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.

I got up this morning at 6:30 and biked 40 miles in the rain. Now, I am not, as a person, someone who likes to get up at early hours. And I am not, as a professional musician, someone who usually needs to be up at hours like that. I mean, do you know the last time I got up that early?

Last week. When I biked 20 miles in the rain.

In fact, I’ve been counting, and in the past 2 weeks I’ve biking over 200 miles total. Not bad for a rookie.

I don’t mean to make generalizations too quickly, nor do I wish to foretell the future of my varied interests, but I’m hoping that this interest in biking sticks around.

The reason I’m biking now has everything to do with cancer, really. See, when I got through my surgery, my chemo, my everything else – when I was done – I didn’t feel like I’d beaten cancer. By the end of all that mess I really felt like cancer had beaten me. I didn’t feel inspired, or thankful, or anything that I expected I might feel.

But flying down that path today, heading into the 30th mile with the wind at my back, briefly leading the pack of riders and ignoring the rain pouring down – I felt that, yes, now – now – I’ve beaten cancer.

It was a year ago yesterday that the doctor called and told me I had cancer. In the land of survivors, I guess that makes me 1 year old.

To celebrate I did a few things. I released my album, that I was recording during chemo. I also edited and bundled up the meaty parts of this blog and released it as an eBook. And third, I rode 50 miles on my bike. In the land of cycling, I understand that’s called a half century.

Busy day, really.

I must be honest, though, it does feel a little weird to be selling stuff that came about because I had cancer. I don’t know what it is that bothers me. Capitalism. Opportunism. Something.

I guess the reason it feels weird is because I didn’t make these things to sell them. I mean, I wasn’t writing this blog with the idea that one day I’d make some money off of it. I wrote in this blog because I had to write in this blog. Same with the songs I recorded. I had to get stuff out.

And to come now and package this stuff up and put a price tag on it, and write succinct little marketing blurbs about it…well, it seems so…tacky is maybe the word.

But it occured to me that as an artist, or as a writer, or as a creative person in general – the stuff that came out of me during this terrible, cancerous time might possibly be the best stuff that’s ever come out of me. I always knew that I could write, if only I had something to write about. And I’m a good musician, but sometimes I lack inspiration.

I decided that this blog, and that album – they have value. So I’ve decided to sell them here on the site. I realize that I have conflicting ideas about it, but I think it’s a good idea. To put a price on something also shows others that it has a worth, and I’m ok with that.

These goods do have some tangible qualities to them as well. A married couple I know were just diagnosed – both of them in the same week – so I’m planning on sending a copy of the album and maybe a copy of the eBook to them. It might help them. When I was diagnosed I read all kinds of books about the experience of cancer, and it helped me.