Chronicles of a
Cancer Patient

Mr. T – The Chicago native was Hulk Hogan’s wrestling partner in 1985’s Wrestlemania. Ten years later, he KO’ed T-Cell Lymphoma (fitting). Mr. T’s motto: “You’ve got to have a set back in order to have a come back.”

Junior Wells – Legendary Chicago blues harmonica player, Junior Wells died in 1998 of Lymphoma.

Jim Ryan – Former attorney general. Non-hodgkin’s superstar.

Joey Ramone – My favorite, the lead singer of The Ramones. That’s right, the funny looking guy who’s band never made a dime, never played a song more than a minute long, and changed rock and roll forever. Joey died of Lymphoma in 2001 at the age of 49.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis – Jackie O died of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Gene Wilder – Actor, comedian, producer, director and husband to Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer. Wilder was diagnosed with Lymphoma.

Mickey Mantle, Jr. – Never made it to the majors like his famous dad, but still a switch hitter. Died of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Charles Lindbergh – Flew across the ocean. Lymphoma took him in 1974.

King Hussein of Jordan – Died in 1999 of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Paul Allen – Microsoft ga-billionaire beat Hodgkin’s.

Mark Fields – Football player. I, therefore, have never heard of him. Survived Hodgkin’s.

On the mondays between chemo session, such as today, I go to the hospital for blood tests. They want to check my blood to make sure that I’m not tanking too quickly. If my white blood cells were to fall too low, they would put me in isolation in the hospital to prevent possible infections. And that would be no fun.

But I don’t have to worry about any of that right now. In fact, according to the results of my blood tests today, I’m getting healthier and healthier as I go through this process (aka: the opposite of what is supposed to happen). They didn’t even give me a booster shot today.

This past week was, even so, more difficult that previous weeks. It’s starting to get harder to keep up with life. I was really exhausted Thursday through Saturday. People asked me how I felt, and I just didn’t have the energy to feign fortitude.

Today was the first day that I dreaded going into the Cancer Center. I like the people that work there a lot, but I’m getting pretty sick of seeing them. Every time I go there they stick me with something, or fill me with something, or rough me up in some other way.

I met a lady there today named Shirley. Shirley has lung cancer and no hair. She was very friendly. It’s funny how cancer patients will tell each other the most intimate details, even if they are total strangers. She took her hat off to show me her bald head. She was old and feeble, but it was kind of beautiful in a way. I pulled out some of my hair to show her that I’m losing mine, too. She told me about her hysterectomy and I complained about steroids. I reminded her of a National Geographic photographer that she used to know, and I told her that he must have been a very dashing young man. She told me that, yesterday, she prayed to die. I’m glad she didn’t, though, because we had a good talk.

My mother tells me that I need to be nice to her because, after all, her son has cancer. That’s an interesting development I didn’t see coming.

This may be hard to read if you don’t like needles.

By the time I finally got to sleep last night it was way later than I should admit, and I had almost forgotten entirely about the PET scan I had to go to this morning. A PET scan is a test that scans your body for cancer. Back in the day they used to have to cut a cancer patient open and conduct “exploratory surgery,” where they would take a little piece of every organ and test it for cancer. My Aunt had to go through that and I understand it’s unpleasant, so we’re awfully lucky these days to have PET scans.

The deal, though, is that you can’t do any repetitive movement for 12 hours before the scan, and you must fast for 6 hours before coming to the hospital. Repetitive movement includes things like reading and chewing gum, not just lifting weights and flexing in the mirror (I don’t know why these are the ones that come to mind…).

Anyway, when the lab assistant came to get me in the waiting room she said she liked my shoes. You may not appreciate the triumph in those words if you haven’t ever been shopping with me. Especially shoe shopping. The last time I went shoe shopping, a week ago, I sat in the store for nearly 2 hours staring at the shoes like they were speaking in a foreign tongue. I finally picked out a pair – a disgusting, puke brown pair of Euro-trash. I got into the car and put them on and realized that somehow between the 2-hour debate, the cash register and the parking lot, I had bought an pair of puke brown, Euro-trash shoes. And they didn’t even remotely fit. Seriously, not even close. At what point in the store did I say to myself – “Yes, these are the ones!”? Was it the 45 minutes I spent walking around in them, seeing if they were? Was I training to be a geisha? What is wrong with me?

Like a shoe-buying idiot, I went back into the store and returned the shoes that I had just bought and tried again. This time I picked out two different shoes, one pair brown and one pair black. I paid quickly and left. The cashier gave me a funny look. I would have too.

Naturally, only one of the pairs of shoes I bought fits, the black pair is clearly too small (no, I’m not kidding, I’m that bad at buying shoes). But the brown pair! Oh yes! These were such a good pick that the PET scan girl needed to comment on them. I thought about telling her this story, but it’s bad enough that I wasted YOUR time telling the story, let alone some helpless lab assistant that was just looking for something to say during the long walk to the trailer.

They keep the PET scan machine in a semi trailer and drive it around from hospital to hospital because no one hospital can fork over the $2.6 million it costs to own one. The lab techs travel with the machine and spend their days cooped up in the trailer with sick people, commenting on their shoes.

They sat me down by the machine. The lab technician – an older guy with a violent case of the shakes, the likes of which I’ve only seen in alcoholics and Parkinson’s patients – prepared my arm for an IV while the assistant asked me questions and checked things off on her check board.

“Do you have diabetes?”

“No diabetes.” I said. The lab tech rubbed my arm with the alcohol swab. I’m used to getting stuck with needles now, I’m actually bothered more now by the smell of alcohol and gauze than anything else. I can’t stand the smell of hospitals.

“Have you ever had chemotherapy?”

“Yes, I’ve had four months of it now.” I said. The lab tech lined up the needle in his shaking hand.

“Did you have it recently?” And he stuck me in the arm. But he missed the vein, I could tell right away (I’m getting good at that). I think he knew it too, because he started sliding the needle around under my skin, trying to dig into the right place.

“Eh…What?” I was trying to pay attention to the girl asking me questions, but when I looked at her, I saw she was staring at the needle, too. She didn’t have the look of surprise or terror that I had on, though, her look was more like ‘Oh, here he goes again.’

“When was the last time you had chemotherapy?” She looked at me.

“Oh, uh, it was Monday. The last time was Monday.” I said, and looked over to see Mr. Shakey McShakerson trying to pull a sample of blood out of the needle he had stuck in my arm. No blood was coming though, so he pushed it in further. I was wearing my look of horror by now, I’m sure.

I think the lab assistant left for lunch then. I don’t know. I was starting to be pretty occupied with this dude that was stabbing me in the arm. He brought over a small syringe that was encased in a half-inch thick tube of protective metal.

A PET scan is an interesting thing. The first thing you have to know is that cancer loves sugar. Cancer eats up sugar like crazy. I seem to remember even craving sugar back before I was diagnosed, but that might be something my mind made up for me. Anyway, in a PET scan, they basically inject you with radioactive sugar water, and then record where it goes in your body. If you have cancer, the sugar will go straight there and your tumor will light up on their monitor like a light bulb.

Shakey started to push the radioactive sugar water into my IV and I tried to look away.

“Does that burn?” He asked.

“No. …Wait…YES. YES, oh, yes, that burns.” He took out the needle and put it and it’s casing back where he got it.

“Is it supposed to burn like that?” I asked. I knew the answer was no because I’d done this once before and I didn’t remember my arm catching fire that time.

“No, it’s not supposed to. The IV must not be in your vein, or it’s leaking out. We’ll have to start another one.”

Oh God. You mean the radioactive material that you keep in a 1/2 inch thick lead casing has leaked out of my vein and is burning the tissues in my arm? And you want to do it again?

He tied the rubber band around my wrist and told me to make a fist. He got out another needle and shakily held it above my clenched fist, like he was about to cut the wires on a time bomb, but wasn’t sure which wires he was supposed to cut. When he stuck it in he, I think, went to far and went clear through to the other side of the vein. It’s hard to explain what that feels like, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I looked down and saw the white knuckles of my other hand clenching my seat.

How much more of this should I tell you?

There was a sharp pain, and I looked up to see him rooting around in my hand, still trying to find the vein. He finally found it, thank you JEE-zus. He brought over another vial of the radioactive stuff and pushed it through the new IV. I was probably emitting my own light by that point, if he’d of thought to turn off the lights I could have done my impression of Jessica Tandy in “Cocoon.”

The funny thing about the guy was just how likable he was, despite his tortuous incompetence with a needle. He seemed genuinely interested in what life is like as a musician, and we talked a little bit about how he’d like to go to the place in Ireland that was displayed on his calendar this month.

Once the stuff is in you, though, you have to just relax. Repetitive motion will attract the radioactive sugar, so if you’re talking it’ll look like you have cancer of the vocal chords or something. He left me in a different room for about 45 minutes and I think I even fell asleep for awhile.

As Shakey brought me in for the scan I walked by the old lady that had been scanned before me.

“Oh, are you next?” She asked. She looked especially interested, but I think that was because she had penned in her eyebrows a little too high this morning.

“Yeah, how did you do?” I replied.

“Oh, I did fine. But we had some trouble getting the IV in me…” Shakey coughed and looked away.

“Ok Dave, your turn.” He said.

The PET scan machine looks just like an MRI or a CT scan, if you’ve ever had one of those. There’s a small slab of a bed that you lay on, and it goes in and out of a big metal tube that surrounds your body and makes funny noises. You have to lay very still or the imaging won’t turn out right.

As Shakey was about to put me into the machine he said, “Do you remember? Was this a head and neck thing or what?”

If I understood him correctly, I think he meant to ask me what he was supposed to be doing. Next I thought he might ask me if I knew how to drive this thing. I said, “Well, I had this big tumor in my chest.” I hoped that information would be enough.

“Oh really? Wow, in your chest?”

“Yeah, a great big one.” I said. He seemed satisfied with that and went into the other room and closed the big, heavy door between us.

About 30 minutes later, when the scanning was done and I’d fallen asleep again, Shakey came in to pull me off of the slab.

“Did you get some good pictures?” I asked, hoping he might show me.

“Oh yeah, yeah. They turned out really well. I set them for an extra 15 seconds and they turned out really well.”

“Did you see a big tumor?” I asked, still digging.

Then, it was funny, he took me over to his computer. He told me that he couldn’t interpret any of the photos, and then he told me what all the photos meant. I saw a big black thing where my heart is, but he told me that that was my heart and that was normal. I didn’t see anything where the tumor used to be.

I didn’t see anything where the tumor used to be!

The images have to be turned over to a radiologist so that they can charge me another $800, but if the radiologist sees the same nothing that I saw, I’m going to start calling myself a cancer survivor.

As I left the semi, I told Shakey that I hoped to never see him again. He got the joke, but I was only kind of kidding.

I went in to see Shakey McShakerson again on Saturday. For those of you who haven’t been studying for the passing exam at the end of this blog, Shakey McShakerson is the fellow that runs the PET scans at my local hospital. He’s about as good with a needle as I am with a mider saw. The difference is that I don’t work in a mider saw for a living.

I don’t know why he shakes. I can only assume it’s a tick he’s had for awhile. Perhaps stabbing another human with a sharp needle makes him nervous, and makes him start to shake violently right as he’s about to put it in, and makes him inevitably miss the vein he was looking for, and makes him shoot the radioactive dye into your tendon, or your muscle, or your whatever, and makes him ask “does that burn?”, and makes you scream “YES.”

Maybe. Or maybe it’s something much more complicated than that. Maybe he’s been cooped up in that little semi-trailor behind the hospital for too long. Maybe he makes him think of the foxhole back in ‘Nam that he jumped in right before they put that steel plate in his head.

I’m just guessing now.

Anyway, I think he would have liked to have been a musician, rather than the PET scan operator in the semi-trailer at the back of the hospital. But more on that later.

His assistant came to the waiting room to bring me out to the trailor, like she always does. Except, this time, she looked different. Her clothes fit a little snugger. And her eyes seemed to have a dull film over them that hid the gleam they usually have. And that big rock as no longer on the ring finger of her left hand.

“Hi, nice to see you again. How’s things?” I said. I was digging. Right off the bench, I was swinging for the fences.

“Oh. Ok.” She replied.

“Just ok? That doesn’t sound convincing.” What? Was I expecting her to pour it out for me right there on the way to the trailer? That her fiance had cheated on her, or had become a jerk, or they moved in together and she found out he was a slob? Or worse, that he was dead, or ran away with his boyfriend? Or simply that they didn’t have anything in common?

She didn’t take the bait. Which I’m now sort of glad for. I mean, I got the story from Shakey later anyway.

Shakey was, I believe, happy to see me, and launched straight into the questions about where I was playing now, and how was that, and what kind of stuff to I play there, etc., etc., etc. I felt bad talking so much about myself whenever I go visit him, so I tried this time to ask how he was.

“Oh, can’t complain. Just…you know…can’t complain. We’re going around. Different places, you know. I’m, ah, getting my taxes together, you know how that is… Yeah… Can’t complain.”

He put the needle in, this time, without fanfare. I held my my free hand around my upper arm and squeezed my other fist good and hard, so that maybe a vein would stick out more and he could get it better. Without digging around this time. (I’m wincing as I write this, you should know.)

Maybe he shakes because he’s been doing this too long and he’s constantly subjected to the radioactive material that he’s shooting into us mice. I’m sure that they have a good deal of safety around him for the job, but if you’re around it, you’re around it, right?

Anyway, eventually they got me on the slab in the machine and took pictures of me, looking for cancer. I haven’t checked on the results, I’m sure it’s clean.

During the photos, though, Shakey actually came into the room and had a conversation with me. Shakey? Dude? Aren’t you supposed to be behind that big lead door over there? Away from the harmful rays? Why are we talking about the Olympics? Aren’t I supposed to remain absolutely still? Dude?

Anyway, he’s a good guy, regardless. On the way out I asked him about his assistants engagement ring. He said, yeah, she broke it off herself a couple months back, and hasn’t acted the same since. I bet there’s a sad story there. Poor girl.

Courtney, my friend with breast cancer, had her, I believe, 3rd chemo treatment yesterday. She goes down to a fancy-shmancy cancer center at Northwestern University for her chemo. As I understand it, she gets her own room and a nice view of the lakeshore out the window. Which sounds nice, I guess, but I imagine all she wants to do is hurl, anyway. Chemo does the same thing there as it does here. I suppose I regret a little bit that she’s not getting the great people watching that comes with community chemo (where everyone is all in one room), but she’s probably better off. You can compare my chemo experience to being a patient in M.A.S.H., and her’s to being a patient in Grey’s Anatomy. Well, either way, she’s still gonna want to puke, so what’s the difference (says the M.A.S.H. patient)?

She’s having many of the same problems I had when I went through chemo, and I think it’s nice for both of us to commiserate about it.

As I suspected, she’s a pretty tough chick.

There is a chance, as I have no experience with it, that I don’t understand the afterlife very well. And there is a chance (who knows?) that we might all turn into clouds when we die.

So I rode my bike up to a park near the river today, where I knew no one would be, and I talked to the first cloud I saw. I thought that maybe the cloud might be Shirley.

I told Shirley that I was sorry that she died. Well, no, not that I was sorry that she died. One of the first things Shirley told me was that she prayed to die. So I don’t wish that she lived any longer than she did. I am sorry that she had to live like she did for the last years of her life. I’m sorry I didn’t visit her before she died. I’m sorry I stopped thinking about her. I’m sorry I left her in her suffering as soon as I was done with mine. That I felt I had to ignore her suffering in order to forget about mine. I’m sorry about how she had to die.

I met Shirley a little less than a year ago in the chemo room. I don’t mean to go into a long description of Shirley, but I will say that I half expect her obituary to say that she was born a princess of some far-off beautiful nation, and that she gave it up to come to the states and have lung cancer so that she could be there to cheer me up when I came to treatments. She would tell me she loved me every time I saw her. She would always be hooked up to a machine, no matter what day it was, and she’d always ask how I was.

I remember Shirley once talked about how she wanted her funeral to be one big party. That we should prop her body up in the coffin and I’d play piano and we’d all dance around like it was New Year’s Eve and she was Times Square. And that nobody would be sad. I told her I’d play, but that I ain’t propping nobody’s body up in no coffin. And now I see that I’ll also be sad at her funeral. So I guess her funeral will be nothing like she wanted it to be.

Shirley had already been in chemo for months, probably months and months, by the time I got there. She’s already been through plenty of suffering. And I believe she’d worked in a hospital for most of her life, if I remember correctly. Either way, she could recognize a scared, anxious kid when she saw one. I’d bet that’s why she started talking to me in the first place.

She always seemed so much more in control of herself than I felt. She was always so straight-forward about her pain, and how she felt. She survived it so much better than me. It seems strange that she’s died and I’m the one people call a survivor. How can that be?

My nurse wrote me on Friday to tell me that she’d gone into the hospital and that things didn’t look good. She thought Shirley would like me to know. I meant to go see her, but I never learned her last name and I didn’t know how I’d find her. I guess I probably could have found her. And yesterday I got caught up with a million less important things. I called today and as how she was. She died this morning. Her body just shut down. I wish I’d gone to see her. I wish I had done that.

But the nurses say she had already started to go by the weekend, and I think they mean for that to make me feel better, which is nice of them. But I still wish I’d gone. If she wasn’t lucid, then maybe more for me than for her. I miss my friend Shirley. But these are the sorts of things you realize too late sometimes.

Whatever happens when we die, if we turn into clouds, or stars, or angels…whatever it is, Shirley will know her way around it by the time I get there. She’ll recognize the scared little kid that’s new to the place and maybe she’ll cheer me up again. It’s a nice thought.