Chronicles of a
Cancer Patient

Hello everyone -

It’s hard to come up with a good way to say this in an e-mail, especially a mass e-mail, but I thought that perhaps this was the best way to let everyone know. Some of you may know that I’ve been particularly ill as of late, and that the doctors have had a difficult time finding exactly what the disease is. For those of you who haven’t heard any of this yet, consider yourselves lucky that you didn’t have to go through the months of playing the “Disease of the Week” game, where each week I would be whole-heartedly convinced that I had some exotic ailment like Malaria of the p.vivax strain, or the very unlikely Thalysemia, or the almost unknown Whipple’s Disease.

It was just a week ago that the doctors were aggressively testing for one of these strange, mystic diseases – when suddenly the tests all came back wrong and in just a couple phone calls, everything seemed to fall apart. At least, that’s how it felt to me.

A few more tests in a different direction confirmed the findings. I have cancer.

I have a cancer called lymphoma. This is a cancer of the lymph nodes and, I’m glad to say, a very curable kind of cancer. I’m told that with the proper treatment, 97.9% of lymphoma patients survive. Nevertheless, it is cancer and I’ll have to go through all of the cancer rituals to get rid of it. Chemotherapy will begin soon, followed by whatever else it takes to get rid of this.

This is difficult. But I can handle this, I will beat this, and I will come out a better man in the end. I am looking forward to being a cancer survivor.

If I can’t have my health, I’m glad that I still have my family and friends. It is a relief to know that I will have you all with me as I go through this. I understand that it is hard to know what to say in a situation like this, but please don’t be shy. This is a fine opportunity to make jokes about me losing my hair, etc., etc.

I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Future Cancer Survivor,
Dave Hahn

P.S. – I’m afraid I don’t have the e-mail addresses of everyone that I’d like to send this to. Please feel free to pass this on.

Chemo Rookie

Hi friends,

A few of you wanted me to let you know how things went today, on my first day of chemo. I appreciate your support more than I can explain. I thought I’d let you know how things are going.

It was long. 6 hours. But most of that was just sitting and waiting. There are a lot of paperwork and procedures on the first day, and it certainly wasn’t the hospitals fault. I expected it to be long, and I brought some entertainment. And anyway, it’s certainly not like I had anything better to do.

The Cancer Center at Sherman Hospital was really great. Because it was my first time, they put me in a private room with one of those snazzy hospital beds and spent a lot of time explaining things to me. I received 9 kinds of drugs today, and the oncology nurse sat with me and my parents for the whole process, which I felt was really extraordinary, even if it might be standard.

The only thing I had trouble with was the one drug that was probably the least of my worries. They gave me some regular ol’ Benedryl to compensate for any allergic reactions I might have had to the chemo and the stuff couldn’t have been more annoying. Maybe it was an extra high dose or the fact that it was an IV drip. My head couldn’t stay awake, but my legs couldn’t stop moving. Picture Sleeping Beauty as a sprinter, or a cross between the Tryptophan-like tactics of poor John Kerry’s speech writers and the body of a dancing Napoleon Dynamite.

I came home drowsy and slept it off. A friend brought us a fantastic dinner, and since then I’ve felt – to my sincere surprise – really well. The nurse said that this would happen, that the steroids would make me feel spunky for awhile, but that I would drop after a day or two (so I figure I better get this e-mail out while I still got some spunk! Note: for evidence of “spunk,” see John Kerry joke, paragraph 4, line 4.).

The best news of the day is that the bone marrow test came back today and it showed that my bone marrow is completely clear of cancer. Had the cancer spread to my bone marrow, my chances of survival would have considerably dropped, so I can’t tell you what a relief it is to know that these bones of mine are clean.

To be honest, I was really anxious about today. There’s a lot of discordant information about chemo therapy – how it’s terrible, or how it’s not-so-bad, etc., etc. – and especially about the first day. I believe this dissonance is due to the fact that chemo therapy is a distinctly individual experience, and that each person is effected mentally and physically in decidedly different ways, even by the same drugs. As it turns out, today was a relieving, giant step toward getting rid of this dumb thing.

That being said, I understand the more difficult parts of chemo therapy are still to come, so I’m not counting my chickens quite yet. Nevertheless, I’m indescribably consoled by having experienced the chemo process firsthand and to have seen the immediate reaction my body takes to the drugs. I also feel very confident that I’m in good hands at the Cancer Center at Sherman, and that comfort, you can imagine, feels priceless.

Thank you again to all of you for helping me through this. Being the social person that I am, I’ve found that it has been the concern, affection and humor of my friends and family that has given me the most strength during the past weeks.

Future Cancer Survivor,
Dave Hahn

I guess it’s too late now to talk about my distaste for blogs.

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere. ~Frank A. Clark

I have Hodgkins Lymphoma, what is also called Hodgkins Disease. This is cancer of the lymph nodes. This is one of the most curable kinds of cancers, as it responds remarkably well to chemo therapy. There are other kinds of lymphoma, all classed as “non-Hodgkins” lymphomas, and, as I understand it, the cure rate for these kinds of cancer is not as good.

There is a great deal of information available on the web about Hodgkins Disease. For an overview, I would recommend the Mayo Clinic’s website: Hodgkins Disease.

One website I’ve found interesting has been Bill Bujake’s Hodgkins Journal, which talks at length about his experience fighting and curing the disease.

It was yesterday around 2 pm-ish I figure. A couple rotten, bored kids on summer vacation maybe.

I had just been to the site – my site – this site – around noon. I noticed that there was still the same goofy picture of Connor Oberst on the front page, staring at me like a neglected puppy, and that the same poll that had been there for months. Five people had voted on the poll. I was four of them.

When I built the website – the original Preservation Records website – I had high hopes that it might become some sort of online community, a sort of band of brethren that would come together around glowing screens and talk about “the scene.” We would speak efficiently and intelligently about art and music, we would scorn poetry together, we would never wear matching t-shirts and we would be the elite.

But it ended up mostly being me and my friend Cam. Cam would make a post and I would answer it, and we would both use language that made it sound like we were talking to a great many people.

Not that the website was lonely. At any given time I could look on the “current visitors” and see half a dozen visitors from servers like “googlebot,” or “msnbot,” or “yahoobot.” A bot could get lost for days in my site.

So there it was, one lonely site, dusty from disuse and weary from the constant crawling of ghostly bots all over it’s empty pages. The hackers couldn’t have picked a more useless site to tag. It’s like painting “I WAS HERE” on the underside of an abandoned bridge. Nobody cares kid. Cars don’t come here anymore.

So I didn’t feel too upset when I saw what had happened. Lord only knows how they got into the site, but they ruined the whole thing. They rearranged code, wiped out the database, put their hacker names all over the place, and shut down the site to visitors. They even left an e-mail address. It was neatly printed at the bottom of their logo. That’s right, these idiots made a L-O-G-O.

I could have been frustrated by all this, I mean, I did spend a great deal of time putting that site together and making sure the colors were perfect, the margins were lined up, the forums were organized, blah blah blah. If this had happened a month ago, I would have been out for these kids’ blood.

But you know what? I don’t care. I have cancer. I have cancer, and that makes things like websites, and hackers, and hours of work – seem like pretty small fries. A website can’t come with me to chemo, the website’s not going to call me when I need it, a website isn’t going to e-mail me to say hi. It’s just a website.

So farewell to the old website. I enjoyed it while it lasted, but I’m glad that Connor Oberst isn’t staring at me anymore, and I’ll never again have that pathetic feeling of voting on my own poll. Thank you, hackers, I hope you enjoy the rest of your summer vacations.

Tonight I had what I will refer to from now on as “the worst gig ever.” My thanks to my friend Shawn and his phoney booking agency in Chicago for hooking me up with it.

But I’m glad that I was healthy enough to be playing even a bad gig (an atrocious gig). The effects of the chemo were a little rough for the first few days of this week, but now 4 days later, I’m feeling well enough to complain about other things.

If anybody is interested, I’ll be continuing my stint as the piano player for the Brazilian gun-twirler and self-proclaimed comedic singer at an Italian restaurant downtown all weekend. You must like feedback and Puerto Rican jokes.

I will be going to chemo every two weeks for six months.

The particular kind of chemotherapy I am given is called ABVD.

There will be a passing exam at the end of this blog. Study hard.

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. ~ African Proverb

Last night’s gig was labeled a “complete disaster” by everyone involved, and the remainder of the performances have been canceled by the booking agency. See? Some prayers are answered.