Chronicles of a
Cancer Patient

I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders. ~ Jewish Proverb

Before all this I didn’t really know what the difference between chemo and radiation was, it all just seemed like some nondescript, horrible stuff that I hoped I never had to go through.

But the world keeps spinning, and it turns out chemo and radiation are two different things. I’m still not entirely clear on what radiation is, and I’m not sure I’ll even have to go through it, so I’m happy to just discuss chemo.

Chemotherapy is a treatment for cancer that involves an IV, a lazy boy recliner, and chocolate chip cookies. The lazy boys at the place I go are all green and covered in fake leather. They are lined up against a wall with dividers between them, giving the same sort of fragile privacy that similar dividers provide in men’s bathrooms.

Each lazy boy has a phone next to it. This is in case you are super busy and need to make important phone calls whilst they are pumping you full of the drugs that will damn-near kill you. I don’t know anyone this busy.

Each chair is also equipped with it’s own television that gets poor reception of local stations. This is convenient if you are really nuts about daytime television and you wouldn’t miss your soaps for anything.

The cookies are in the waiting room. I don’t know where they get them, but they are awesome. Clearly the bakery keeps the best cookies for us cancer patients. They probably use a pound of butter in each cookie, but I mean, what do we care, right? What, is it going to give us cancer? Gimme one of those damn cookies, and put more butter in it next time.

The rest of the cancer center is pretty sterile looking. The walls are painted with the soothing, tan color that they always use on those HGTV shows. Hanging in the corner is an embroidered acronym that cleverly uses the individual letters of CHEMOTHERAPY in a sad prayer. There are also small dolls dressed as nurses. This corner freaks me out.

The real nurses sit at a big desk and talk on the phone to doctors. Behind them is a big ice and water machine. The water and ice machine is the biggest piece of equipment in the whole place.

When you come for your chemotherapy session, they first take your blood and send it off to “the lab,” which must be a place very, very far away, judging on the amount of time it takes for things to go and come back from it. You then have to wait a few hours for the far-away people at “the lab” to test your blood.

An order is then sent to “the pharmacy,” another place in a far-off land, where they measure out and mix the drugs that they will be giving you. The drugs have to be measured exactly, based on your height and weight that day.

Meanwhile, you are still sitting in the lazy boy, watching your soaps and eating your butter cookies. The nurses hook up an IV to the port that was surgically implanted in your chest and give you huge amounts of “saline.” “Saline” is something that looks like water that is apparently not water that makes you have to go to the bathroom a lot.

Before the drugs come, the nurse, who in my case, is sort of cute, puts several drugs through your IV. First, she puts in a steroid called Decadron. This is to bolster your system before the other drugs destroy your system. Having Decodron is a lot like having a direct IV drip of pure, liquid caffeine.

Then the nurse puts Benedryl through the IV, which makes you extraordinarily tired. You might fall asleep at this point, but as you are unable to stop moving from the Decadron, sleep is not really an option.

Then the chemo drugs come. Their are four different drugs that need to go into you before you can leave. The first one is colored like red Kool-Aid. It’s a little frightening to see the red liquid floating down the IV tube towards your body. You think, “OH GOD, here it comes!” And the nurse is looking at you, and you are looking at the nurse, and suddenly it seems like all the other patients are looking at you, and you are looking at them, and the red stuff is coming down the pipe, and the nurse is looking at you, and you can’t stop fidgeting, and the room is getting smaller, and it’s coming and it’s coming and it’s coming!!!!

But then it’s not so bad. It doesn’t feel like anything. One by one they put all the drugs into you and it doesn’t feel like anything. You might as well just watch your soap operas, because it’s not exciting. I bring my laptop or my iPod and watch movies and listen to music.

Then they give you a few shots that will, again, help fix the system that the drugs just screwed up. By this point you are pretty sick of being stuck with needles and you have had your fill of butter cookies. They take out the IV and they tell you to go home, that’s it.

I’m glad so many of my friends have come to read and comment. That’s good, because I need to make a small announcement:

Remember all that weight I lost last year? Well – funny story about that – it was apparently not due to what a hot stud I was, or to eating better, or to working out, or to anything else that I might have bragged about during the past year of grinning and gloating.

Therefore, as I do not condone the use of diseases to lose weight, I retract any dieting advice, especially all the dieting advice, I doled out during the past year.

And I’m not saying I necessarily will, but just for you sticklers out there: I reserve the right to stop being such a sickly-looking thing and to get good and fat after all this is over. Pass me another cookie.

In case anybody is throwing a sweet party anytime soon and you need some new music, my favorite cancer song (yes, I now have a favorite cancer song) is “Chemo Limo” by Regina Spektor.

Chemo Limo, Regina Spektor:
Song Clip
Lyrics
Artist Website

Cancer changes your life, often for the better. You learn what’s important, you learn to prioritize, and you learn not to waste your time. You tell people you love them. My friend Gilda Radner (who died of ovarian cancer in 1989 at age 42) used to say, ‘If it wasn’t for the downside, having cancer would be the best thing and everyone would want it.’ That’s true. If it wasn’t for the downside. ~Joel Siegel

1. (Zool.) A genus of decapod Crustacea, including some of the most common shore crabs of Europe and North America, as the rock crab, Jonah crab, etc. See {Crab}.

2. (Med.) Formerly, any malignant growth, esp. one attended with great pain and ulceration, with cachexia and progressive emaciation. It was so called, perhaps, from the great veins which surround it, compared by the ancients to the claws of a crab. (1913 webster)

So far, I think the worst thing about having cancer was finding out that I had cancer.

Since then, I feel like it’s been nothing but good news. My bone marrow is clean, I’m not going to die – then the chemo isn’t (so far) as bad as I expected – then my pulse goes down, my cough is gone, my blood tests are better, the nurse is cute, the cookies are delicious (my appetite is back), and I feel more energetic. I mean, even the drought seems to have stopped since they told me I have cancer. I made it rain people! I made rain!

Now, surely there have been things that could be called bad news since the diagnosis – my website got hacked, the cancer is in a later-stage, Comedy Central changed the set of The Daily Show and gave Adam Corolla his own time slot, etc. Certainly all tragedies. But give me a break, nothing compares to that call from the cancer doc.

Dr. Crazy Finds Cure For Cancer

Mustard Gas was first used by the Germans in World War I to gas French soldiers. The gas only killed 1% of the soldiers exposed to it, but the side effects of the chemical were enough to significantly slow whole advancing armies and to contaminate large areas of land that could have been used in strategic positioning.

Mustard gas is a chemical weapon that is dispersed in aerosol form. There is little, if any, immediate effect, but 4-24 hours afterward, those exposed to the chemical experience severe blistering of the skin and lungs. Exposure to more than 50% of the body is usually fatal.

Between the 1940’s and the 1980’s, mustard gas (in liquid form) was one of the key ingredients in chemotherapy for Hodgkins Lymphoma. During World War I doctors found that exposure to mustard gas slowed cell division in those exposed to it, which is the main objective of most cancer treatments.

That’s right, mustard gas is used to cure cancer. Even today it is still used in some places, it is the first drug in the MOPP chemotherapy cocktail.

I, however, am treated with a newer kind of chemotherapy cocktail, ABVD, and nobody’s giving me mustard gas. It’s no wonder, though, that chemotherapy has gotten such an intimidating reputation over the years.

In 1996 an international study identified 7 factors that consistently predicted the probability of remission in Hodgkins Lymphoma patients. (Well, actually, they were looking for the probability of what they called the five-year “Freedom from Progression of Disease,” or FFPD. I interpret FFPD to basically mean remission.)

The probability of remission is much different than the probability of survival, so you have to be careful not to read the results as such. It’s easy to get carried away with cancer statistics.

The 7 factors include things like age, sex, and the measure of certain chemicals in your blood. As I understand it, a patient without any of these 7 would have a remission probability of 84%. For every factor you have, you lose 7%.

According to this test, my probability of remission is around 60% for the next five years. That means, according to whoever these people are that developed this project, that I have a 60% chance of losing this cancer and staying cancer-free between now and 2010.

But why stop there? Since we’re discussing statistics, I should mention that progressive heart disease is much more likely in Hodgkins patients following chemotherapy. Moreover, patients that receive chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma are 4 times more likely to develop lung cancer, and are at an increased risk to develop leukemia within the first 10 years following treatment. In fact, according to the National Cancer Institute, the number one cause of death among Hodgkins patients is second cancers that develop following diagnosis.

Be that as it may, the Dave Hahn Institute of People Who Are Nuts says that if you don’t take the chemotherapy to cure your Lymphoma, you have a 100% chance of being an idiot. If it happens, you should feel lucky that you lived long enough to develop a second cancer, heart disease, or whatever else.

Realistically, I think these numbers – and really, any cancer statistics – should mean very little to an individual cancer patient. There are just too many factors involved to make any of these statistics worthwhile. Every individual responds differently to the treatment of cancer, and considering all the things modern medicine still doesn’t know about this thing called cancer, there’s really no way to know what will happen.

So, while these numbers are, I suppose, impressive or intimidating, they don’t effect me much. The really valuable thing that can be taken from all this is that tomorrow is not guaranteed, and you better not let today pass without making the most of it.

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive. ~ Josephine Hart