This one really has nothing much to do with cancer, if anything at all. It is more about Christmas. I guess the hope is that someone who is in pain or fear will read it and laugh, and I only write it because I was chatting with another cancer survivor earlier this morning and she indicated that it made her laugh.
It may be that she has an odd sense of humor. I know I do.
Here is the cancer connection, to satisfy the purists: I cannot eat goose meat anymore. At least, I cannot eat it now, and I have not been able to do so for the last three years, for reasons that are apparent to anyone that has followed this blog.
I had never eaten goose meat before I married. I had eaten a few exotic meats, including bear and moose and duck, but not goose. It simply never showed up on the family menu or in any of the fine establishments we habituated back then, me the oldest of six kids whose dad was in the US Navy and whose mom did not work outside of the home, if you catch my drift, and I think you do: we were not into swank.
And, we didn’t eat goose. It never even crossed my mind to eat a goose. Every year, at Thanksgiving, we had turkey. Every year at Christmas, we had turkey. And every year at Easter, we had ham. I thought it was part of our religion, I really did. Just as surely as fish sticks were on for Friday night :).
When I married, the first Christmas I spent with my in-laws (my first Christmas as a married man, by the way), they had all kinds of weird stuff on the table. They had these long green things that looked to me like mutant weeds. They called them asparagus. They had something called potato filling. Don’t ask. I still do not know what is in potato filling. Suffice it that if there were laws for abusing perfectly good potatoes, my mother in law would be doing 40-to-life.
There were these cheeseballs??? They were rather white, but covered in pecans or something. My brother-in-law swallowed them like they were a cure for something. I tried one and nearly gagged. They were cheeseballs, I think they call them. Cream cheese (which I have never liked) rolled in pecan, um, stuff.
An exotic time for me, for sure. And there was the meat. The darkest meat I had ever seen. And I already knew that her dad ate some pretty weird stuff, like Rocky Mountain oysters, and cow brain, and turtle soup, and fried frog legs, and just about anything, frankly, that would gross out normal people.
Did I mention the time the cow’s tongue was lying on a plate in front of us? If I did not, it is because I am trying to block it out.
And there was the dark, greasy meat.
It was goose meat. One platter of goose meat, one platter of turkey meat, as I recall. I opted, for the most part, for the turkey, but thought I should try everything, so I slid a couple of small pieces of goose meat onto my plate, along with one of those cheese balls, along with one of those weird looking asparagus spears, along with potato filling, and, I think, everything, a little bit of everything, on the table. I did not, under any circumstances, want to upset the natives, especially my in-laws.
It turns out that my brother-in-law can have all of the cheeseballs he wants. I loathe them. It turns out that I am not particularly covetous of potato filling, although I eat it and it is not so bad with goose gravy on it.
It turns out that those asparagus spears are pretty darned good, and I DO covet them. It turns out that the rolls are sweet and succulent and that the goose meat is the best meat I have ever eaten (in a family setting).
It turns out that if you cook a goose correctly, something my new mother-in-law apparently does with distinction, people will KILL to eat your goose!
No one is killing, of course. We are all polite. Except for me. I am forking more of the goose every chance I get, I am pouring more of the goose giblet gravy onto my other stuff every chance I get. I am being a troll, a beast, a Viking, a rude dude.
But I do it politely, and, of course, my mother-in-law appears to be eating it up, pardon the pun.
Let me tell you how much I enjoyed that goose: within a year or so, there was not one, no, there were two geese being cooked at that house if we were there. That is how much I enjoyed the goose.
And here is something else: after Christmas dinner, later in the evening, when people were fixing leftovers, I had a sandwich. It was two pieces of bread, goose meat, asparagus, potato filling, and mayo. I might have had two. I was in love all over again.
They were rather forced from then on to cook two geese, so that I could have one, including leftovers, and they could enjoy the other among them.<We now flash forward to quite a few years later. Maybe 10. I am in Texas. My family, that is, the side of the family that is my mom and dad and brothers and sisters, we are all in Texas. A minor miracle to get us all there, but there we are.
My brother is renting a place out in the country. He is gifted in ways that I will never imagine. He is great with his hands, an excellent mechanic, plumber, carpenter, whatever needs to be done, it seems he can do it. And he is intelligent, beyond all of that. My little brother is living in this place and has bought some incubated chicks, and is now raising chickens on the place! That is the kind of guy he is.
Some of you will wonder, so what's the deal? But he had never done it before, decided to do it, and did it well. The eggs he ate came from his own coop.
That is beside the point, but I am really proud of the little fellow. He's done good for himself.
Now, my in-laws are coming down for Christmas, and we decide to do something special, and we, my wife and I, my wife principally, buy a couple of geese. They are alive. They have webbed feet, and feathers and beaks, and they squawk and they run: they are alive.
Naturally, we take them to my brother's little farm, and ask him to care for them until right before Christmas, and he agrees. So he deals with these creatures, which are, frankly, genetically ornery, I think, for several weeks prior to the arrival of my in-laws from far-off Virginia.
He never does tell me all of the hell he has gone through, my brother, in raising these beasts. In retrospect, I suspect he went through a lot. They are BEASTS.
If I remember correctly, we arrive at Bill’s house (that is my brother’s name, not Bill’s house…just Bill) the day before Christmas, and are there to do the birds, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. If you are misconstruing, then shame on you :).
The first order of business is to catch them. It seems easy enough. But, well, (wince) in Texas we do things a bit differently. Or at least we did then. At least WE did :). Catching the geese required that we first drink a few beers. Quite a few. None of us had cut off a goose’s head, ever, although Billy had fried chicken all the time. I’m just saying.
They were out in the coop enjoying their time on Earth, and I was drinking beer and making a lasso, of all things, and I finally went out into the coop and tried to wrangle me a goose!
That is Texas. Honestly. That sort of thing happens in Texas. It is not all steer and rodeo and buckin’ bronco. There is a huge heaping of stupidity, too. At least there was when I lived there :).
Maybe it has diminished in my absence.
I went into the coop and started chasing geese. Now, the first thing you have to do, if you are chasing geese with a lasso, is to decide which goose you are chasing. I had some problems with that due to their strategic and tactical maneuvering. While they, therefore, were optimizing their opportunities, minimizing movement and fooling the heck out of me with jukes and jumps, I was running myself out of breath. And this was long before anyone even remotely thought of taking a lobe from my right lung.
I chased them in true Pecos Bill fashion, and everyone was laughing so hard they were regurgitating breakfast, some of them, and … I finally gave up on the rope, realizing that the one thing that separated me from these geese was my inferior technology. I was not a gaucho, I was not a cowboy, in other words, I was simply a warrior. I decided to use my hands.
Some of the same problems continued to present themselves, in that the geese were more agile, quicker, and less drunk.
Not necessarily in that order, I assure, as I occasionally stopped to replenish the liquids in my body, albeit, I knew, for a very brief time (due to dehydration), thus the necessity to continuously stop and replenish.
I finally got one of the geese. Finally. I do not know how, but I finally grabbed one by the neck, at which time I discovered they had the strength, in their necks alone, of any 10 men I’d ever come across.
Holding on to a goose’s neck is like holding on to a boa constrictor, one that is about 40 feet long, one that is 40 feet long and angry, one that is 40 feet long, angry, and hungry, one that is 40 feet long, angry, hungry, and you are the only meal in miles.
I held on, gentle readers. I did.
Did you know that geese can bite? Just wondering.
I didn’t. Not until then.
But I held on.
We took him or her, I never checked, as he/she never gave me the opportunity, to the chopping block, and I left it to others to do the next deed.
As a friend on this site pointed out, you never want to give names to creatures that you are going to eat, and I never named the geese, but if I had, given the subsequent experience, this one would have been named SOB. All caps.
Eventually, both animals were, um, ready, in so far as they did not have heads anymore, and we had the issue of plucking them. Everyone had ideas, and we used them all. Getting rid of the big feathers was not a big deal. The pin feathers, however, proved to be a problem.
We boiled, we waxed, we blackened, we skinned…heck…a lot of women (and men, I suppose) would pay big money for the kind of treatment these geese got as we tried to remove pin feathers (okay, maybe not the skinning, but you never know, do you?).
Finally, we decided, I guess, that we were getting hungry. The primitive was coming out in us. We cooked them. Mmmm… they smelled great. My mother-in-law CAN cook a goose.
BUT…eating them proved to be an entirely new experience, as we were constantly having to pull pin feather nubs from our teeth. Not mom-in-law’s fault, of course, but that of us he-men, and especially me, who had decided on this lunatic idea.
It is the only bad goose I have ever eaten. My mother-in-law can flat out cook a goose (or two). But it is a cherished Christmas memory, one I will never forget, one that brings me to tears of laughter, nearly, every time I think about it.
It is THAT time of the year, a sad time even for some people who have not lost loved ones, who are not losing loved ones, who are not worrying about making early exits themselves.
It can be a depressing time, for sure, and that is well documented.
This year, my wife and I, our family, will be dealing with the loss of my father-in-law. So far, my wife, her brother, and their mom, they have done an awesome job with that. I suspect that the dam is about to break, but I have thought that before and they were stronger than I thought they would be.
Until he died, my wife had me to worry about, as I was in the hospital at the same time as my father-in-law, and even beat him to the punch in that regard. In fact, he came to visit me before he ended up, ultimately, in the same hospital. And she kept working. And I am convinced, I really am, that having someone pass over an extended period of time, while not easier in terms of toil and sweat, is probably easier in terms of coping.
I think that you begin to accept, or most of us do, as time goes by, and as our loved one goes deeper into the abyss, if you will.
That is just a theory, and has nothing to do with Christmas.
My father-in-law looked like Santa Claus, Santa Claus as most of us envision him in the United States, I think, a jolly old man with a white beard and all of that.
Early in their lives, both of my kids were convinced, or at least hesitant not to believe, that he WAS Santa Claus.
But he didn’t want to be Santa Claus. Or so he said. Can you imagine, every time you go into a store of some kind and being gawked at by children and even parents? 🙂
He acted like he didn’t like it. I think he did. But he would never dress up as the Jolly Old Elf, for whatever reason, and now he is gone.
He was my personal Santa Claus, by the way. You reach a certain age and you simply stop getting toys. But not with Harv, not with my father-in-law. I got BB guns, I got a multitude of remote control cars, trucks and such …. there was always a toy. A toy for me.
I will be honest. At first I thought it was kind of weird. At first we had no children of our own, so I didn’t understand the wonder of it the way he did. It was wonderful. It really was. I came to look forward to the toy each year. What would he get me that was different, that was not a tie or a sweater or a shirt or something else practical and useful?
I should add that Mrs. Claus, his wife, has been delivering musical instrument ornaments to me every year since I married into the family, and that this gets harder and harder for her each year :).
We are going to miss Santa Claus this year.
I do not know how we are going to deal with it.
I know that I am going to her house, Mrs. Claus’ house, tomorrow, to put up her Christmas tree, to take decorations out of the attic, to put the lights up. It forced me to do the same for myself (well, I am still working on the outside lights). I would not put up someone else’s tree, even Mrs. Claus’s, without getting my own tree up :).
I told Santa Claus, while he was in his last throes, in a hospital bed, that I would take care of Mrs. Claus. And of his elf :).
I do not think I have done a good job of that to be honest. Part of it, of course, is that I have had a few issues to deal with myself. That is no excuse. I have to do better.
Starting in the morning.
I leave you with this Christmas story, a true one:
I am the oldest of six children, and my dad was in the US Navy back when they didn’t pay very well, and I cannot say that we did not have wonderful Christmases because we did, but when I was 13 or 14, I was part of a small group of guys and girls, mainly guys, that went to this Catholic Church for Midnight Mass on the 24th. I was permitted to open one gift, as always, on Christmas Eve, and this time, I was pointed to a particular one.
It was a shirt, the ugliest shirt I have ever seen. Seriously. And that was the shirt I was to wear to Midnight mass. I cried. I cried in shame.
I told my mom that they were tears of happiness, because I did not want to hurt her feelings. I then wore that shirt, with other clothes of course, including a tie, to the Midnight Mass.
You know, I promise you: that became my favorite shirt. I think before then I didn’t know what Christmas was all about. That night I realized: it was about sitting in the balcony and spitting on bald guys’ heads in the pews below.
🙂
Merry Christmas, every one. I wasn’t sure I would get here, and some of you have doubts about the next one, I know. I’ll see you there.
Last night I drank something called barium sulfate. It looked to be about a quart of the stuff. It was not as bad as I remember from the barium swallow days. It was rather minty. But it was still barium sulfate.
I did this on orders from OncoMan, and it was sort of like receiving an audit notice from the IRS, just as painful in the same psychic sort of way and from someone I hadn’t thought about for a while. You know, you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, but you feel guilty just the same? Similar deal here: I don’t think anything is wrong but I am concerned nonetheless.
It was a prelude to a CAT Scan performed earlier today, which makes it understandable, except that I cannot remember ever taking this stuff before for a CAT Scan, and I have had countless CAT Scans, all of them, I think, with contrast involved. However, it is typically injected while I am hanging out in the tube (okay lying in the tube, not hanging out, geez!).
I drank the barium sulfate last night and woke dark and early this morning and headed for the big hospital, with my wife following in her car, since she would be staying for the day in order to provide us with steady income and a great source for future recommendations re doctors, if ever needed. She met me in the admissions joint, where the guy was just getting around to asking me if I had drunk my two bottles of barium sulfate (I think they call it dye, or contrast, I’m not sure which. Frankly, if I worked in a hospital, I would NOT call anything dye, if you know what I mean and I think you do, but that’s just me.).
If you have been paying attention, you will wonder why I didn’t mention the second bottle of barium sulfate before now. That would be a discerning catch. I did not mention the second bottle of barium sulfate because I did not know about the second bottle of barium sulfate and therefore did not drink the second bottle of barium sulfate, which resides comfortably, still, as I write this, on the kitchen counter.
My wife said “You know, at the stoplight at South Boulevard I thought of that and then thought, “Oh, he must have taken it!”. We will not discuss my thoughts. This is a family show.
In any case, I eventually found my way into Radiology Room, and was offered another bottle of barium sulfate, this time with a straw, as if it were a milkshake.
As if!
I sucked it down pretty quickly, dismissing the straw entirely, and my wife, in an aside, suggested that it is amazing how previously learned life skills come to the forefront when you least expect them. In response to my quizzical look, she replied, “You guzzled that down like it was beer.”
Funny girl.
I finally got into CAT Land and onto the slab that slides into the tube. CatManDude did what he does, sticking me in the vein, not once but twice, and offering that I was probably dehydrated, which was his way of shifting the blame to me, I suspect, and each stick felt worse than the previous. I am here to tell you that if you get stuck enough times, unlike other things in life, it does not get easier. You come to dread it, you want to avoid it, and it really starts to hurt. But do not worry until after about the 1,000th jab. Then you can start worrying. (You might also be eligible for a free toaster, though, so what the hell?)
And I am being a baby, of course.
But it did hurt.
I’m just saying.
It turns out I was made to swallow the barium sulfate because OncoMan, in his infinite wisdom, decided that I needed not just a head/neck scan, not just a head/neck and chest scan, but a head/neck, chest and abdominal/pelvic exam. This will worry me eventually. For now, I am glad that he is covering all bases (well, except for toe cancer).
What these people do not know because no one in their right minds would cart around the entirety of my growing medical chart is that just prior to my last cancer diagnosis, I was scheduled to get some surgery for a torn rotator cuff. To be followed by another in the opposing arm. I put this off so that I could play golf until the season ended, only to be detoured by the lung junk. I bring this up only because they made me lift my arms over my head, as is the usual case, and keep them there, as is the usual case, forever, which is not the usual case.
It begins to hurt after awhile. I am not being a baby on this one, folks. It begins to really hurt, and they don’t know, and being a stubborn male I do not report my duress, instead choosing to follow my orders to HOLD YOUR BREATH…BREATHE…HOLD YOUR BREATHE…BREATHE… I wonder what would happen to me if the voice thing stopped working between HOLD YOUR BREATH and BREATHE? I would probably die from stupidity .
Here is something else: I have been told not to eat from midnight right up through the scan. I am a person who really, since all of this began, needs to eat, needs to have something in the belly in the morning. Otherwise, I am sort of shaky. Yes, before you ask, they have checked my insulin levels and all of that, especially during the staph infection episode, and I am not diabetic, or so they say, but I get shaky, really shaky, and it is not DTs either, so do not go there.
Being advised to be very still while in the catacomb has the exact opposite effect that was intended, I believe. Before CatManDude said that, I was quite complacent. After he said it, I was shaking like a leaf, or thought I was. I am fairly certain that the head/neck image is going to be one blurry furry fellow, frankly.
I did survive, of course. It is not painful, even when the IV is stretched to its limits as you reach the far end while they scan your pelvis. It is not painful, even though you might be on Coumadin, a blood thinner, and bound to bleed to death if they get the stick-and-wrap wrong. It is not even a problem if you are claustrophobic. No. All of the scary stuff comes later: the next day, the next week, when OncoMan looks at the pictures and tells you what he sees.
It is like being on a game show. OncoMan is the host, OncoMan is the guy who waits that extra moment, building suspense, before telling you, “You live!”.
I do not know why it took so long for me to get this. Maybe I got it a long time ago and forgot (I leave it to you to decide whether ChemoBrain is an option here).
The other night, in the midst of some discussion that I have also forgotten, my wife left the room, and came back with a small booklet. It was a construction paper job. The exterior was folded over purple construction paper, and somehow, the artist and author and director of this thing, my daughter, had managed to stick white folded construction paper inside, without staples. I still have not figured that out.
The front of it is titled “While You Were Out…”.
It is about my first surgery, the one where I was purportedly being cut on for 15 hours or so, the one where I was left in an unconscious state for four days following the surgery.
It begins, inside, with a photo of my wife in the waiting room. She looks lovely. She is smiling, and I wonder how hard that was for her, knowing how much she worries over me. I hate to consider the option that she was hoping for an alternative ending (:)). I have brought that up before: why are they all smiling?
There she is though, and she looks so much younger than she looks today, and by that I mean that all of this has been a big hit on her. I forget that all of the time. I think of me. I forget, sometimes, often, the big hit it has been to her. She is sitting there in the waiting room with a sandwich in a baggie in her hands, there for the long haul. Beneath the picture, the message is, “Your number 1 fan!”
My daughter added, in parentheses, “(Mom)”, as if I might come awake, see this booklet, and forget who she was :).
Next are my dad and his wife. At the time I did not know they were even there, and they were gone before I came to, and it was much later that I learned they were there.
I will advise that while in post-ICU morphine land, I thought my entire family was out in the lobby arguing, my side of the family and my wife’s side, all of them, including my parents, her parents, my siblings, her brother, my children, all of the other children I know about in the clan, about who got to come see me :). Such is the nature of the human mind, I suspect: it was all about me.
They were not out there arguing, of course. By the time I got out of the coma room, almost all of them were gone. It was all in my imagination. My dad and my father-in-law were not coming to blows. A nurse was not calling my daughter a foul-mouthed whore (she is a happily married college graduate about to complete her Masters degree in Psychology, in case you wonder about dad’s personal assessment being rosy-colored), and no one left because they were insulted by treatment by either family or the medical staff. That was all in my morphine-addled mind.
(As an aside, I will admit that, later, when my daughter came in to see me, I asked the nurse why she was permitted to see me (rather than others, I was thinking, thinking that she had won some epic family battle), which must have upset her and certainly addled the nurse. I wrote a note on one of those erasable boards, but it turned out, as I later saw, to be complete gibberish, and even today I wonder what instinctive language I was using to try to get my point across, even though I do not remember the point. Morphine has its uses, but cognitive awareness is not one of them, as a general rule.)
There are my dad and his wife Ginger smiling. Why is everyone smiling?
And beyond them, I had no idea Melinda came. She is a friend of my daughter’s, a friend of the family, now, and she was there with her two young children. It must have been hard to make that happen. She was not there for me, of course, but for my daughter and my wife, I’m sure. While it’s true that I have wanted her badly from the first time I met her, she has never reciprocated, and I am sure, or fairly sure, that the older I get, the less likely such a scenario is. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.
But, I didn’t know she was even there! And, now that I think about, where was that punk-ass husband of hers, who really does love me?
Oh yeah, probably in Iraq. Never mind.
On the next page we have Fely, a friend, but one who has not returned a treasured book I lent to her. I guess she showed up knowing I would be in no condition to ask where the hell my book was. (It is a Harlan Ellison collection. If you like science fiction, I recommend it highly.)
She is also smiling.
Next up are Kathy and Silas, with Kathy getting a page and a half, which she deserves. I have known her exactly as long as I have known my wife. I will not get into details here, but will tell you that among women, she is my best friend. I can talk to her and know that it will stay between us. I know that I can nott have her, either, even though I have forever, because of some stupid rules that women who are truly friends make up between themselves (the rest of us call it morality, and some times it gets in the way of a good time as far as I can tell. I’m just saying.) We are friends, and the older she gets, the less I want her :). But I love her. And there she is. Smiling.
And my brother in law takes half of one of those pages. He and I, of course, go back a long way, and there he is too, smiling in the waiting room.
Geez!
There are pictures of my father-in-law and my mother-in-law, along with pictures of some family friends I didn’t expect to be there, and a co-worker of my wife’s, a nurse. The only people not smiling in those are my father-in-law and the nurse. I wonder what they knew?
Turning the page, I see my old assistant soccer coach, a teammate of my daughter’s, a young lady who was very self-conscious when she came to work with me, but who grew and is now coaching full-time at the college level. There she is…smiling :). What is it with all of these people?
And on the opposite page, my buddy Ray, golf partner and former co-worker of sorts. He too is smiling, but I am really astonished that he is there. How did he know? How did he know where I was or what was going on? I have a suspect, the lady on the first page, but still, it is really nice that he is there. I have not been giving him his proper due of late. Having seen him in these pages, I need to call him, to let him know I love his Scottish ass (but not that way) and that we need to hit the links again soon!
Beyond that, we have a picture of my daughter, the author, with her husband and somebody else’s kid. We now have Scooter, so that if there is a next time, they will not need a surrogate :). In point of fact, she included a picture of her damned dog. I’m sure she was not at the hospital, so I must assume this picture was taken at home, where she was fertilizing my yard with relish (among other things). A very big dog.
And then, just closing pictures of people partying in a waiting room. It turns out there were so many of them, making so much noise, that they were given their own room. Among the people I mentioned above, there is finally my son, along with a buddy of his (and Ryan isn’t smiling either, in any of these pictures).
Finally, on the last page, a picture of me headed for the OR, wrapped up in green and gauze but before they drew all over my face. The caption exclaims “Dad! Our hero!”. But of course, they are the heroes and heroines. I look at the picture of me with my daughter, I look at the picture of me in my hairnet or whatever they call it, a big old grin on my face (I’m smiling too!!!) and I don’t remember any of it. But they do. They all remember all of it.
The last two pictures before those pictures of me strike me the hardest. In one, my dad and his wife are sitting with my father-in-law and my mother-in-law. In this one, they are not smiling. Perhaps they have been sitting for too long, but the smiles are gone.
Beneath it, my son and his friend, Charlie. Charlie is still smiling, but Ryan, my son, looks beaten. I have never seen him look beaten. Ever. It takes its toll.
In December, I go in for those routine checkups that are anything but routine to many of us. I am going to get a CAT scan to confirm that my lungs and head and neck are clear of cancer. I am going to see OncoMan and have his people weigh me and perhaps estimate my sanity, and I am going to see ENTMan, who will ever so gently slide Nostril Eddie up into one of my nose holes, down into my mouth and on in to my esophagus.
I am so looking forward to December.
Really, that was a snide remark, for sure, but I am looking forward to all of this. I do believe that knowing is much better than not knowing. I am confident, on one hand, that I will get the All Clear from these guys. I am equally confident, on the other, that one of them is going to say “Uh oh!”
I have a little something-something on the inside of my mouth that I do not think I used to have. It does not hurt, and I am sure that is a good thing, and it does not take anything away from my inability to eat steak. It is probably not cancer.
Even so, it is worrisome as I approach Nostril Eddie.
All of a sudden.
And ENTMan is going to say that my esophagus is rather abused, a not so subtle hint that while I have not been sucking down hot sauce on a regular basis, I have been drinking something that is irritating my throat. Whatever that something is, I seem to be doing it a lot, or so he will say!
He will not say that, I do not believe, and that will be a sterner rebuke, his silence, than anything he might say that I might refute in total denial, if you know what I mean and some of you do.
This is the guilt of survival, in a sense. I wanted to be the model survivor for my guy, ENTMan. I worked my butt off inside the hospital, did not complain, and got out of there, well, right on time. They said I was the model patient. But I have not been the model survivor.
I suppose I feel like, having been given this reprieve from death, I should start acting like Mother Teresa, and anything I do that is contrary to that sort of life is refuting all of the work they did to save me. Believe me, I have been contrary. (Also, I like sex, but not with Mother Teresa…I’m just saying; I mean, maybe when she was alive, okay? She would have turned me down anyway, story of my life :)).
Confession over.
He is going to slide Nostril Eddie down through many passages, beginning by going up into my nose, and then nosing around and finding a way to finagle it downward from there into my mouth and to my throat, tiny flashlight attached, and I will gag and have tears in my eyes and he will say “hmmm” and take me into another room where he will repeat the process where he can see it live on a sort of Cancer YouTube or something, live, from the Esophageal Theater!
He will say, “We need a scan” and I will say, “I just had one”, and he will say, “Hmmm”, and look at my chart which is now about five inches thick, so it is no wonder he misses stuff now, if he does, and he will ask his lovely nurse to get a copy of that for him and she will run off to do that, and I feel for her because she looks so overworked nearly every time I go to ENTMan, and I think maybe it is this bonding with some of the patients who become toast, when she only wanted a bagel.
Maybe I will be fine with that. I think I will. I act like I am worried about the little thing inside my mouth, but it does not worry me halfway as much as the cough I continue to have.
I eventually found I had cancer in my lung because I mentioned it to my family doc (aka GPMan), as you may know, the cough, I mean, not the cancer, and thus an entirely new series of events unfolded. I had lung cancer.
The cough is still with me. Or has come back to me. And of course, they could not determine when they did the lobectomy whether the cancer was new or metastasized. I am fearful that I am about to find out.
I advise others not to worry, and I do not worry, most of the time. Only in these dark moments, at these dark times of the morning, alone, to be honest, does it come to me and hit me this way: that something may be wrong.
I will get my next CAT scan in December as well. This time, I am to drink some sort of potion. A friend in CSN was describing have to drink her dye, and I thought, “That’s weird; they always inject me.”
I wish she had not mentioned it. I have a prescription to pick up some noxious substance to drink before I go in for the CAT. I do not remember if it is the night before or what. I remember my friend saying that it tasted kind of sweet and gave her a tremendous headache. Now it is my turn.
I am taking her off of my Christmas shopping list, as I am fairly certain this would not have come up if she had not mentioned it.
I was just looking for it and could not find it. I suspect my wife has already tucked it away in her purse, a place I dare not go, since I am sure I would not find my way out, lost forever in everything she keeps in that room on a strap. But I will be drinking something weird before the scan.
And then the scan. I love the scans. I love lying down and sliding through a tube with robotic voices telling me when to breath. Not to disparage the scans. Okay, to disparage the scans.
I hate the things, but find them much better than PETs and, especially, MRIs. Also, I’ll bet they are a lot more acceptable than caskets. So I deal with them.
I will get the CAT and I will go to see OncoMan and he will tell me what he will tell me. It is his prognosis that I fear, frankly. He once told me I had 10 months to live (minimally). I am afraid he is going to do so again. I do not know why. Yes, I do: that pesky cough.
If I am lucky, the cough is due to a rare disease I contracted while being seduced by escaped concubines in the wilds of Mongolia. Otherwise, I have no clue, and he will. I am hoping for the best, of course.
I need to get back to Mongolia, regardless of the results, by the way.
We will deal with the results when we get them, and I really do not worry all that much about it.
It is what it is.
Just in these late hours, these dark hours of dark morning. I find myself worrying on occasion.
All of this happens in December. As the singer sings, if we make it through December, I feel pretty good about the Spring. I feel pretty good about many years to come, if we can make it through December.
This will make it more than three years since the tongue/neck cancer, the diagnosis and surgery, anyway. This will make it way more than a year since the diagnosis for lung cancer, and nearly a year since the surgery. Let’s call it three months since treatment ended for that.
The above, regarding the tongue/neck cancer, is predicated on the assumption that the lung cancer was not metastasis from the tongue/neck. It was the same type of cancer, squamous cell carcinoma. They simply could not discern whether it was new or a traveler, because it was so small still when they removed it. They did well in assuming it was new and taking out the lobe. Had I been awake as they were deciding, I would have insisted that they do exactly as they did.
Probably :).
I like getting rid of cancer, even if it begins to feel like piece-by-piece loss after awhile.
So there we are: December, the happiest time of the year. I hope that this is so for me and my family. My family will be grieving enough that my father-in-law will not be there for the first time ever. They do not, we do not, need any more distracting news.
What does this have to do with cancer? I will tell you. But not yet.
The thing is, we moved. We moved from Texas, where all of my family was, to Virginia, where my wife’s mom and dad and brother were. The reason? Well, my wife was working at Baylor University’s hospital in Dallas, a highly respected institution, and could probably get a job anywhere in the country. More importantly, as she pointed out, we had gone my way for the entirety of our marriage, my parents had many grandchildren while hers had none but ours, and it was, simply, her turn.
I agreed.
It was probably either that or celibacy.
We moved, and I called around, and I got my daughter hooked up on a team with a lady coach who proved to be an excellent one for her at that time. The lady was fairly knowledgeable, had a daughter on the team but did not appear to show favoritism, and seemed to understand the relative significance of the game (which is to say that unlike me she did not think a loss would bring about the Apocalypse).
When I called seeking a team for my son, the guy that I talked to, the director of the league, asked if I had any coaching experience, and I answered, of course, “Well, um, not really. I was an assistant coach for my son’s team down in Texas last year, but…”, and he said, “Great! You are the coach!”
What?
Truly, I knew nothing about soccer. Nothing. Except what I have previously mentioned, that you kick the ball, that you try to put it into the goal.
But he was serious and he was insistent.
I was a coach :).
I was petrified :).
I am a perfectionist. When I was first told that in the fifth grade, I smiled, and my teacher, Mrs. Byers, just shook her head and said someday you won’t be so happy about that.
She was right. It can lead to anxiety and even panic attacks. It can lead to social anxiety, in particular, and depression, as I have since learned, much to my own dismay. But, on the other hand, it makes you one helluva coach :).
If I must say so myself, and I must, and I do.
I went immediately to the library and to soccer stores. I got books, got videos, saw some of the most boring junk you will ever witness on television: an hour on how to kick corners, all with an English accent and all to a guy that did not even know the importance of a corner kick at the time :).
But I hung in there.
I went to my first practice more nervous, I think, than I can ever remember being. Not because of the kids, of course, but the parents, my peers.
I know my voice was quavering when I addressed them. I told them I loved the kids but did not like them. I told them that they had the potential to rob their boys of a good time, among other things. I really did. Some mouths dropped, but not a word was spoken. I was what they had, and so they had to deal with it :).
Keep in mind, this is formerly bad parent numero uno! I was speaking from experience! 🙂
One parent, the one who became my assistant, told me that I had nothing to worry about: that teams in our area never won. Ha!
That was not hilarious at the time, but is now.
That first team, my first team, went 4-4 as I recall, in community soccer, where it is not supposed to matter. I will tell you that it always matters to me, and I do not apologize for that.
I have told my players, every single one I have ever coached, the first time we gather around before the first practice: Rule number one is to have fun. Rule number two is that winning is more fun than losing.
We take it from there :).
I moved on. I coached my son at a higher level. I coached my daughter on brief occasions. I coached outdoors, I coached indoors, I coached community, I coached select (advanced), I coached travel, I coached girls, I coached boys. I always succeeded. I did.
I should say that my players succeeded. Always. They did.
(I am allowing you to avoid me reciting the litany of every game, every win, every trophy, I was ever involved with, so be thankful :).
Both of my own kids moved past me. They moved to travel ball, to elite competition, and I felt no longer capable of coaching them. My coaching ‘career’ was done.
My daughter played travel ball and played for her high school team as a freshman. My son played travel ball at a younger age even than his sister, and played in England with his team. He started every game, played every minute of every game, as a freshman in high school. Unheard of.
Both were MVPs their senior years in high school. My daughter went on to play four years in college, and then coached in Europe! Both girls and boys, high school kids from around the globe. What an awesome experience that had to be! And she would write to me asking for advice on occasion, even though I am sure she did that to make me feel good.
My son played in adult league soccer when he was but 16 years old, and played, again, for the entirety of games. And he did not play on bad teams. Like his sister, he was offered a chance to play in college. In fact, he turned down a potential scholarship.
I am suggesting that this is why I am soccerfreaks. 🙂 The sport has been good to my family. It wrecked my son’s knee, to be sure, but by and large it has been very good to my family, and I encourage parents to get their children involved in this game. It will help them, frankly, if and when they decide to play other sports, simply because of the fitness required.
But, I am preaching. My apologies. (Why am I apologizing? It’s my book :))
So there I am, going to my kids’ games, as an innocent spectator (amazing how you can turn back into a monster when you are simply dad again :)), when one of our family friends calls me to say that her daughter’s community team needs a new coach. They are six and seven year olds. I have not been there in awhile. I say okay, probably because I am a glutton for punishment.
I write a manifesto for the parents, describing what I expect from the players (six and seven year olds!), what I expect from the parents, and what they can expect from me.
As is usual, the kids love their previous coach and suspect me. It doesn’t get better, as I run them into the ground, to be honest with you. We work and we work and we work on fundamentals and on fitness. I think they hate it, but I am working for free :).
I am probably being too harsh on myself, maybe by an inch or so. Let us say that the parents did not complain, and that was good enough for me. Let us say that the girls hung in there and did everything I asked them to do without complaint, and that was good enough for me. Reputation carries you a long way I guess.
My son’s teams had been winners when I coached them. When I took my daughter’s abysmal high school team indoors, we won as well, totally unexpected. Reputation matters.
Even to the parents of six and seven year olds 🙂
I will shorten this again: We completely dominated in community league. We did not lose a game, won them all by huge margins, and parents from other teams, frankly, hated my guts.
I do not, never did, scream at my players in negative fashion. But I always have and always will scream encouragement to them. And I did so then. At that time, I had a great voice, in all modesty, and a loud one. One dad from another team made a point to walk in front of me with a bullhorn to speak to his team…I suppose he was the coach. I laughed at that and advised him about the rule that he stay on his half of the midfield line. If I sound like an ogre, I do not believe I was. I loved my girls, I wanted the best for them, I worked their butts off, and they deserved their rewards. I was happy to encourage them for their success.
I will never apologize for that.
Let me tell you this: when we decided it was time to move up a level, and learned that our youngest player (the one who actually sold me on the game of soccer…playing in goal and getting a drink of water while someone from the other team kicked a slow roller past her, and who, when I asked her at the half if the water was more important than preventing a goal simply smiled, all freckle-faced, to say, yes, it was) her parents petitioned HARD within the league and even in the newspaper for her to be able to continue playing for me. That was a very proud experience for me. They lost that battle, and she played in her age group, and went on to excel at a private high school academy, incidentally. I keep track of all of my kids.
I’m trying to bring this to a boil here.
Let’s cut to the chase: I took my little girls to the next higher level. We won. We were not supposed to, to quote that long ago boys’ assistant coach of mine. We were from the wrong end of town. While other teams’ tryouts had kids numbering in the 30s, 40s, 50s, mine had maybe one or two new kids :). It was a challenge, it was a blast.
And we won.
My arch-nemesis, to be fair, the lady coach of one of the teams in probably the wealthiest areas in the city, called me one night and asked if I was interested in a player she had no use for. I said, “Sure, give me a number.” The mom and I talked, and they came to our next practice. She was supposed to be a goalkeeper, and she was not all that good on the field otherwise, and on top of that, my girls were schooled well, if I can humbly submit, and they, in turn, schooled her that first night. They blistered her. Still, I could not turn down just one player trying out, so we took her.
And began her education :).
I cannot claim credit for this young lady’s success as a keeper. I cannot. Others have had a much bigger stake in that. But I took her onto my team, tried to teach her a few things, and she learned them, and she became a great keeper.
In our season-ending tournament one of those years, the Hampton Roads Girls Soccer Association tournament, the biggest tourney of our season, frankly, with teams coming from out of the area to play, in fact, something we were just getting used to, as we were not yet a travel team, it was starting to snow as we made our way to the final. Yes, we expected to be in the final, and there we were. I, of course, approached each game as if we were doomed, and somehow the ladies pulled me out :).
Officials decided we would not play. In order to let out-of-towners hit the road and avoid the snow (around here an inch is considered a major snowstorm), we would go immediately to penalty kicks. For those of you not in the know, this is a point where you choose five players from among those playing, to take a kick from a spot very close to the goal. The opponent does the same. It is difficult, even at that level, even among kids of that age, for a keeper to prevent opponents from scoring.
Ah, well. You play with the hand you are dealt.
Kristin, the keeper I referred to above as the player I kept, even when I had doubts about her abilities, stopped every single shot by the opposition. In the meantime, none of our key offensive players, the ones I chose to take those critical shots, could not get it past the other keeper either. My ace in the hole was Kristin. I had selected her to take our fifth and final kick, thinking that no one knows better than a keeper how to beat a keeper. She nailed it. We won. I got a heavy trophy to carry home, one I owe to her, and one I promised to give to her when I was told I was dying of cancer.
(You thought we would never get here, eh?)
Here’s the kicker (pardon the pun): when I was in bed, waiting to go into the hospital for my initial surgery for tongue and neck cancer, there was a wreath of angels surrounding my bed. My wife was there, as were a few of the soccer moms from that very team, and also a few of the players from that team, from what was, at this point, quite a few years ago. They were there for me, they had remembered me, and I was truly touched by this.
At the time, I was sedated to some extent, but I remember this moment, and remember telling them that I must have already died and gone to Heaven (do not go Christian on me, my friends :)) because I was surrounded by lovely angels.
The other night, Virginia Tech played Florida State in a quarterfinal of the ACC soccer tournament in, I think, Cary, NC. I have been there. My daughter played there more than once. Now, Kristin was there, a freshman, in goal, for the unranked and lowly seeded Hokies. She stopped one kick, another hit the crossbar, and Tech beat the Seminoles on PKs following a scoreless regular session and two sudden-death overtimes.
I wrote her and her parents to congratulate Kristin on her success and to let them know it reminded me of that HRGSA final so very long ago. Both Kristin and her mom wrote me back to say that they had thought of the same game, that game from so long ago, and that Kristin’s grandma had even been in tears as she recalled that game.
Next up was 12th-ranked Virginia, as I have indicated. This one was tied up, 1-1, after regular time, and after the two OTs. I watched both games on the internet, by the way and heard over and over again how this freshman keeper was making save after brilliant save.
She acted like it was HRGSA all over again, blocking shot after shot, unheard of at this level. I have never seen anything like it, personally, not at this level of play, not against this level of competition, not in this kind of pressure environment. Never.
Tears were rolling from my eyes. I have lived to see one of my players make it, and to make it to my alma mater, and to carry them where they have never been before. I always wore maroon and orange to practices back then:). I always told them they would play for Tech one day, even though Tech didn’t even have a women’s soccer program back then.
One of them has done it.
It brought me to tears. I lived to see it. It brought me to tears.
I cannot forget lying in that bed, with her and others surrounding me, in semi-darkness, wondering if I was already gone, wondering if I would ever see them again, and certainly never expecting to see what I saw tonight.
To be straight up front, I am wondering how this salsa con queso is going to deal with me after I’ve had some sleep. I do not know. It is Medium, which would be no problem for the great majority of you, but it is pretty much cutting edge for me. We will see.
If I bleed to death that way, I suppose it would be poetic justice.
Meanwhile, we are talking about death and dying. I was told in June of 2007 that I had 10 months to live, maybe more, but to expect nothing more. Ten months.
I’ve mentioned that.
I was dying. The strangest thing is that while the initial announcement blew me away, I was not truly overwhelmed by this. My wife was. My daughter was. My son in law was. But I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said, okay, let’s move on.
But you have already read this story.
The real story is this: they were wrong.
I wasn’t dying. I had one small node in my lung, not the shotgun pellets they first thought were there. And I was not dying.
Even when they decided to take that one node out of my lung, I was not dying.
But my father-in-law was. Imagine that! My wife, as a nurse, is permitted to sleep in my room every night, and all of a sudden her dad is in extreme duress in another hospital!
She works her magic, and gets him shipped to the same hospital I am in, her hospital, but it takes forever, and I think I am out before he even gets there.
She is staying with me, night and day, day and night, and still trying to find time to see her dad, and to care for her mom, who can’t drive anymore, and her brother, who has Cerebral Palsy but does very well with it, and now her dad is in the hospital, close to death, apparently, as is her husband, suffering from a staph infection that they are still trying to figure out.
She is a busy lady.
Oh yeah, and she is trying to get some hours in, too.
It turns out that I get out before her dad. I went in before him, but I get out before him too. The real irony is that I went into the OR for my second operation, for the staph infection, the same night he went to the ER at another hospital. My wife thought, ok, he (me) is going into surgery and then into ICU…I can sleep at home tonight with the dogs (no comments please). And then she is alerted that, that very night, her dad is in the ER at another hospital.
Wouldn’t want to be her!
My wife said later that the only time she feared for my life was during the staph infection business. She is the nurse so I will take her word for it. There was no fearing for her dad. She fought with doctors and whomever, but he was not coming out of it. COPD. Look it up.
I went to see him, as I was out of the hospital and walking again, and he wasn’t looking good at all. He would die within 48 hours I think. I held his hand, told him that I would take care of his little girl, and that I would take care of his wife and his son. It would get done.
He was not comatose. I think he knew what I was saying. He squeezed my hand more than once.
We didn’t start off so well, Harv and me. His daughter was too young for someone like me, or so he thought (she was legal, folks!). Maybe it was my age (I was three years older than her…she was 10 and I was 13); maybe it was the suits…he didn’t seem to like the suit types; maybe it was that I was quitting a job where I had just been promoted to assistant manager, so that I could go up to New Hampshire and write the Great American Novel. Oh, yeah, probably that last one.
I do not blame him. Now that I am a parent, I do not blame him.
He would ‘go to bed’ before 5 PM if I was coming over for dinner, just to avoid me. I thought it funny.
There are lots of other good parts of this story; suffice it that he came to love me. I took care of his daughter, I loved his daughter, she had a roof over her head, she ate well enough, we had his grandchildren. Whatever it was, he came to love me, and I came to love him.
And then, in the midst of my own problems, he died.
He gave me a ponytail palm not too long before I ended up in the hospital. It was like getting Excalibur handed to me directly from King Arthur. That’s what it felt like to me. I truly loved the man. No pretense, no BS. Just Harv.
And now, no Harv.
To this day, I do not know how my wife did it, how she handled it all emotionally. But she did, and so did her mom, and so did her brother, who worried me most.
Part of it, I thought, was that she was too busy with me to give it too much thought. I now think I was wrong. I think that as you get older you learn to grieve differently. Young people tend to think it is the end of the world, while older folks have been there and done that, that sort of thing, not to shortchange the grief. We simply know better how to deal with it as we mature and experience it.
I am not saying that it is ever easy.
I do miss the man. I held his hand there, in that hospital room, while his eyes stared out into space. He was leaving, and I knew it. But, unlike my mom, I am almost certain that he could hear me, and that when he squeezed my hand he was answering me. He knew I was telling him that I now had the watch, if you will, for his wife and his son. I would take care of them. He could trust me to do that. He knew that. He squeezed my hand.
And, a day or so later, he died.
I am done talking about death. I have overdone it probably, even though I really feel like I have not even hit on the salient points. But enough of death. We are not about death but about life. I needed to talk about death for myself, and for all of those caregivers who are fearful of losing someone or who have lost someone. I felt compelled to talk about it and to give it its due.
But enough of it. Let us move on, celebrating the fact that we are alive, surviving.
I had a rather unusual experience this evening. My wife was standing next to me (she does that from time to time), looking with great excitement at some photographs she had just had developed. It turns out that they were a few years old, but only now developed. That happens to us. I am still looking for the rolls I took in Europe, Paris in particular. They were probably confiscated by the Thought Police at the airport in Brussels, but that is another story for another time.
She is standing next to me and giggling and laughing and doing her “Oh, my God!” thing when she sees something that really delights her, while I am busy going through the second set of photos from the batch. It is clear to me that they are older, but I do not know how old. I just know that I see her dad in a lot of them. And none of me. I notice things like that, not that I am a vain man :).
When she starts to cry, and I mean really cry, when she lays the pictures down and starts to leave the room, I stop her and ask, “Is it your dad?”. He passed away earlier this year, and I am thinking that some photo has set her off, some tender, some sentimental moment has really gotten to her.
She is speechless. Literally unable to speak, and beginning to blush, she is so upset. She is shaking her head, she has put the pictures down, she has a hand to her mouth, very upset, and I am trying to guess at what upset her, about to pick up the pics and find out for myself when she picks them back up to deny me the end of my curiosity.
I am concerned for her, and continue to ask her what could possibly be making her this upset. It is sort of like a game show, to be honest, and would be funny if it were not so serious. I keep bringing up names and situations and she keeps shaking her head, No, with her hand to her mouth and the tears flowing.
Finally, she settles down a bit, takes a deep breath, if you will, lays the pictures back down, with the exception of two, and says, rather shakily, “Picture of you.”
Picture of me? I didn’t know I looked that bad. Ever! Even now! 🙂
I ask, in fact, “You mean after this last surgery?” (when I felt I looked like a concentration camp survivor, albeit sans tattoo, said with the deepest respect for those who actually lived through it or did not, but as the best description I can think of for how I looked with my rather emaciated body, hair loss, etc.).
She shook her head again and said hesitantly, “After the first.”
The first? The first was three years ago! And I didn’t look so bad after that one! You can look at my picture on this site. I mean, I may not be Paul Newman (okay, he’s dead now, so bad choice, but you catch my drift), but I’m nothing to cry over (am I?).
So I finally get to see the pic and it is me in the hospital, in a bed, head resting between some sort of stabilizers, foam on either side of those, most of chest covered with the ubiquitous butt-crack robe but enough showing to show some bleeding. Trickling blood is always eerier, somehow, isn’t it? It appears it is running down from my neck to under my garment. There is more, of course, but that is the blood I notice first. Lower part of head is swollen, there is a trache with a serious attachment to it, and there is even some sort of garrote-looking piece of wire or something wrapped completely around my neck.
I suppose that is there to keep my head together :). Sounds funny as I say it, but I speculate that it is so. I see no other reason for it but to help maintain my immobility, perhaps.
What I notice, beyond the blood and the trache and the line ‘drawn’ down my lower face from bottom lip nearly to chest before it veers off to the left, what I notice beyond the fact I am sleeping and being garroted at the same time, what I notice beyond the tubes and swelling and monitor attachments, is that I have hair! I have a moustache and lots of curly brown hair!
Those days seem so long ago :).
I WAS a bit overweight, even beyond the swelling, but, geez, I was a rather handsome lad, if you take away the swelling and the new chin/neck ‘tattoo’ and the tracheand the blood and all of that :).
It did not make me cry. It made me interested. I looked at every small detail in that photo, down to the color of the sheets and the way someone apparently moved my robe a bit to cover my breast before the photo was taken. (Danged censors! :))
But I wasn’t there. Someone who was, someone who feared for my life, found this photo disturbing. I guess you had to be there, and I wasn’t. Whatever else you see in this photo, you can be sure you will notice that my swollen eyelids are covering my eyes, that I am asleep or in that induced unconsciousness that some of us shorten to ‘coma’.
Not to continue to beat on that drum, but these caregivers, they sure go through a lot.
I cannot make the smooching sound, I cannot pucker up and plant one, I cannot kiss.
I cannot whistle either, and I used to be a danged good whistler. But that is not as big as not being able to kiss. Everyone should be able to kiss, and I cannot kiss.
Whatever they did to me that first go-round, they took away my ability to kiss.
I have tried to kiss my grandson, and I cannot do it. I purse my lips, I move them, and suddenly I realize that I cannot kiss him. I can slobber on him. I can touch his soft sweet face with my lips, for sure, and I have. But I cannot kiss him.
I should work on it.
In the meantime, I am very lucky.
When my wife and I started hanging out together, if you know what I mean and I think you do, I advised her that she did not know how to kiss. Like a great number of people, I suspect, she kissed in a hard, closed-lip fashion. We worked on that and we corrected it.
(Am I anal or what?)
A kiss, in my opinion, then and now, should be soft, succulent, receiving and giving. Corrine was a quick study.
So was my wife.
JUST JOKING! Corrine is my wife.
The thing is, we can kiss. It is because she is succulent, receiving, and giving. I am not trying to be erotic here, although I am about to leave this paragraph in mid-sentence and run off to bed!
No.
Isn’t that amazing though? We can kiss. I cannot even kiss my own grandson, not really, but every time I kiss my wife, I know that it is a real kiss, and I feel it, and I savor it, and I know that I am a part of it. And I know that it is because I taught her how to kiss.
That sounds funny. I know. But no one kisses like her. Well, I mean, probably :).
My wife made steak along with some other stuff the night before I called my doctor to begin the whole sordid affair that became my cancer years. Three of them, so I have no complaints. I have many friends who have lived with it longer and been much braver and more disciplined about the whole thing than I have been. A great many of them are women, which is not surprising, since they seem to carry most of the burden in our society, with less of the credit and cash that they deserve, not to sound political. But enough of them are men too, of course, and I seem to be the only wimp among them :).
My wife is a nurse. She is a wound care nurse. They refer to her in these parts as an ET nurse. If I have said this before, I have forgotten. Skip it if you know it. It means she works on wound care, of course. Sometimes, many times, it is gunshot wounds. That makes for pretty exciting times, what with the policeman standing outside the door of your patient’s room, for instance, or people trying to cop some time with your patient so they can see what a shark bite looks like (that is rare folks, so do not avoid the water just yet).
She also, more importantly, I think, teaches nurses and doctors and patients how to apply appropriate wound care, and even how to care for themselves (hopefully just patients) with their ‘bags’. You know what I mean. Any kind of -oscopy is likely associated with a bag at least for a time. She teaches people how to fend for themselves, how to change them, how to protect the wound area, the whole bit. People come to rely on her greatly for this service. She works at the largest hospital in our area, in fact, a rather large urban/suburban area, and is one of just two in the entire hospital complex who provides this service.
She is simply awesome at her job.
I don’t know if she knew I had cancer the night before I called my doctor. But she made steak. And I couldn’t quite eat it. I have said before, had I known, I would have eaten it, I would have found a way. But my tongue hurt, and I am a grumpy guy when I am in any kind of pain, and I don’t remember eating any of it.
I wish today that I had either eaten it or remembered eating it. Either would be good, right about now. A friend of mine who had his tongue rearranged nine years ago has commented that he may never eat steak again, and I have the same feeling re myself. Thus, the reference to a cheeseburger in paradise. A cheeseburger might BE paradise! I have told many people, and may even be repeating myself here, that restaurant commercials on television are like porno to me now, although I’ve never seen porno, of course, and only use that strange reference because others have told me about it.
To get to the point though, I do not remember a time since then when my wife has not been by my side when I needed her. She was not there for the initial emergency reaction of my personal doctor, who told me to gather clothes and head off to the hospital. (I was not naked in his office. He meant that I should gather MORE clothes from home, preferably clean ones, although I only inferred that, and head for the hospital.) And she was not there when I got to the hospital.
I have hospiphobia. (And by now you may have noticed that I seem to have lots of phobias like that guy Monk on the television show. I don’t, really. Some of them I claim because I think they are funny. But I do have puncturephobia, and I do have cancerphobia, and, um, yeah, hospiphobia. Seems like every time I go into a hospital there is something wrong with me or with someone I know.) I don’t like going into a hospital alone. I get this feeling I will be lost in the system, and by the time my family finds me, they will be looking at a toe tag. I probably watch more television than I think I do. But I digress…
After that, she was there the entire time, my wife, that is, and not some television actress. I do not know how it can get better than that. (Okay, some television actresses might have been better, but probably not in this situation.)
She was there at that particular hospital later in the evening, and when the biopsy came back, and she was there to insist that they haul my butt to her hospital (along with the rest of my body, I should add), where, somehow, she had already lined up the doctors of choice for my care, one of them certifiably one of the best in the country at his job.
I went into the hospital for two weeks before we even thought about surgery, to make sure I could handle it. And she was there, sleeping on the floor on a mat of some kind, the entire time. Male friends, who I never thought would come into a hospital, came to visit. (MY male friends, not hers, you sick people!) I was surprised and happy. I am a man. Hospitals suck. I will see you when you get out, or I will take one of the handles if you do not. I am not going into a hospital to see a male friend. But they did (I think they are my male friends???).
They looked, of course, like kids brought into the principal’s office with no excuse for pulling Peggy’s pigtails. But they were there.
And so was my wife.
I do not remember any of the rest of my family being there for this two weeks. I am probably forgetting because I was on Demerol or some such for at least part of the time, and because it was three years ago and now that I am an ancient man I can’t even remember how I survived the Ice Age without thermal underwear.
I do remember those two guys coming to see me, and I remember a few lady friends coming as well, although if I were to be brutally honest with myself I would admit they were really coming to see my wife, who was trying to work and care for me and sleep on a mat on the floor in my hospital room.
I prefer NOT to be brutally honest with myself, of course, and so I remember them coming into the room bearing palm fronds and grapes, lotions and potions and erotic emotions.
Remember, I was doing the Demerol thing. But the grapes were good!