Chronicles of a
Cancer Patient

“Boy, this place is dead.”

Which is not the right thing to say in a room where they conduct chemotherapy, which is why it was followed by such an uncomfortable silence. I jumped on the silence as quickly as I could, adding -

“The place is empty. Everyone go home already?”

The nurses, probably thankful for my quick attempt to recover from the first comment, hastened to speed the conversation along. This was most people’s off week for their chemo, so, yes, there weren’t too many people in today. (I notice they never call us “patients”, except when they are talking on the phone.) They planned to get slammed next week. I thought that made it sound like a popular restaurant. Which it is not. Popular, that is.

I was in for another port flush. Which I must have subconsciously put off for as long as possible. They tell me to come in every 4 weeks, but they aren’t too picky about it. So when I’d gone almost 7 weeks without one, they hadn’t really noticed.

They did the normal ritual of flushing the port, etc., etc.

My nurse was sunburned, which we all thought was ironic – an oncology nurse looking like Miss Melanoma. But she’s not the one with cancer, we are, so let her smoke, and drink, and breath asbestos, and accidentally fall asleep in the sun if she wants to. Although, after all she’s seen, I don’t think she’d want to.

I saw on my calendar the other day that I’m quickly coming up on the 1 year anniversary of my diagnosis. July 26th. Or 27th. I guess the official phone call came on the 27th, but my heart sank with the first call on the 26th, when the words “lymphoma” and “oncologist” were first used.

I’m sure this’ll sound trite, but, boy, it seems like longer ago that just a year. 12 months. 6 spent in chemo and 6 spent recovering. Or spent forgetting. Or spent doing both.

They’ve been a few times that I’ve mentally stepped back, usually when I’m doing something that really makes me happy, and thought, “I would be dead right now.” And I would be. It’s an interesting thought. It doesn’t last very long, because the thought is a little overly-dramatic. There’s any number of ways or reasons why any one of us could have died by now. So why dwell on it.

Because I know it. Sure, we could die any minute, but we don’t know it. It’s all a big mystery. But not for cancer survivors, we know we got a second chance.

And you see, this is exactly why I’ve rarely been writing here lately. There’s so little left to write now that every entry inevitably ends up being some half-concocted, overly-dramatic general philosophy on mortality. How boring. Wasn’t it so much interested when I had things to talk about? Drugs, and side-effects, and characters, and the journey?

Well, forget cancer for a minute. Let me tell you what I do these days, a year later.

I’ve taken to biking. Like most other hobbies I have at one point become interested in (piano, guitar, camping, backpacking, speaking German, starting a record label, making websites), I’ve allowed it to take over my life. This is how I do things. I get interested in something, make a decision that I going to try it, and I don’t think about anything else for months. It’s a shame I’ve never taken up the hobby of “making money” or “feeding the hungry”, as I’m sure I could make a difference in the world if I could just get as interested in the world’s hungry as I once was about playing Sonic the Hedgehog (it, just that one game, consumed an entire summer when I was 14. And I consider video games to be a horrendous waste of time, and did then. Incidentally, I never got past level 4. The whole summer. Anyway…).

So, biking. I started with the problem that I didn’t have a bike, or much of a bike. My good friend Zach had given me his old bike, which he was going to otherwise donate to his garbage can, and that’s been with me for awhile. It’s sort of (we’re not in the chemo room, are we?) dead, though, if you’ll excuse the phraseology.

Another friend heard I was looking for a bike, and gave me an old 10-speed he had in his garage. A green one. From maybe 1987. Beautiful thing, though it inexplicably pulls to the left no matter how hard to furrow your brows at it. My brother gave me his old bike, also dead, but also rusted out from siting in the elements (and, judging from the dust, a great deal of concrete drilling) for the past 3 years. My brother claims that it is a green bike, although I can’t confirm that until I dip it in a vat of acid to get all the shit off of it. (Again, you’ll need to excuse my phraseology.

But if you think I might be defeated by the three dead bikes in the shed, or the fact that I don’t know how to use a wrench, or where to get one, etc., etc., etc., you would be wrong. You have either forgotten that part about “consuming my life” I mentioned earlier, or you falsely concluded that I was exaggerating.

I rode 87 miles this last week. In 4 separate rides. 8 miles + 16 miles + 39 miles + 24 miles. I don’t mess around when I get something in my head. I’ve lost 9 lbs. I decided that I would learn how to use a wrench, take the wheels off one bike and put then on the other. Which required the I also take the brakes off one and put them on the other…and the axle off one and on the other…

And, I almost forgot, awhile back I took my parent’s two dead bikes, stripped them of anything useful, and put it onto my bike.

The result is the ugliest, heaviest, oddest, Frankenstein-like bike you’ll ever see. And that’s what I ride.

It’s just unfortunate that I keep finding hobbies that require some sort of upfront cost. To backpack you gotta get a…duh…backpack. Not to mention you have to go somewhere WITH the backpack once you get it. Camping’s no better. You couldn’t imagine all the expensive things that are absolutely REQUIRED in order to rough it.

And now biking. A new road bike is a minimum investment of $600, if you want to do it right. Sure, you could go to Target and get a $70 Schwinn, but that would be more indicative of a “reasonable interest” in biking, not an “insane obsession”, which is what I’m referring to here.

I guess I’ve always liked biking. I used to go biking with my buddies when I was younger. But then there was that unfortunate accident that left half my face on the pavement. And then the unforgettable week or two in college when one pedal fell off and I become “Johnny One Pedal” until I saved enough money to fix it (seriously, have you ever ridden a bike with one pedal? It’s like trying to doggy paddle fast enough to water ski. Try going up a hill!)

So, while I am determined to bike, I’m also, apparently, determined to make it hard as possible by building a tank with which to do it. Because I put the gears and tires of one bike on another, I now have too few gears on the back end of my Frankenstein Bike. Long story short, I need to pay very close attention to how far down I shift. If I go too far, the derailler will de-rail the chain right off the gears, get stuck in the back tire, which will stop immediately, along with the rest of the bike – and maybe I’ll be able to donate the other half of my face to the pavement. It requires a lot of concentration to ride the thing.

The last time I had a psychic reading, back when I was at college, it was just as much for novelty as this time, and in the end, just as disturbing. Don’t these people know that we’re just looking for a little entertainment? Why do they always feel the need to give me the bad news?

“Do you drive fast?” She said as soon as she took my hand.

“Well…I don’t know. I guess sometimes I drive fast?” I replied.

“Do you drive fast around corners?” She continued.

“What?” I said.

“Well, I’m not suppose to tell you these things,” she said, and looked behind her as if for emphasis, “but I get a strong feeling that you will die driving too fast around a corner.”

What?! What the hell kind of psychic reading is that?

“And your girlfriend is no good for you.” She added, in a sudden southern Indiana drawl.

That was four years ago, and while she was right about my girlfriend at the time, there’s no telling about the accuracy of the rest of her story.

I don’t buy into the psychic thing, or, at least, I better not. I’m sure that there are some people out there who have some kind of talent in this area, but I’m sure it’s got to be pretty rare. The two I’ve now gone too mostly start with the same nonsense: I see that you are very strong-willed, nobody understands or appreciates you, something happened to you in the past that hurt you – you know, vague stuff that could probably be accepted by anybody as at least mostly true.

And then they jump into the more specific, and that’s usually when they start talking about me as a dead man walking.

When I drove into Pompano Beach on Sunday for this long anticipated vacation, I noticed a lot of kitschy, tacky tourist stores that usually line most beach front property in Florida. And the psychic place. It said “Palmist” on the sign.

I had also gotten a palm reading once when I was in Hawaii. It was at a farmers market on the big island. The dude, the palmist, told me that I was strong-willed, and nobody understood me, and that I liked to travel. Liked to travel? Duh? What was it that gave it away – the camera around my neck? The clothes that don’t match? The look of stupid wonder on my face? The Illinois driver’s license that I flashed when getting the $5 to pay? Thanks for nothing.

But I’m game for interesting activities, and shuffleboard at the hotel is difficult to play by yourself, so I went to the psychic’s place the next day.

A tall skinny lady with dark features answered the door.

I won’t get into how the place looked, and my misgivings about her decorating (which I awkwardly complimented her on…I don’t know why). She led me into what must have been her office. It was painted floor to ceiling in dark, night blue, with a massive, 10-foot sun on one wall and a matching moon on the opposite wall. There were crystals littering the desk and books on a book shelf – “The Tarot Encyclopedia”, “Psychic Readings”, “How To Make Money On Tourists”, “Basic Psychology 101″ (alright, the last two weren’t there…).

As she started to lay down the tarot cards she started talking.

“I see that you are a very strong-willed man” – blah, blah, blah. And on and on with the normal beginning stuff.

“Something happened to you in November, something that could have brought you the success your looking for. But you missed it for some reason, and now you are behind. I see that you are about 2 years behind on your success. What was that thing in November?”

Well, I thought, that’s certainly a bunch of baloney. I thought back to November. To laying on the couch in my parent’s place, surrounded by empty pharmaceutical packaging, rolling in nausea, bloated and angry. I’d mostly stopped gigging by then. Nothing was going on. Just chemo.

“No, I don’t think anything happened in November.”

“Where were you?” She asked.

Nice question, eh? Hell, I could be a psychic if the people coming to me would give me all that information – “well, I see your strong-willed, and…uh…so what is it you do?”…etc., etc., etc…

I paused and looked at the lady. Do I really answer this?

“I was in chemotherapy. I wasn’t doing anything.” I finally answered.

“Ah yes, the sickness.” She said, suddenly adjusting the cards on the left, as if she was just about to get to that anyway.

“Yes, the sickness kept you away from something.” She concluded.

Good call, lady. Tell me something I don’t know.

“Your cancer will come back, but you won’t die from it. I see that you are planning to move, yes? I see that this place, southern Florida, is not for you. I see the west coast somewhere. Where is it that you were planning to move?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “go back. Did you just say that the cancer is going to come back?”

“I don’t mean to alarm you.”

“Really?” I looked at the cards. “Where does it say that?”

“Oh, you’ll be ok. You won’t die, you’ll beat it again. Your cancer is in remission, yes?” She said.

Ok. This lady has clearly never been through cancer treatment. ‘You’ll beat it again’? Like that’s supposed to make me feel better? Do you know what it’s like to beat cancer? That’s not just something you brush over casually before heading on to the next subject.

“Yes, I see you on the west coast when it happens. Doctors there will have a cure.”

Ok, lady, that’s enough.

It went for a few minutes longer. She talked a little about relationships and told me that, for only $250 (!), I could have a FULL reading, but that she’d need me full name and date of birth. And although she didn’t ask for it, I bet she could probably get some use out of my social security number, a major credit card, the internet passwords of all of my bank accounts, etc., etc., etc.

Thanks for nothing, lady.

So I think my curiosity with psychics has waned. Either I’m going to die in a fiery car crash or I’m going to be riddled with cancer on the west coast. I could do without that information, thank you. In Machiavellian terms, I imagine this is how they hook their clients. They tell them some sort of horrible event that is bound to take place in the future, but that can be avoided through the psychic’s constant guidance. And BAM! You’ve got a client that will hang on your every word and pay you whatever they need to pay you. Too bad for her I’m strong-willed and she doesn’t understand me.