.
Maybe that's why I walked out after the first few sentences of the guest speaker at a recent fundraiser for the local women's cancer organization. She had cancer, but now she was better.
I didn't want to hear about it. The cancer or the better.
Both for different reasons.
I didn't want to hear about the better because it's a lie they've been telling us for too long. Very few women stay better once they've had cancer.
Why didn't I want to hear about the cancer?
(Pull my shirt up and I'll show you.)
Because I already know way more than I ever wanted to know.
Because just about every day someone asks me something about cancer..."my" cancer.
Because there aren't enough good cancer jokes to break this spell.


My favorite cancer joke:
A guy's waiting in his doctor's office and the doctor comes in and says "I have some bad news and then I have some really bad news....which do you want first?"
The guy says, "Sheesh...okay, the really bad news."
The doctor says "You have incurable cancer."
Stunned, the guy shakes his head. Then he says, "What's the other news?"
The doctor says, "You have Alzheimer's."
The guy sighs and says, "Well, thank god I don't have cancer."

That reminds me.
One of the funniest and most right on books I've read about living cranky and lively with metastatic breast cancer is called "Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics" by Miriam Engelberg. She's brilliant and savagely honest, and she has saved women with cancer from death by a more painful foe: sincerity.

Shot Thru With Light

I was walking into the setting sun this afternoon, the ocean on one side of me, car after car after car on the other side. I couldn't see the people walking towards me, so I had no social obligations to acknowledge them, leaving me free to ponder as much as dodging dog shit would allow.
It's getting harder and harder to ponder on West Cliff Drive, what with safety concerns...bikes, poop, dead fish, spacey people pondering...
The sun was ferocious in the chilly afternoon sky and I was unshakeably certain that I was permeable, light shooting through all the various and increasing number of holes in my bones. I stopped, pissing off a cyclist for good reason, and savored the vision.
If I was a painter, I would paint that one with lots of bloody red and deep yellows and oranges coming through the holes in my legs, my pelvis, all up and down my spine, my arms and shoulders and ribs and skull. Maybe with encaustics, y'know where they mix the paint with hot wax and sort of sculpt the paint on the canvas, giving the image fleshiness and heft.
And when the light shines through that.
Wow.
For someone who likes to walk and jump up and down and dance and jerk around for no reason, it is distressing to know that my bones grow more fragile from one CT scan to the next. I think about that movie "Shadowlands" about C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) and the American woman (Debra Winger) he fell in love with and how one day she's just walking around the kitchen and her leg breaks.
Snap.
Crash.
It's a great movie, partly because she dies such a tragic death (they'd just fallen in love) by bone cancer. And it makes Tony Hopkins realize just how much he loved her.
It didn't start in my bones, but in my breast, and it's taken to my bones like a tick to moist dark skin. I have lytic lesions, which are the ones where the cancer thins the bone, leaving them at risk of breaking out of the blue. Especially with bouncing. Or picking up heavy things. Or sometimes for no apparent reason.
It seems that along with the erosion of the bone, there can be nerves and muscles involved, all those things being so close together like. This intimate sharing of space and blood and sensations and naughty cancer cells can bring on the pain like a surprise birthday party that only people you don't really like come to. For instance, I often have the feeling that my ribs have been shattered by a two-by-four.
Halleluiah for the humble poppy. I know I complain about the irritating and embarrassing side effects of opium derivatives (constipation, nausea, anxiety, anorexia, itching, depression, nodding off as the arc of narrative makes it's most graceful turns in books and movies. Oh and farting.
But I don't even want to imagine what my life would be like without opiates. I remember when my grandmother was dying of cancer. It started in her breast and within five years it was all over and finally in her brain.
In those days...the early '70s...they were real worried about dying middle-aged women becoming dope fiends and so the only time she got pain medication was when she screamed for help. And my dear introspective, shy grandmother who I remember as being someone I had to get really close to in order to hear her, became a screamer. I was ten and we visited her in the nursing home every night for months.
There should be a parade for all the people who dedicated their lives to getting as much pain medication necessary to the people who sorely need it for as long as they need it without making them feel guilty or weak or fiendish about it.
I'm grateful I can save my screaming for other opportunities.

Piss Off Post

I ran into a former co-worker yesterday. God, it was good to see him. I miss work something fierce much of the time. I mostly miss hanging out with writers all day, being smartasses. He, one of the most proficient smartasses I know asked me what I was doing with my time. I said, Oh, you know, having cancer, reading books, hanging out, going to doctor's appointments. And, I said a bit sheepishly, I started a blog.
He laughed and said, "You must be the last person to start a blog...what are you writing about? What Dick Cheney said today?" I said, "No...(Asshole)." He said, "What? About having cancer? There must be a few blogs about that out there by now." I muttered something about how I didn't really know what I was doing yet, had just started it a few days ago, didn't really care if anyone read it, just needed to be making something happen. He laid off. I carried on with grinding my teeth.
Today I did a search for cancer blogs. I knew before I opened this blog that there was plenty of this out there and I admit to having illusions of writing something so different about my experience with cancer that it has no compare with the other blogs by people with cancer.
I will not only be the exceptional experience, I will be the most outstanding author of cancer lit ever to hit blogspot. People, with and without cancer, will stay up into the night waiting for my next post. In my hands, cancer writing will encompass the whole human experience in the way that Camus' "The Plague," spoke not only of festering lymph nodes and bloated rats, but of love, death, friendship, swimming and war.
And where will the energy come from for this life -defining piece of work if I have to take a three hour nap every day as well as keeping my house clean, doing laundry, feeding myself, going to the movies, reading books and contemplating my next bout of chemo?
Where will the scalding syntax, the vivid vocabulary, the cliche-splitting chapters, the genre-busting narrative arc come from when I can't remember what I did yesterday, when my ears are ringing so loud I can't even hear myself think, when I sit for ten minutes tapping my fingers waiting for a single simple noun to come to me?
Here's how:
A lava flow burning its way to my fingers will illuminate every thing that stands in its way. All that left over radiation and throat burning chemo will lead me to the truth. Adverse drug reactions, pain and constipation will keep me up into the dark fertile hours of the early morning. Irritation is my cloud by day, my pillar of fire by night.
Piss and fury are my guides.

Poem of the Day

The Buddha in the Glory
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Center of centers, of all seeds the germ,
O almond self-enclosed and growing sweeter,
from here clear to the starry swarms
your fruit's flesh grows. I greet you.

Lo, you feel how nothing more depends
on you; into infinity your shell
waxes; there the strong sap works and fills you.
And from beyond a gloriole descends.

to help, for high above your head your suns,
full and fulgurating, turn.
And yet, already in you is begun
something which longer than the suns shall burn.

Venus in a Nursing Home

One of the benefits of having worked at the local newspaper is that I am welcome at the regular press screenings of upcoming films at the arthouse theater. It had been awhile and today my friend Annie invited me to come see the new Peter O'Toole flick, "Venus."
First, let me say. Oh My God. How is it that Peter O'Toole can still be gorgeous at, what is he?, eighty-something? His wild life is written all over his agile face, his long luxurious limbs are still limber and steady in slapstick, and his voice is steady and sexy.
But if it wasn't Peter O'Toole sliding his hand down the shoulder and around the breast of Venus, his best friend's country-raised niece, who is maybe all of 17--if it was, say, my eighty-something uncle, I would have walked out of the theater. The baby boomers are getter older and this is a classic old man fantasy flick. I was creeped out.
And I liked it.
Okay, I love Peter O'Toole, who in this film is married to Lynn Redgrave who he abandoned with three children under six many years before. He takes Venus off his best friend, Ian's hands. Ian asks, "What is it that a man your age can do with a girl like her?" O'Toole says, "It's very difficult. I'm nice to her."And we watch Venus, an angry teen who's been kicked out her home after a forced abortion, slowly and sometimes violently unfold under O'Toole's gaze. And sometimes, touch.
That's all I'm going to tell you except that I was many times moved. I laughed a lot. One of the best scenes is Ian and O'Toole waltzing together. It's a beautiful movie about old age, love and death. And Venus rises whole from it all.

Poem of the Day

Wet Pajamas On a Rainy Night

I dreamt it was blood,
the adhesive sticking my pajamas to my slick skin.
Rain drummed late into the darkness,
first tapping lightly on the window so at first I thought it was possums trying to steal my bike again, raccoons looking for a handout, the egret resident of the local drainage bumming an umbrella.
The wall heater cranked up high,
I tried to dry off evidence of my late night dog paddle across the bay, finally giving up to a dry set of flannel before stepping back into the swell,
thick with kelp, smelling just like blood.

Cats in the Machine

It's about every three months that the doctor wants to see what the cancer is doing. He just can't resist the lure of technology, the clicking machines, the brightly colored scans, the heated phone calls with the radiologist. It's what he does.
He's an oncologist.
Today is my CT scan, also known as a cat scan. My father, my brother, my lover: none of them can resist a joke about cats and claws and purring and whatever.
It's a man thing.
Last night I started at nightfall with the first glass of barium sulfate suspension (2.1%w/v,2.0%w/w). It's like drinking a glass of someone else's spit. Then another glass at daybreak, another before leaving for the clinic, two more after checking in. I did better this time than the last one in October. I drank it all without once gagging.
Today there was even more excitement, a countywide power outage. The receptionist said I could reschedule my appointment. AND START THE SPITTLE DIET AGAIN?
No way.
Me and George sat it out, which sounds noble, but it wasn't because the power came on within about 20 minutes. Ten minutes later I was prone on the bench that slides into the whirling techno-donut, the nurse telling me she was just learning how to do the intraveneous thing with the iodine. They all leave the room and the machine says:
"Take a deep breath and hold it," and then "Breathe."
Then it's all over, except for the barium and iodine hitting my intestines like a marching band.
This is where the hard part starts: waiting. What did the cat see? Has the cancer grown? Has it miraculously disappeared? What does that mean? Should I go buy a cane? Some new hats? A burial plan?
Okay. What it means is that I have cancer.
One more time, almost just like the first time, I go through the grief, just as surprising as before:
Tears and snot out one end, barium suspension out the other.
I've told George that if I'm going to do chemo again, I'll need to go to Hawaii first.
Or we'll just go to Hawaii and fuck the chemo.

Snake in the Grass

You just never know.
I've never noticed a snake until the very last minute, until I'm pretty much on top of it.
Then there's the adrenelin rushing to all of the senses and suddenly everything is big and bright and loud and alive. That's why I used to like horror movies. And why I used to take a regular spin on the Giant Dipper roller coaster.

It was like that when the surgeon put on his serious face and said it was bad. Real bad. It was all over the place and it wasn't going away. He said a lot of other things but adrenelin did funny things to language and I heard single words, like chemotherapy and nipple, like stage four and lobular.
But none of them would string together in sentences. I got the general idea. I had cancer and it was bad. Real bad all of a sudden and I didn't really notice it until I was pretty much on top of it.

The adrenelin flow slows down pretty quick and then everything that was big and bright and loud and alive settles down into complete sentences. But there's the lingering slime of the stuff and still the sentences won't coalesce into paragraphs.
The questions don't lead to the answers.

It's more than a year now since that first adrenelin rush and since then there has been one after another...oops, now it's in my uterus, now it's in my bladder, now it's in my intestines... so that I am now always looking for the snake before I get to it.

Can I slip by this time without waking it up? Is it going to be poisonous this time? Is that any reason to kill it? Isn't it just another snake in a world of snakes? Isn't it beautiful in it's own right?