Chronicles of a
Cancer Patient

During cancer I had looked forward to a celebratory trip I had planned in Yosemite National Park. But it didn’t work out with my work schedule and I ended up not going. I started to regret not taking the trip lately, as I’ve been looking back on how much of a pain cancer really was, and I really, I think, earned a trip.

So I booked a trip today for Pompano Beach, FL to do some scuba diving. A big thanks to my parents for supplying the lodging and to scuba.com for selling me my new snorkel (I’m not going to beat cancer only to get hepititis from a rented snorkel…).

I learned to snorkel if Fiji about 5 years ago. I was studying marine biology and anthropology in Hawaii and Fiji, and I got my PADI certification on the coral coast of Fiji’s big island, Viti Levu. (Sounds pretty sweet, huh?) I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling again, but college, work and life in the Midwest have kept me pretty far from the ocean as of late.

I had planned on picking scuba diving back up when I was on the cruise ship, but, as you may remember, I was getting pretty sick on the ship. I didn’t know it was cancer, but I was having problems with dizzyness, and coughing, that I now know were part of the tumor in my chest. The idea of coughing constantly underwater didn’t sound very comfortable, and I was afraid of passing out while in the water.

I also had a problem with my ear. I don’t know what it was, maybe all the weight I lost, but my ear was constantly closed. I’d actually forgotten about that. You know the feeling you have when you have water in your ear? And you can’t hear anything but the water? I had that all the time, except without the water. I even went to the ship doc once to see if there was something wrong with my ear. He was no help, naturally (no offense doc, but, buddy, you are totally useless).

Anyway, I beat cancer, and now I’m taking a trip to Florida for some scuba. Because now I’m healthy and I can.

It’s spelled “spackle”, for those of you keeping track, and if you get the right stuff, you don’t even have to sand it. There are no longer crevassed holes is the wall of my Easter bathroom.

But there is still a decided lack of towel rack.

I had another port flush this week. There are new people in the chemo center that I’ve never seen before. New people must come in all the time. Filling up the green recliners and drinking water from little, white, styrofoam cups.

I don’t know how the nurses and doctors manage to spend every day in that place. Don’t they ever start to feel like it’s all just too much? Don’t they ever want to leave all the disease and all the sadness in that place? Doesn’t it wear on them?

I don’t know. It felt good to be back there. I’ve had a hard time placing the emotion, but lately I’ve just been feeling…depressed. I can’t understand it. Spring it coming, and I’m working all the time, and I’m alive… I can’t understand why ending chemotherapy would be despressing. It isn’t. It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t.

I moved out this past week. I never intended to be living off my parents at age 25. It’s time I moved things along. I’m working all the time now, it’s possible, I should. I live in a nice house with an old friend and his dog. It’s close to work. I might buy a bike and take that to work as it gets warmer.

My room is a very serious green color that I’ve tried to tone down with stock artwork I bought at Target. The bathroom is a pallid, Easter-egg green that makes me want to go invest in a step ladder, paint brushes, and some other – any other – color. I tried to put up a towel rack the other day, but in the end, I just made two holes in the wall that I’ll have to putty up and paint as soon as I learn how to do that. Don’t make fun, I don’t even know how to spell spa-kel, let alone sand it.

Sometimes it just occurs to me that my life is being filled with more and more things I’m supposed to do, and less with things that feel right. People call that growing up, and I call those people quitters.

And it occurs to me that being surrounded by nurses and blankets and little, styrofoam cups filled with water felt, somehow, safer than being surrounded by Easter-green walls and holes where there should be a towel rack.

I can’t remember things very well. My nurse says that’s normal, a long-term side-effect of chemo. That it’ll probably get better. But that doesn’t help me find my car when I walk out the door with an arm full of groceries. And that doesn’t help me when the person picks up my phone call and I realize that I’ve forgotten who I was calling. Or that I need to bring a goddamn pencil with me to rehearsal, or listen to that CD, or do whatever else. I can’t remember. Sometimes I just want to sit down right in the middle of that big, stupid parking lot, with all my heavy groceries around me, and cry about how lousy it all is.

And then I think that I’m 25, and a man, and a cancer survivor, and people like me aren’t supposed to get upset. So I do what I’m supposed to do. And I wonder how I got here instead of somewhere else. And I can’t understand why life scares me now. I can’t understand why traveling doesn’t sound like fun anymore. Why I shouldn’t be at home, but I don’t feel like being in the green room, and I don’t want to be in chemo, but I feel better in the room with the cancer patients. But I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t.

Again – I don’t know. I remember having a plan before all this. Things I wanted to do, and places I still wanted to see. I meant to be on a beach right now. I meant to learn how to surf. I meant to live in another country. I meant to behave better, and look better, and eat better. And where, before, things all seemed so possible, now I just have to admire a guy that could have enough courage to dream up all that stuff.