And the winner is...

Me.



The Drs called today and my marrow is clear. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer, to quote Burgess. There are no bad lymphoblasts and there is no cancer to be found.

In short: Yahoo!

These are still woods, and we are by no means out of them, but this initial good result sets a tone, I hope, and is one of the more important hurdles. 30% of people are resistant to chemo: I am not. Sometimes there's more induction chemo: not for me.

We can now move onto the next phase of the protocol to try and eradicate and keep eradicated this leukemia. If each benchmark goes well--which may or may not happen, but let's pretend on this happy day--then there are seven more months of different chemo regimens, followed by likely a couple of years of 'maintenance' therapy--which tends to be significantly less but still owns you--until I am released. And then the Medical Establishment demands five years cancer-free before they pronounce you 'cured.'

But that's the point on the horizon for which I am aiming, and this first smear of clear marrow points the way.

We have our next appointment Wednesday, and if my blood numbers are in the right place they may start me on the next round at that point. Or maybe wait a bit more. But it will be soon. They give you a break to get some strength back before hitting you again, but they don't want to wait too long, and I don't want them to--both because it means I will be done sooner and, of even more value, it means there's less chance the bugger will have a chance to regroup and regrow.

So...off we go into whatever's next.

I want to apologize for the two-day hole I fell in the other day, and I want to prep everyone out there for more pauses. But this time on purpose.

From now till Wednesday, nothing is supposed to happen. I am supposed to eat, sleep, and crap: baby time, puppy time, Republican think-tank time, call it what you will.

Partially because writing about nothing happening is often bad writing--unless you are Nicholson Baker--but more so because I respect your time as much as I understand the need to husband my own, I don't intend to blog sedentary-tude. That's just obnoxious: 'today my toes look better, but still sort of like Vienna Sausages,' blah blah blah. Obnoxious.

So we're going off radar unless something happens that warrants a report. No news will, in a very real way, be good news for the next little while.

I will definitely report at the end of Wednesday or during Thursday, depending on what they hit me with and everything. But probably not before that.

There's some good lacrosse on ESPN2 this weekend, NASCAR is at their home track in Charlotte, the Indy 500 is in about a day and a half, and the blue crab is probably coming into season if you are near Baltimore. Just ideas, you know.

So go see an art-house film, crank some Dio or Iggy Pop, or just mourn Gary Coleman, and I will speak to you all in a few days.

Faceless mass of unknown care that you are, I will miss you, oddly.

Later.

So, ummm....we're home

This morning, here in Chelsea, in our own bed, I cracked my eyes. Eyes that were not Ambien-coated. Eyes that had been shut for five straight hours. But what had opened them? It was 5:40.

What was that noise? That high pitched repetitive noise? Like a trill, like a...
Birdsong. I reached over and grabbed N's leg, almost too hard. Birdsong. Good god it's good to be home.

But I should back up, because, as with all things so far, it wasn't that easy.

The full marrow results are not back, and won't be for a little while. But there's nothing else for the hospital to do for me in the meantime. And my numbers are either high enough or trending in the right direction, so why not wait for the results at home?

Yes. Indeed; why not?

They turfed us around noon Wednesday. The tiny room that had been our home unfolded a clown-car's worth of crap, and we needed the extra-wide wheelchair they use for fat people to get all of our bags and belongings down to the taxi driveway of the hospital. Hugs, tears, assurances, and this strange mix of freedom and knowing I'll be back soon enough pushed us out the door.

And into a cab. Which made me sick.

Not hurl sick, just car sick. Makes sense, and didn't surprise me: I often tend towards motion sickness when not controlling the vehicle. So it's really control issues more than nausea.

When we get to the apartment, it is about 90 degrees. N insists I can only carry the one parcel that weighs under four pounds--I think there was a bag of pretzels in it.

I am allowed to hold the door as she trundles our proud gypsy pile of gear into the hallway.

Then I have to relinquish everything and climb the stairs.

One stair at a time, one hand on the wall and the other on the railing, and weeping like the highest grade of sissy little dweeb, I get all the way to our door nonstop.

N has been carrying my precarious health and emotional fractures like some leaden turtle-shell on her back for a month, and my reward for her getting me safely back to our home is to stand on our "Go Away" doormat and blubber. Nice work, tough guy.

Yes, there is deeply ingrained pred flushing out of my system, but it is also extremely emotional in two ways: the glory of coming home, and a growing terror that I am not, in fact, in a hospital.

Convicts get out of prison, and they don't know what to do. Robert Downey Jr recently described prison as the safest place you could possibly be.

Meet me in the cancer ward, Bob.

But this feeling doesn't settle in at once. There is mainly happiness and fatigue, and the emasculation of slumping on the couch--the couch! the couch!--while N walks endless laps from one end of the apartment to the other unpacking, cleaning, prepping, arranging, feeding, fretting, and starting our life again. I think I may have picked up an envelope at one point. Maybe.

Then we ordered food. Just ordered it; didn't have to fit it between other meals, didn't have to send her out for it, didn't have to arrange for a visitor to bring it. Just called the local deli we have patronized for a decade but NEVER gotten delivery from, and a little while later a fine young man brought us:

Bag o' chips
Grilled Cheese
Creama' Tomato soup.

And seven or eight seconds later I was done.

Bad. Idea.

At some point after the bustle had settled, after a friend had come over to keep an eye on me while N shopped for the prescriptions and supplies we need now that we are here, I started to slowly grow into a nice little freak-out. And in perfect harmony I started to feel bad.

In the excitement of leaving it had not occurred to me that:

A: I had gotten chemo the day before.
B: I had not eaten greasy NY food in such abundance in quite a while.

And I was getting more and more worried about not being surrounded by doctors and nurses and monitors and bells and whistles and pharmacies and echo-cardiograms and whatever else had grown into my twisted sense of safety and sickness over the last 30 days.

30 days I was in there. 30 days N was in there with me. 30 nights of sleepy smiles across the little valley between the mechanical bull bed and the cot. 30 days to grow used to cancer.

And then all of a sudden I am on the couch, and my stomach is roiling and I am sweaty and feel loose-limbed and maybe faint. I rush to the bathroom. Yes it is nice to be sitting on my own toilet, but what happens there won't make a greatest hits list for anybody.

And then all of a sudden I am on the couch, and my heart rate is speeding up, and there's nobody except N, and my fears and systemic quivering are too much for me. My trust falters, I lose the thread, I abandon N and her careful carrying of my health. I am foolish enough to stop believing in Sequoias. I feel like they were wrong, we shouldn't have left, I am back in A-fib, I am turning to liquid from the inside out. I shouldn't be here. I should be back take me back take me back oh jesus am I in A-fib just stare at your chest just stare at your chest it's a 4-count not a broken 3 its a 4-count calm down calm down CALM DOWN...please.

N saw the little boy in my eyes and, and fixed it. She called her father, who came in with a stethoscope and listened to me and said 'no, you're not in A-fib' and he's a Dr so I listened. He taught us to take blood pressure, where to listen to the heart. When he and N listened to both their hearts and mine I saw the truth in their eyes when they said, a little sadly, that mine actually sounded stronger than theirs. Just pounding away, scared 4-count, lub-dub, lub-dub, you're here.

So with some help from her and him, it passed.

And it was time for bed.

I figured I might as well just pile every demon together and get it over with, so I didn't take the Ambien. Fuck'em, you gotta fight it out eventually, and this is my goddamn bed.

There was a sound that became symbolic of the hospital to me. A sound that attacked me, small but dedicated in its violence like and Arctic Tern defending her nest on the beach. Every day. Dozens of times, punching holes in every thought or space or sleep I had.

I asked N about it, and she never heard it. Amazing what we choose to hate, what we choose to ennoble with the strength of obsession.

It was a ringtone. I think it was for a staff phone in the hall, but it could have been our roommate's cell. It was a set of bending opening tones and then a chitter of follow-up notes. Very digital, vaguely musical. It was one of the ringtones from the earliest era of ringtones, a facsimile of something else.

But it had bored into me like the marrow needle and taken up residence. And most nights in the hospital it took up residence in my head and just rolled over and over and over. Tinnitus with a melody.

As I tried to sleep, it was more constant than it had ever been, somewhere between memory and reproduction. I felt like I could actually hear it, yet I knew it was memory and psychology. But i did not stop.

Each time I slipped away--for ten minutes at the start of the night, maybe an hour at a time by the middle of the night--it was there, shushing in my ears, pretending to be next to the bed, maybe outside the window, melding in with the air conditioner hum.

I had sweats again in the night. Partially because we shaved off the mohawk--it was just about to slough off on its own--and partially because of the fear, and partially because of the heart-rate and partially because of...well, just get used to it. That's how it'll be on your own in the night, no Ambien, no nurses. Just us: and that's more than enough, dammit.

It was the terror-test. It was me, the internal sadist me, rounding the bases over and over to see if any other part of me could stop the sprinting. It was a mind-game at the most basic level--with only one gamer and high stakes.

And then...

Birdsong.

And an Iggy Pop track.

Highway Song, off of American Ceasar. Great album, but a song I haven't listened to in years. I looked up the lyrics online:

"Highway Song"

I been walkin' down the road
what it means i dunno
i been walkin' down the highway
with the bad food flyin by me
i' m an ordinary man
with a time bomb in my hand
it keeps tickin' and i keep runnin
tryin to find out where i come from

and there ain't nothin' gonna take this road away
nothin' gonna take this road away
nothin' gonna take this road outta my heart
nothin' gonna take this pain outta my heart

i wake up sweatin in the night
every town is only lights
i 'm addicted to the highway
'cuz i just can't do things their way
and there ain't nothin gonna take this road away
nothin gonna take that road away
nothin gonna take that road outta my heart

highway i' m doin fine
you help me draw the line
no use in bein alive
if i'm just renting
i undersand the circus well
i've played the clown when down he fell
but bein' down ain't bein' loser
so just look out here comes a bruiser
and there ain t nothin gonna take my road away
nothin' gonna take my road away
nothin' gonna take my road outta my heart


I just dug these up, just now. And I have chills. But I'm smiling.

This is not a massage.

My back feels like one of those minefields in Sierra Leone Princess Di used to walk across in her UNICEF flak jacket for photo ops.

This picture is from about 40% of the way through a bone marrow biopsy. While 'bone marrow biopsy' sounds all sorts of medical, it is in fact a procedure with two parts, and the part that involves my back isn't really much more than, well, mining.

They use lidocaine or something like it to numb the area, and to be totally honest it never actually hurts. But, like the LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP!!!!That I got a few hours later, there is something very deep and darkly about the level of invasion that makes it a really really lame way to spend twenty minutes.

Which is not to say that the Physician's Assistant who did it is not adept. She was phenomenal, not only doing less damage, but getting a much better sample than my first marrow check. N saw both from beginning to end, and was pleased and impressed with the size of the ookie bugger they slid from me this time.

The short version is that they manually drive a core-sampling needle into the bones of the back of your pelvis, and then they slurp out a bunch of marrow. Then they spirit it away and do science-y stuff with it. The junk they find inside, and the percentage of that junk that is lymphoblasts, indicate my progress--and I use the word progress the way the people rewriting the Texas schoolbooks see it: as a lot of pain and sickness and nausea. Oh no, wait; that's what they think of Evolution. Sorry.

My last marrow check made us aware that the I have hard strong bones. That is something I would be extremely proud of, something my Montana relatives and I would smilingly crow about, if it didn't make the digging and twisting into the pelvis so much more rough and tumble.

I described the first marrow check to N and the Dr digging me out then as "like a root canal in my butt." I stand by that: it is a thudding, nerve-deadened, internal ricochets of pounding on the inside of the skeleton.

And, OK, it hurts some. Little moments where what was until then an 'awareness' that there's somebody journeying to the center of your bones changes to a direct wash of pain as some new level of depth is attained.

But by and large it is just weird and uncomfortable.

And about halfway through, the Physician's Assistant was saying "steak and milk, huh?" in between grunts and grimaces, as she needed to use more and more of her height and strength to get her sample.

And then there are spicules. By the time this issue came up I was a little lost into my own search for peace and open space in my head. But spicules are, I think, little bits from the mess of the marrow-mining process that can be looked at under a microscope in an old-fashioned way to get at least a preliminary sense of the results a day or two before the full tech version.

I will try to put in a gory picture here, but have not had luck with mid-blog photos:



So my back was dug, and then a few hours later I got what officially my last chemo, the LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP!!! Methatrexate. The tap went as well as can be expected, with one strange moment where I felt trills running down my right leg and creating a little dot of extra sensation in my right knee. Very odd. But it passed, and away we go.

And go we did...

A Ford pickup. I shoulda guessed it.

Really, in retrospect I feel a little silly for not finding it earlier. Scattered. Almost, at times, the fool.

The following will not be a paid announcement, and no goods or services will have been purchased, traded, or bartered in exchange for this message.

Seriously.

If you know me, you know that Ford pickups have both literally and figuratively meant a great deal to me, pretty much my whole life.

If you don't know me: Hi, I'm the guy with cancer and the rapidly thinning mohawk who insists on blathering on about his each and every day: how the hell did you get in here? And do you have any potato chips?

It all started in Montana, which feels comforting and solid to even say. The first Ford pickup to claim me was and is a 1969 Red F Series Explorer--god, after all these years I may be getting it wrong. The names have spread out over the years, and words that in the 60's and 70's only meant option packages have become entire model lines unto themselves.

This truck, and most of the ones that captured my imagination, belong to my uncle and still either work or populate his ranch all these years later. Red was his daily driver then, and I remember it pretty fresh and new, and every useful and wonderful bit in between until now. Now, it still helps out on the ranch, its main job these days to haul the enormous fuel tank that lives in the back for keeping the other vehicles, spread across the acres and the chores, running.

But the real grabber, the first Ford truck to quite literally loom in and own a memory and a sensation, is a bright, bright yellow 1960 F Series Ranger Explorer--two whole vehicle lines have fallen off that option package and onto America's roads.

This was the truck I drove for the first time. Staying with my uncle--he has always been patient and generous enough to refer to what I did as 'helping,' maybe even 'working' but at this age I think was mainly ballast. Let's say I'm 11. I cannot remember exactly, and I couldn't even have been much ballast because at 11 or so I probably weighed 85 pounds and looked a lot like a little girl.

It was extremely winter on the ranch land my uncle was leasing. He had to feed the section of the herd that was in the pasture closest in to the house--pastures get closer and closer to the house as winter gets uglier and uglier; you plan to have to travel the least to keep the herd healthy in the harshest times.

I am out from Baltimore for a visit, and it is just white everywhere. But we bundle up and take the yellow truck to the hay pile and load up whatever amount my uncle understands to be needed for feeding. Then he turns the truck along some ruts it seems he is capable of seeing in a road he must remember from before winter claimed the creek basin up which his ranch was located.

He leans forward, sets and pulls what at the time seemed to me like seventy or eighty knobs, and then looks at me:

"You got it?"
"Wh-hwadduyumean?"
"Can you just keep it in the ruts? Just steer. We're in 4 low, so just hold the wheel and try to keep along this line. But don't hold too tight, or you'll get tossed around."
All life's lessons. Right there. Full stop.

He indicates out the window, at the blankness crawling by at a mile an hour. I see nothing to differentiate, and I am thrilled and terrified, and not warmed by the heater just yet--you can always trust a Ford truck's heater, but it still takes a little time.

"Just along there?"
"Yes, that's fine. Remember, you don't need to touch the gas, just steer. OK"
"..."
"..."
"OK."

And he opens the door and steps out of the moving truck. Granted, moving a mile an hour, but still.

He stands still for a second, unaware of the perfect memory-picture he is creating of himself sliding whitely past and out of the passenger window, and then he levers himself into the back of the truck and begins the process of breaking bales and throwing them out in the ruts we make in the new snow.

I have since done this with and without my uncle dozens and dozens of times. And it never is not beautiful. The herd coalesces out of coulees and shadows, fog and snow, and this line of hay becomes a line of shuddering necks and backs and bodies as they line the tracks of the pickup, eating and eating and steaming and snuffling and tossing their huge long heads.

But that first time...I was DRIVING! All I did was clutch the wheel like a condemned man clutches the edge of the injection-table and let it hammer back and forth in my tiny gloved hands as the truck did 98% of the work, wheels tumbling along in the ruts.

But I was driving! I was helping!

God, I was present. I'm crying now.


I have Ford trucks of my own, now. Not a 'collection,' not a 'sampling.' Nothing that obnoxious, though that I have more than one is obnoxious, and I guess wasteful, and I guess part of the fantasy-man aspect of me and what I do that I will have to be a little ashamed of...but do anyway.

The youngest, the freshest, is a 1996 Ranger. That's our daily driver, our family car. We cleared two hundred thousand miles before I got sick. We've driven that one to Montana and back around 8 times, California a couple, and any number of other wheres.

It is in Baltimore right now, traded out for a Ford Escape Mom and Jim own, which would be a little more comfortable for me and my non-ass if and when they ever let us out of here and I get driven home. Yes, Mom and Jim have whatever filial disturbance my uncle and I have.

My oldest Ford Truck is a 1950 F47, bought in Canada on the set of a film and slowly (s l o w l y) restored ever since. Not flashy, not expensive, not a show vehicle: it is a place to labor, to figure out in simple terms and structures what mechanical knowledge I have and do not have. It is, to some extent, the first church I built.

Then I have The Bronco. This is a 1978--the F-series' best body year, for those keeping score--Bronco that was purchased new by my grandfather. By about 1982 I was nipping at his heels asking if I could 'have it when he was done.'

I was annoying back then, too.

My grandfather is a man of honour, empathy, and kindness. He's also nobody's fool, so about twenty years later he sold me the Bronco for a fair price. The Bronco lived in California for a while, where it was the most amusing way in the word to make tiny men and their tiny sports cars screech and wriggle in terror. It is a gorgeous brute, lumbering and over-powered like the era from which it roared...and I put in a sick stereo.

And last, but not at all least, the newest addition to the family, sort of. A 1992 Ranger short box we bought from friends in the South a few years ago, that had been a patient and capable garden truck and a patient and capable everything-vehicle for years before that.

4 cylinders, surprisingly good mileage, insanely tight turning radius, and just beat up enough to be something you won't worry about. Buying it and fixing it to full driveability was economical and created a snse of accomplidhment and pride: priorities, value, knowing what to feed in your life.

A friend once borrowed the black truck for a day of errands in the city and was screaming to me on his cell phone within twenty minutes: "This is the best vehicle ever. I just parked in one move! I loaded everything in two minutes. I scratched it with a box and you don't care! I LOVE this truck!

Whenever I have purchased a vehicle, the first thing I do is find a spot on the paint job and scratch it with my knife tip. Just get it over with. Then you don't have to worry about it. Like a Buddhist potter making sure each finished product is flawed; there's no reason to attempt perfection, so why ruin yourself trying?

It is this black truck--similar in model but not freshness to the photo above--that revealed itself to me last night in a moment of peace. And I have needed peace.

Jim started it, telling me he had a place he went to when the chemo was bad. Others have followed, ether reiterating his suggestion that I find a 'place' when things are hard, or even suggesting places either I or they have been. To some extent the flurry of Rob Halford heavy metal talismans and passing ghosts of Ronnie James Dio served that purpose--attempting to find somewhere comfortable for me to stand, a place from which to lever the bad life aside and maybe just look at the sunset. What the poetry professor who introduced me to N would have called 'the still point of a turning world.'

I just wrote that and then went to see exactly from where it came. To be sure.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

I just read it again after a few years, and am shattered. Lovingly, happily shattered, by the poem. I had forgotten. I do not want to forget again. Eliot has been my favorite poet since I was in 9th grade. I have never varied from that. I just remembered why. That was nice.


Back to pickups. Last night, after watching the season finale of Lost with N snuggled in the mechanical bull next to me, I started to try and sleep. I had timed the Ambien badly, and the Ambien has been getting less effective. I am happy about that, and as I seem to be off the pred for now I am going to stop the Ambien as soon as I think I can.

So I was drifting but not yet sleeping. And, unbidden, into my mind rolled the black truck. Near our driveway, our tiny driveway, with a little plow attached. And again, near our house, our little house, with a wood splitter attached to some hydraulics Gerry-rigged to the back.

A project. Rig the black truck with a hydraulic setup. So we can use it to keep house. Split wood. Plow the little driveway.

Maybe a winch on the front in case we get stuck. Maybe I'll have to finally learn to weld, to attach a base-plate for whatever tool goes in back. A wood-splitter, a cable winch, a plow.

Forward, reverse, clear the snow, clear a path, in our little black truck. Make a home, split the wood, forward, back, in our little black truck. Make a home.

And then I was asleep.

I had found my place.

Get behind me, atrium!

My father-in-law just left, having explained a great deal of the info thrown at us over the last few days in terms of metabolism and body systems. He's an endocrinologist, and the manner in which he explains things often help clarify for me because I'm a mechanic more than a theorist: his answers can kind of be seen in the 'body as car' template that makes a lot of sense to me.

Today was, to some extent, yesterday again, only more so.

I tried to stay in a slow state and enjoy, if not sleep, then marked inactivity as late as I could, which means lying flat till 8 o'clock or later.

Turns out that somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, some clerical person or machine still thought I was going to get shocked.

CLEAR!

And if yer gonna get shocked, no food for you.

So breakfast never came.

Just a guy with a wheelchair did.

The procedures had been swizzled, but I discovered at 8:57 that I was slated for a nice nine o'clock echo.

Happy to have the echo as early as possible, but had been basically unconscious ten minutes earlier. N was pretty much still out, though rousing with impressive alacrity.

I was already a little faint with hunger. And being a day after I actually fainted, I got a little worried.

So we're scrambling around our little curtained kingdom, climbing over stuff. N gets a Boost calorie drink out of the fridge for me. The poor transport guy-whose job is just to haul me to the 4th floor--is just left twiddling his thumbs while N, the nurse, and I all cooperate on opening the Boost bottle.

I get the pseudo-chocolate chugged, stand upright without moving for a ten-count to make sure I don't drop like Roberto Duran at Sugar Ray Leornard's feet (de cramps, de cramps!), and I'm off.

Transport delivers me to a wall near a door on Four, and there I sit. For some reason I find this hilarious. Maybe it is the Boost.

Then an Echo tech brings me into the room and I get a very thorough set of heart measurements on a very high tech sonogram machine. There's Doppler pictures of my blood flow in different directions, there're freeze-frame audio slates of each heartbeat. The tech is drawing lines and shapes around certain peaks and valleys. It's a rollicking good time, though the gel is very chilly. We can send people to the moon and we can live eight years under a president who couldn't find his ass with a map and a head start, and yet we can't warm the gel? C'mon, America, let's do better.

I watch all the tests, as if I have a rat's ass of an idea what any of it means, and I manage to quell the tension. Every passing slur and bleep, peak and la-lump, makes me feel like it is all wrong. Heart irretrievably ruined, a shattered beer bottle of a vessel.

Calm down, drama queen. When I concentrate I can clearly hear and see the classic four-part rhythm that was so absent during my 4am brush with idiocy.

And it works, a little. I talk myself out of the stupidness, out of the terror. It works, a little. This is a good thing.

The tech has a student sitting in, and I am asked, after the official test, if I mind letting her do some Echoing for her med school classes.

My heart is just as much an actor as the rest of me, and is overjoyed to be asked. Does this ventricle make me look fat?

She's from New Hampshire. She goes to NYU. When I say "Go Violets!" there's a pause in the room as four eyes register...nothing.

She knew that was the NYU mascot. She just didn't care. And the tech, well, I might as well have asked her about toe-cheese.

Other than that it goes well and I am back on the leukemia ward within the hour.

And shockingly soon thereafter a member of the cardio team comes by to talk to us and explain his version of what has been building in the opinions around us for a day or so: it is bad that I went A-fib, but it happens, and while it might happen again while I am getting poisoned, this episode seems to have passed and we'll be careful but move forward.

Soon thereafter the Echo is in hand, and it seems all good. The left Atrium is slightly dilated; that's where the A-fib happens. But the heart is strong and not fluid-wrapped or infected or anything bad at all. The cardio guy returns with his honcho, and the honcho in even and deliberate terms says pretty much the same thing--keep an eye out, nothing's certain while your battling cancer and on drugs meant to harm you, but as far as things stand now, have a nice day.

And they are gone. And we are fine with that. It is the most pleasant of dismissals from a department, and we are happy to be off their radar.

All schedules have been thrown by the weekend of the heart, but today rolls by aided by two units of blood to prop my hemoglobin and some amazing steak kebab N and my aforementioned Dr-in-law brought, which disappeared like...well...um...like steak, I guess.

Tomorrow will hopefully have explanations and schedules and a lot more forward-thinking, but I am satisfied that today has ended without any new wrinkles, and with a few old ones pressed out.

And...keep going.

To quote an 80's Foreigner nugget "That Was Yesterday."

I am still wearing the monitor from the photo on the right--taken three ECGs ago. But that's about it. Everything else seems to have moved past.

First, the fun: I blacked out this morning! Wheee!

It was kind of a sissy blackout, all things considered. A couple seconds, tops. But I was very much not here for those seconds, and that counts if you ask me.

I stood up to go pee. Stayed standing for a second to get my equilibrium, as everyone tells me to do.

Then looked at N.

"What? Are yo OK?"
"Yeah. Just...headrush"

Then I vaguely recall thinking maybe sitting on the bed might make sense.

Then N was in front of me calling for help into the nurse's callbox. She had her arms out like a goalie. I was at that point sort of burrowing into the bed face first, worming my way back toward the pillows without using my hands.

I remember the return to awareness as very abrupt for two reasons. One: as soon as my head was level with my heart again, I was back, full clarity.

Two: I had not been on my face in a month. Because of the rattlesnake, I have to be on my back. Maybe twice I got kind of on one side, but NEVER on my face.

So I return to consciousness and all I can think, along with "I wonder what N is so concerned about?" is "Wow, I am on my face. I am rubbing my face against the bed. My chest is on the bed. My back is open to the air. This is so weird."

Needless to say I wasn't much help at this point. But N had seen me teeter and sit, and when I drew my arms into myself, fluttered by bilirubin-yellowed eyes and started my little mole-voyage towards he head of the bed, she guided me onto the mattress correctly so I squiggled around harmlessly for a few seconds before coming out of it and looking at her with what I can only assume was a perplexed expression.

The Physician's Assistant was, rightfully, a little concerned, as was the nurse. But when we called a friend of mine who is an ER doc in Baltimore, he just laughed at me.

"Yeah, that's A-fib."

OK.

The long and short of the day is that between all the local departments on the cancer floor and cardiology--wherever they hide--it seems to have been figured out.

Chemotherapy regimens, by their nature, suppress your immune system, creating the possibility of incursion or infection of lots of your places by any number of baddies. Most of the infections that concern doctors are from the inside--your gastro tract is thinned so you get sick from yourself, etc.

It seems that I now have some not-too-concerning-to-the-Drs infection or irritation or inflammation of the heart sac: Pericarditis.

The pred--the only damn good thing the pred has done for me since day frigging one--masked the discomfort around the heart. But it was there, and I went A-fib.

At about 9:30 the medical team came in on rounds and said "You flipped back to normal sinus rhythm at 8:30, did you feel it?"

I had not. Which, I'll be honest, pissed me off a little. I had been so scared and hyperaware, and then when the best possible thing happens, I miss it.

Regardless, I have been back in normal sinus all day and evening. They still have half a bag of heparin on the pole just in case but nobody seems to think I will need it. I have been put on two bags of saline to get my blood pressure a little higher: I am still on Lopressor to lower my heart rate. It was this drug that they think helped guide me back to normal sinus so I am still on the pill for a while--and that lowers BP as well, so I do fun stuff like black out.

But it seems to just be an issue of finding balance and getting to tomorrow.

If I get to tomorrow without any more cardiac issues, they will still wheel me downstairs to the fourth floor for a full Echo-cardiogram. It will be the first time since coming in that I will be wheeled away for...'a procedure.' Stefan used to get wheeled away every day. I was jealous. Now I get to go. Nya nya nya.

Barring a bad echo (echo), the whole cardius interptus thing may be over and we can get back to concentrating on the simple things in life, like cancer.

An informative day and a half. Nobody talked about cancer. I didn't have it, in a weird way. There was a new speed bump and that's all anyone worked on. Single-minded of purpose like a mutt going for marrow. And then moving on.

N took the brunt of the issues last night and this morning, and Mom and Jim did a mixture of babysitting and pig-iron-hauling today that woulda made a mule proud. I was actively told to lie the hell down and stay calm. Not that that worked, but still, I have walked to the can three times in 30 hours. That's it. And on the first try I passed out, so what do I have to show for it?

Well, I'm still here. There's that.

And...setback.

At approximately five this morning, I got up to go pee, looked in the mirror. I'm under 140, and I look it. I looked at myself and thought I had finally crossed the line towards cadaverous.

Likely not true, just a mixture of Ambien and fatigue. But it got my head whirling and I spent the next hour in the bed, actively not-sleeping.

While lying there I felt my heart knocking around in my chest. Knocking wrong. Like when I tune my old pickup and it doesn't quite roll through the cylinders. Kind of loping. Arhythmic.

This is the first point at which I do not wake N and tell her I feel off.

I have tried not to preach or order so far in this account, but listen to me: SAY SOMETHING WHEN SOMETHING'S WRONG.

God knows how many hours stress I caused myself, what I may have done, by delaying treatment. Just to be macho, just to 'figure it out' or be tough. Goddamn stupid.

An hour later I fall asleep, heart still knocking funny. I get up again at 7, hungry. I walk the four feet to where the oatmeal an aunt sent waits. I dig a plastic spoon from the pile. I sway.

OK, oatmeal's not gonna happen. I have the dim sense to just flop back in the bed and manage to kick off my sport-sandals and lie there, clutching a plastic spoon.

An hour later the nurse comes in to bleed me, and I tell her about it, but not with much gusto or concern. She goes away.

This is the second or third time I should have awakened N or called the nurse or DONE SOMETHING. Asshole.

When the Physician's Assistant comes in for morning rounds, I am unnerved enough FINALLY by my sideways knocking heart that I run her through what happened in the night. N awakens to this confession, is justifiably angry at me. The PA is bothered by what she hears and, though she doesn't say anything, is also clearly of the opinion that I am a dumb-ass of epic proportions.

Long story short: I am in A-Fib. The non-science meaning of that--and a rare silver lining of all this--is that I was right in my personal diagnosis during the night. My ticker is out of tune. It is loping on a broken three pattern as opposed to the good old four: at least that's what it feels like to me.

A-Fib is, more than anything, tiring. Jim has had it, and frankly had it much worse that I do now, so I should keep my yap shut, but it has halted all other discussions of health and numbers and counts and the like. It is a classic setback: just this new thing standing akimbo across my recovery, a new swamp to wade through.

And we waded all day. N, Mom, Jim. Bloodletting, ECG testing, monitors. Note to patients: getting an Arterial Blood Gas test from a dessicated and pred-thinned wrist, well, sucks. But I had the fun of asking the Drs if I would be on a Holter monitor--invented by a near branch of the family and so hence the name--and seeing their pleased confusion when I told them I was looking forward to it because it turns out that I am, in fact, Holter.

Instead I am on a telemetric heart monitor that sends wi-fi versions of my heart rhythms to the nurse's desk and some building uptown, but also apparently functions on the same radio wavelengths as NYC cabs. N posits that this explains their driving habits--peoples' wonky tickers bleeping in the background of their worlds all day.

Many possible causes have been ruled out through the day. Everything, it seems, is in order. This is good in that it means that a host of things that would have been bad and caused the A-fib are not the problem.

But that also means we don't know what is. Then again, who cares, just fix it, right?

I am on a 21-hour Heparin drip to thin my blood. This is because one sure-fire way to fix it is to shock me back into rhythm. You know, like on ER.

CLEAR!

That is not on the horizon yet, but may be. The Physician's Assistant who was very good to us all day has done two Ironman races, which makes me feel great. I was about to start training for my first. I have done two Half Irons, but was about to step up.

She understands that I do not, cannot, should not go through the rest of my life with chronic A-fib if it is at all avoidable. That an athlete really can't. I might have to stop running, swimming, biking, at least at the fun level where it hurts like hell.

So maybe I get zapped. Or maybe I get drugged. Or maybe I get a good night's sleep and it all goes away.

The other silver lining is that I am off the pred because it makes me jumpy and right now, jumpy gets to haul its sorry ass over into the 'not worth it' category. The Drs were consulted, and I am pred-free at least for today and maybe tomorrow as well.

My voice--strained to a pathetic squeak by the pred--has already fallen back to it's regular slot, which lifted a huge professional weight of fear from me. I woke up from a nap, started talking to Jim, and suddenly realized I recognized the voice I was hearing. That was a high point. It was good to have one.

So soldiering on. Setbacks are the rule, assuming it will all go as planned is just a fool's game, and we will wrap ourselves around this as we have everything else.

Annoying, not ruinous. Nothing a little chicken and rice and hulu with N can't fix.

Up the far side.

I think I climbed up the far side of this week's ditch today.

We did not get outside, but I felt N was justified in thinking I tend to post only the 'mean or pained' pictures, so here's a more pleasant one from yesterday's wander. N pointed it out, and I think I can see the fullness of the chemo under my face.

She notices it not when they give it to me, but when I am feeling it, which makes sense, and I know the odds are gonna be she's right. When I look in the mirror I am seeing fears or the past or just kind of blank 'where are you?' look, so I am not currently the best source of info on that front. Sometimes I just stare for a minute and think 'wow, you don't look that sick. But you are.'

I think I see what she means. And I think it may be less right now. That, maybe, I can feel.

Smuggled--but cleared by N and the Drs, so I guess the smuggling isn't all that super-spy--food from the outside world helped. Mom and Jim are here and that means chicken and rice, a dish apparently son-approved across the country, if emails from an aunt are to be believed.

And Shepherd's pie from cousins--which is apparently the least Jewish food ever. Though Jim said that could be easily rectified with enough horseradish.

That may actually be a universal truth.

But the grey and the weighted won most of he first half of the day anyway. Things started to kind of clear out the way the clouds move out of the way in the Simpsons intro somewhere in the mid afternoon.

I am learning that I cannot predict the when, but sort of the what. The days of grey came at a different pace, came faster, last week, and were done sooner. This week I got Wednesday off, but Thursday was, looking at it from close by, worse, and so was Friday. Maybe in the aggregate they were not as bad, but tripping me up from farther out was a nasty trick. One I hope to have learned from.

But the what, I am understanding. One of the days of grey will be like lying in a shallow bath as it cools. If you don't make the move to get out, you will just stay down there, nose above water and everything else submerged and slowly cooling, slowly getting worse, slowly giving in.

In the morning you can't beat it. I did my mile as quick as I could and was swallowed by sleep again.

But as the day wears, if you can get out from under, get above that line, force yourself to rise a little above it, even to just go fill your water bottle or make yourself sit up and talk to your family, it pays dividends.

Effort begets effort begets a better level. A higher level.

And then you climb a bit from there.

It's the far side of the ditch. Just grab a root. Haul yourself up a few inches. Pant. Pant. Do it again.

Left foot. Right foot. Repeat.

In those early hours, when I was just barely above the line, it was so quiet, because I wasn't letting anything in.

Rooms speak and whisper. Crocs squeek by.

I learned at some point in the dead of last night that the first two notes the toilet makes when I flush it are the same two notes that open "Son of a Preacher Man." You know, that sad, bent first double note that tells you the song will be about loss?

A workman left a sweatshirt on the building project we can see from the northernmost lounge, the one in the elderly section. It's been there for more than a week now, fluttering and wet through at least one storm. I wonder if he'll come back for it.

These mechanical bull beds yearn to be together, like my uncle's draft horses. They work their traces next to each other, wheezing and rolling us undead through our nights, drawing our sweat and embracing our farts.

When my neighbor's bed draws in air to slide him around, I know in my half-sleep that I am next. They cycle together, then apart, then together, thrumming to each other, wheezing a little, then thrumming again.

Good night.

Ups and downs

I am sure you are all surprised to see it in this mirror-loving, self-centered endeavor of information, but that's a picture of me.

And if you look, all around me...can you see it? It's kind of hard, because it is invisible. But that's AIR!

Apparently they have it outside in abundance.

In here we don't really have air, per se. We have a heady mixture of filtered oxygen, tension, fear, laundry dander, and the reconstituted, ever-floating molecules of prednisone farts.

I prefer air.

Though it is really hard to get. There was a flight of stairs on our walk...sheesh. I have not done any vertical work in about a month. Very very strange. The simple firing of muscle groups in a manner they have not fired since April. Going down stairs was equally odd--not hard as such, but kind of like reading Dutch phonetically but with your body...when you don't speak Dutch, I guess.

But I should back up. Today was actually not so good. I think I kind of knew that might be the case. Yesterday just had a honeymoon feel to it, so I was a bit ready.

My numbers were up this morning. Not vaulting up to health and triathlons, but up. Incrementally moving in the direction away from the 'sorta dead,' where they have been maintained by the friendly and effective medical establishment.

We were told these might be the days of upping numbers. N has been good to keep me on keel that this may be when it comes, and that when it comes it does not contravene the protocol or the treatment.

That has been one of my fears. That getting better, firmer, too early, would somehow screw up their poisoners' regimens and allow the cancer sanctuary. In all honesty, them telling me that is not the case doesn't go that deep into my terror, but I hear it. And I try to listen. They are the Drs, right? Either that or some people are missing some lab coats. And crocs.

Nothing as bad as last time, but no better either. Just really tired and down, a little nauseated but more just un-hungry. You learn these immensely valuable, infinitesimal distinctions between things like nauseated versus un-hungry, tired versus run down, grey versus flavorless. Skimpy gradations of difference in the unpleasantness that somehow, by being cataloged and specified, push the slow day past one sigh faster.

But N collected all the necessary permissions and got me out for a walk. She had done some impressive subterfuge to finagle access to the lovely college campus with the over-zealous--read 'bored'--security men next door to the hospital. She found a Dr here who knew the name of a Dr there in their tiny medical school, and we were all primed with excuses and the flashing of ID bands and the like.

Which of course meant we walked right through because a woman in an Explorer was late for her shift and so just about ran the security guard over.

Last month when we wandered the same campus, there was this gentle slope to the main hall. Oddly, it had become the backside ascent to K2, and so, thwarted in our first attempt of the summit, we cut to the side and traversed a less steep pitch of sycamores to the fountain in the corner, where I sat.

I have discovered where a lot of my weight has left. I was down to 142 this morning, after yet another day of eating like you read earlier. Just deciding to not worry about it; I have a 141 to go before its a real problem, right?

Anyway, if any of you see my ass out there, just collect it up in ziploc bag or Tupperware or something and drop me a line.

Sitting with N on a bench in the glorious sunshine is a lovely lovely thing for me, in some ways better and of more value than anything I can think I need right now.

I do wish I were sitting on more than my coccyx, the undersides of my femurs, a shoddy and slack layer of medium grade leather flesh, and running shorts.

And there is N, maneuvering herself every couple of minutes to take the glare on her back and keep the sun off my head and exposed stick-legs. Moving a little to one side, then the other, gesturing unconsciously to the hat she wishes I wold put back on...but of course that would smooosh the mohawk, and one has one's priorities.

We stayed out about 45 minutes. Joy, sun, air, insane changes of altitude.

The grey had settled over my palate early and so we were searching for any food I might want. I saw two ice cream sandwiches, with girls attached. Maybe I could eat an ice cream sandwich. N approached them. The one she spoke to was German:

"Excuse me, where did you get those ice cream sandwiches?"
"Gristedes (for non-NYers; the grocery store)."
"Oh, OK. They don't have them at the cafeteria over there?
"No...but you can get the big box at the Gristedes."

She'll do fine in NY.

And then we walked back to the hospital, to the loading zone in front of the hospital, where absolutely hate-filled and selfish bastards sneak up the drive-loop and shove women with infants out of the way so that they can get in the waiting cabs before the waiting cabs get to line up in front of the polite humans in wheelchairs and with bandages waiting patiently at the "taxi here" line further on.

Sort of refreshing to see how much some people suck. I would have worried if the world had changed too much while I was gone. Silly me.

But the day was overall a winner. I am that one step further from the Devil. I may be that one step closer to going home to whatever happens next. Or not.

Left foot. Right foot. Repeat.

The Devil You Know...

Today has been...OK.

That's all I can say. The above view is the Devil going in. The Devil has to be staggered with the saline because it is cardio-toxic--which is a really wicked word, especially when the rattlesnake goes in right above your heart.

And the saline-to-Devil ratio was pretty snug, so the last undiluted bit of red had to just plunge home, followed by a hand-flush of saline from the nurse's voluminous pocket. You can see N in the background. Not sure if you can read the tension in her boy language. Not sure if you can sense mine. I trust the nurses, and the nurse was only a little edgy.

But still...the whoops goes into the hole right above my heart, not theirs, right? That's why N and I were a bit tense.
And of course the cardio-irony is that the tension makes your heart go faster, which would hypothetically streak the too-dense dose that much faster to the ticker. So I am lying there doing all the actor-body tricks I can think of to keep an even breathing, an even heart rate.

All good. No problems. Devil in. Devil done.

And then...OK.

A little nausea, a little fatigue, some new muscle aches that came on quick but left just as fast. Thought the first one was a heart attack, of course, because it was along the upper left arm...but that's just silly.

I would roundly say it was good, and not just OK, except that the fear owns the future. The body forgets the bad so fast that I don't know if maybe it won't hit in my sleep, hit in the morning, hit at 11:24. So that Poe pendulum with the blade across the night stops it from being as peachy as it could.

But really, I am pretty pleased.

The secondary fears and worries--why do I feel good shouldn't it still be bad does that mean it isn't working did I get healthy too fast has it shrugged off the attempts to kill it where is it where is it hiding?--that's for another day, another set of questions to the Drs.

Another day.

Not Wednesday.

Wednesday is just about over. Good night.

The Diet Craze That's Sweeping the Nation

Not that I would eat a turtle. But a friend sent this from a recent trip, and it soothes.

Since Wednesday looms and I may slack off a bit I figured I would file something tonight.

I was going to call this my Michael Phelps list. Then I thought I would make a crack about being on less drugs than him. Then I realized...well, that's just silly.

So here is simply my super-great guaranteed diet plan for all ages and sizes:

1: Get Leukemia.
2: Get on 115 mgs Prednisone
3: Make sure Vinchristine is part of your chemo regimen
4: Using today as an example, eat like this every day:
-Diced peaches in sugar-water
-Raisin Bran
-Banana
-Cottage cheese
-Cherry Jello
-Milk
pause
-bag pretzels
pause
-Tuna Sandwich
-Vegetable soup
-Dinner roll
-Mashed potatoes
-Chocolate ice cream
-Milk
pause
-Steak Picado Fundido
-Rice and beans
pause
-Pork loin
-Brown rice
-Green beans
-Ginger ale
-Bit of cookie (N ate rest; pig)
pause
-Chicken fingers
-Applesauce
-Coca cola
-Banana Bread
pause
Calorie-supplement medical fruit drink (apple flavor)
pause
-Rice cake

5: Walk a mile every morning
6: Drink lots of fluids
7: Read Scandinavian mysteries as fast as you can.

And presto, you too can drop 20 pounds in 20 days!

Here comes the Ambien, and here comes Wednesday. Head high, thighs wasting, ready for anything. Onward.

Wednesday's comng! Diversion! Diversion!

Ambien is rollerblading on a tabletop. There is a place to start, a prescribed distance, and then, for me at least, an edge you fall off.

I get 7 hours. I do not get 6:43. I most certainly do not get 7:12. An example:

4:59 Asleep.
5:00 Not.

You know; distinct differences.

4:59 non-dreaming vacuous space of, at best, grey movement beyond a veil of grey-blue.
5:00 I have been thrown out the front door like the house-saber-tooth-cat in the Flintones intro. Abrupt, uncalled-for.

And for my personal comedy, I cannot get up and jump through the window as the Flinstones cat does and deposit Fred on the steps instead. Abrupt, justice.

In fact, to walk this metaphor as far down the garden path as we possibly can, I am extremely amused by the image I get of myself trying, in this current state, to leap through a window seeking justice. I would likely get what my step-father refers to as 'credit-card' air, which means I would jump just high enough off the ground to swipe a Mastercard between my feet and the soil. You know, the height golfers jump when they put the little ball in the little hole.

I would not make it onto the window sill. My slack and skinny ass would hang in the balance for a second, and then--hopefully with some uttered half-word like 'z'tnah!' I would fall backwards into a difficult-to-extract-oneself-from location between a bush and a large potted plant, there to lay, stunned and scraped, until N came out onto the porch and tried very hard not to laugh. Which would be wasted effort, because in the physical release I am getting from this horse-beaten metaphor of a wipe-out, I am already roaring with laughter, because at least I am somewhere, at least I am in dirt, at least I tried to jump up and down. At least I'm not here.

Sorry, back to master Ambien and his night rules.

You can awaken, which is nice and has saved me a lot of dark bedfulls of chemical-laden urine, I would imagine. But the rising is a specified sub-version of consciousness, and you must do what you are told.

Ambien lets you know that it owns you by lightly salting your eyes with lye, so that any movement of them hurts just a bit. But it is not eye-boogers, it is a layer on the eyeball, so that it cannot be rubbed off. It is just a telltale. A leash.

So you scrape your aching eyes open because you have to pee. You swing your legs off the bed and into the absolutely perfect 'sports slippers' N bought you when the leather boat shoes you wore the first week literally began to smell visibly.

When you press your quickly waning weight into the floor and stand, the Ambien reminds you that you are merely renting your body. For me it is always a lean to the left--maybe muscle atrophy, maybe just an older sense of balance, but always the left. Just a sway. A little sway. Ambien: "Don't go far, sweetheart."

Then you have to put your left hand on the corner of the bed as you go 'round. Again, weak left, again nothing serious. Just a reminder. By the bathroom at the front of the 'suite' you place the left hand against the wall at the door for the final straightening, and then you are probably OK for the rest of the pee. This has taken a minute or so.

The peeing has it's own issues caused by the extreme brightness of the bathroom--we have mentioned that the Ambien is holding the eyes hostage--and the fact that you have to pre-pee (a phrase I just fell in love with) into the measuring bottle before noting, dumping, and washing up. So there's a whole dexterity/aim/concentration/don't fall asleep thing that makes for a quiet, but intense, 40 seconds or so. There's a lot of nose-breathing at this point; I'm not sure why.

By then you are at your most awake, and beginning to worry that maybe you have actually shaken off the Ambien--silly boy--and that you may have fallen beneath it into the grip of the pred again and so your night is over. You walk somewhat steadily back to the bed, having learned the first week of Ambien use that your mind is of little or no value in this jaunt and so you must muster all your functions to remember what your output was and write it on the board as you go by. This added surge of quasi-normal brain function further fuels your fear that you may indeed be awake, and therefore screwed.

You sit back on the bed, discard the sports slippers--those Addidas things with the feet-tickling nubs and the single flap over the top: those who know me know that I consider flip-flops to be the most universally true sign of a broken man, and simply won't wear them.

Anyway, barefoot, you reach for and swig from the sports bottle, trying to keep a fluid flow through the night even if it is less than you are used to. You lay back against sheets and pillows that have cooled and so you can feel the exact outline of your night sweats and settle yourself on the other half of the bed for the next stint, which should last about three hours. Because of human anatomy and the bed's width, you will have one of your elbows in the cooling damp, but otherwise you are likely to feel dry as you sleep.

You take the bandanna you keep rolled for your eyes and rewind it around your head, which also serves to push the earplugs a little more firmly into place--you never take them out and so your whole Ambien pee has a scuba-breathing soundtrack that, actually, I think the Ambien prefers. I think that's the voice in which the Ambien speaks. Blood muffle and slow air. Life, bright-muted, tilting.

And then you find the spot where your heavy heavy head notches high enough on the pillow to not be flat but low enough to not be bent.

And you hope. It is a small little worry, a tiny little hope, because by now your are really scared you beat the Ambien, that it left you, and that you are about to start one of the multi-layered, thinly connected thought-puzzles about football strategy and rotating tires and issues of secondary insurance EOB forms that may tie into earnings reports you have forgotten the password for and staff people at the union and what exactly does the hall outside our home look like and I read a story where a man shot a dog and in parallel why can't I figure out the best way to get the wood stove installed without changing the schedule for the lead abatement while I need to know exactly what is in the plastic they use on the food-plate-covers here that allows them to stay warm but also makes everything smell a little like a combine picking a straw field in Montana?

But have no fear. You didn't beat the Ambiem. You're gone again.


And a note on hospital beds. Years ago, George Carlin did a bit about certain foam couch cushions holding farts for a long time. It was a piece about modern materials, really. The comment was that there were now rubberized foam cushions that would keep a fart indefinitely; that only upon actively going to the cushions and banging it out as you cleaned house would you release the gifts left there by asses past.

I would like you all to know that Hill-Rom Versa Care mechanical bull bed on which I ride has been designed and constructed with pride and craft by its over 6000 employees world-wide using the latest version of this space-age, fart-capturing polymer.

No matter how long it may or may not have been since the ongoing conversation between the pred and myself has produced an olfactory statement of purpose, as it were, the cushions have taken their sampling. And they have waited, patiently, to remind me of the sins of my slumbers.

I refer you back to the second Ambien moment; the slipping of the legs off the bed towards the thoughtfully-provided sports slippers.

Well, that moment has accompaniment. In just the tiniest, most gentle way, the movement of the rubber mattress and the shift of weight sends me an archaeological tuft of air as my face passes the bed's threshold. A little puffy historian of the night, telling the recent tale of the body and it's slumbers, the steroids and their meals on my muscle, my flesh, my sense of calm.

Just a waft, just a tidbit off the top of the brandy snifter: 'Hello, sir, please recall this passing moment. Please know that we were here. Enjoy your pee. We'll see you soon. Hurry back. You have two more hours and twenty-six minutes to sleep.'

Rainbow in the Dark

Ronnie James Dio, epic lead singer of some of hard rock and metal's best bands, died Sunday morning at 67. From stomache cancer. He was a hero.

As you may see from the above photo, this post was to be about some other stuff--weekend hair loss, approaching this phase of the fight with a little grit, blah blah blah.

But when a friend sent a simple 'ride the tiger, Dio RIP at 67' email, I thought maybe the best thing was to roll with it. To step outside my own navel-gazing and look over there somewhere and just celebrate a life. When someone dies of cancer and you get the email in the cancer ward, sure, that horse-kick is a little worse, but c'mon, we're dropping like flies out here all the time. How 'bout we just celebrate for a minute?

Indulge me?

Ronald James Padavona was born in New Hampshire, that hot-bed of heavy metal, in 1942.

He was born into an actively Italian Catholic family and spent a lot of time with his tiny but powerful Italian grandmother. Dio himself is a wisp of a man, tipping in at a thin-framed 5'4" in rocker boots. It is yet another reason his soaring vocals are such a joy, pouring out of this elfin man.

His grandmother, old-world, had a common gesture--the Corna--that had become a mixture of admonishing her grandson to pay attention while at the same time warding off the evil eye:

-Curl your two middle fingers down and hold them in place with your thumb.
-Extend your pointer finger and pinky out, making a rude Y shape with your hand.
-Knuckles to the floor, you use the whole hands an an indicator, waving it at evil spirits, errant grandsons, and probably mangy New Hampshire dogs who smell your pasta fagoili from the window sill.

This gesture, instilled and distilled into a hand-waving, crowd-connecting thrust of the arm, is now the universally accepted gesture of might and right and being an outsider briefly surrounded by comrades, and love, and power, and celebration that is the heart of heavy metal music. Beyond warding off the evil eye, it has nothing to do with Satan. Almost nothing in heavy metal has anything to do with Satan. Satan is our eyeliner. This is just about people. From a tiny Grandma, through a tiny man, to the world. I love that.

In brief, his career started well and never stopped. He fronted the band Elf--which had to have been named for him--and laid the groundwork for his vocal style: his voice was always and incredibly huge. He hit high clean notes where others yelled, he bent the note at the end just right, tucked it into a powerful little ball and rolled it toward some overwhelming next line. He, in some ways, took a croon and a cry and made them explode when he needed them to.

Richie Blackmore had just left Deep Purple, a hugely influential band--c'mon, Smoke On The Water? What a-hole hasn't learned that guitar riff until his friends throw Doritoes at him or her?--in the world of hard rock right before heavy metal became its own genre. Blackmore saw Dio's potential and brought him to sing for Rainbow, a successful collaboration of years, spawning some classics.

Then Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sabbath, and Dio stepped in. 1980. Bon Scott of AC/DC had died, and that band successfully brought in Brian Johnson for a 30 year run. Metallica would lose their glorious bass player to a tour-bus accident half a decade later and still make music nonstop till the present. It was possible, if the chemistry worked, to bring a completely new personage into an iconic band and succeed.

The first albums for both AC/DC and Sabbath with heir 'new guys' were huge successes: 'Back in Black' and 'Heaven and Hell.' Both still stand as well-wrought examples of the best of the form at the time, and possibly forever. The tiny man with the huge voice had stepped up again.

After years of success with Sabbath, Dio struck out on his own with the band Dio, and along with re-upping stints with Sabbath over the years, he had been successful ever since.

The album Holy Diver stepped so smoothly into the newer, more musically technical, cleaner heavy metal that was being made by the mid-eighties that Dio found himself fully on top, and for three albums he didn't step down.

And one of the reasons is collaboration. Never concerned with spotlight-sharing, he spent his career surrounding himself with guitarists and musicians of the highest order, men sometimes one and almost two feet taller almost, who often took center stage in the recording studio and on tour. And Dio lapped it up, just enjoying the virtuosos with whom he was lucky enough to work. He had started as a horn-player, citing his breath control for french horn and trumpet as the secret to his singing; he was always a guy in the band.

But for me it all came from a live recording of a song Dio did for the wrestling movie 'Vision Quest.' As a young wrestler I had loved that the film was made and had seen it, and had certainly heard he racing light-metal song in the movie, but it was a B-side recorded from a concert that made me really love Dio.

Because the B-side was an addition to the 'Hearin' Aid' album. During the plague-and-drought-and-white-guilt mid Eighties, a group of Heavy Metal musicians that included Dio wanted to put together a hard rocking version of the Band Aid and USA for Africa-style charity albums, to reach out and grab another group of fans and try to help fight famine and hunger. The album, released in 1986, raised a million dollars.

All the metal luminaries (and gloriously, Spinal Tap!) came to a studio in LA to record the many-versed, each-guy-gets-a-line and the guitar-solo-soars-for-three-minutes song, which is a hoot. But the rest of the album--back when there had to be a whole album--are gems or B-sides donated by the bands. And Dio's was 'Hungry For Heaven,' live.

An on the live track I learned what was behind the voice I had already grown to love: There's a some banter before the song gets going; just Ronnie James introducing what's coming next. Amidst all these screaming adrenalized young men, and the spotlights and the fireballs and the leather, he just says something like "Hey, you know we're just up here for you guys, and we're just happy to be here playing music that you love, because that's our job, man; this is Hungry For Heaven.'

A working man. A lunch-pail rock god. Simple. Play your heart out. Play for the fans. Give them whatever you have inside while you're up there. Leave empty. Leave in a box if you have to. Just hand us that huge voice, and wrench those big big notes down through your tiny body, and lay them at our feet. Night after night for thirty years.

There are any number of overly poetic, quasi-mystical Dio lines I could end with. But I'll bring it back to cancer instead. It got him, after a pretty good long run and a career that gave so much to so many.

I love his music, and he was a bit of a hero for how he made it. All the websites have already added (deceased) next to his name, in less than 24 hours. I'm furious at their efficiency.

If you are still reading, I also want you to know that I am very moved that you stuck with me this far. Maybe you learned something. Maybe you will download "Holy Diver" [there's a true Pat Boone big-band version Dio sings on that's actually really good too] or "Man on the Silver Mountain" or "Heaven and Hell." That would be nice. Ronnie would like that. Even though he's dead.

Have a good day.

Water. Bad.

Turns out there can be too much of a good thing, and so I am on pee restriction. Or rather, to be more correct, water restriction and pee counting. Or something.

I have a friend on my running team. She's a strong runner, keeps insane weekly mileage, takes care of herself, the whole nine. Athlete. Last year she runs a long race--the friggin Boston Marathon, to be exact--and it goes a little south. She's been taking water and Gatorade at the correct intervals and running a solid pace, but it's a marathon; a hard one. East coast April. And wind, which strips the liquid off you as you run. And, like the photo at the top, when we run the long long races, runners sweat it all out. We grow exoskeletons of sodium from our brow ridges down our faces to our jaws. We look like people who maybe drowned calmly somewhere and are being slowly taken over by a coral reef. It's sort of a badge, for weirdo runners like us.

But it is also a sign that you are losing something, and you tend to do better when you put stuff back that you are ejecting, and my friend didn't totally. She finished the race strong, scored yet another phenomenal time, but had serious cramp issues. Like 'who parked this epileptic baby porcupine in my duodenum?' cramps.

Turns out, it was just salt. Gaotrade has the electrolytes we need to replenish, and water has the, well, water, but there wasn't a lot of salt, and she kept taking the same stuff. Gatorade. Water. Gatorade. Water.

If she had just upturned of of those modern hooey nutritional goop-bags (which I admit I love and make me feel like an astronaut) into her mouth, she'd probably have been fine.

Even easier, with all this new exer-tech: a lot of people steal a salt packet from McDonalds (where they will not admit they eat in semi-orgasmic rapture whenever they can) and slip it into a pocket of their race shorts. Half way through your race, rip it open, pour it in your mouth. Not the most pleasant quarter mile, because for a while there your face feels a little like a snow tire, but it does the job.

Simple little things keeping us going through tough times.

When this whole diagnosis started for me, it was partially because of a little muscle fatigue--OK a lot--but it was mainly about pain. I went to the doctor because I thought I had broken a rib trying to do a single push-up. Good, old fashioned, pain.

Looking back, it is kind of beautiful. Just pain. Regular, human, point-here-where-it-hurts pain. Pain I was used to. Clarity, Structure. Ouch.

Everything has been so fuzzy and systemic and murky since then, I kind of miss that first night in bed, lying very still, at home, in a sweetly direct agony. The good old days.

So we go to Dr 1, and even as he speaks about lymphoma and leukemia and marrow, he says "first thing: drink a lot of water. It'll help flush out what is causing the bone pain."

And son of a bitch if he wasn't dead-on right. One night later, I'm hurt, but it is less: specifically, effectively, less.

Then we get here to the Dr 2 team, and they say "we may or may not put your on this flushing stuff, but drink a lot of water, it'll help your kidneys and all as the bad things get pushed through."

And damned if they weren't right. I felt better, I seemed to have a little more energy, and my labs always came back with good kidney numbers. Oh joy, modern science just humming along!

N becomes my friendly water devil--the sports bottle disappears and reappears full in magical jaunts to the lounge. We experiment with slight flavorings of Gatorade, lemon juice, Pom. It becomes one of the rare little hooks of effort, involvement, we can hold onto to feel a little less like passengers on the 5:15 to Cancer Town.

Then chemo. Did I mention that sucked? Did I mention the alkaline layer of sewer tar that coats your mouth? That turns most flavors into something like 'I vaguely sense chicken, but mostly hubcap.'

So I go down to just water. No flavoring, no mixing, no juices. Maybe a ginger ale for the nausea, but only one of those small cans that make you feel like Andre The Giant.

Just water. But I am a good boy, a good athlete, a good performing bear. I do what I am told. I m not blaming anyone, just framing this in the context of actor-boy who wanna do good.

Every morning on my lap I down a whole squeeze bottle. Funny, because out in the real world I used to drop seven hot fast miles and need half of one, but in here I'm a doormouse trying to pull bricks, so a whole bottle it is. It becomes part of the pacing--round the third corner at the nurses' station, drink, head for the top of the ward, drink.

In bed at night I prop the table so I can reach out and grab the water, so when I wake up with the sweats, the pees, or the pred, I can chug some more.

My mom and Jim learn on their visits that a 'do you need more water?' is always welcome, always something to do for a minute, a way to move around, to be involved. They can't climb down through my rattlesnake and pick at the lymphoblasts themselves, so they get me water.

I get me water. I learn the best ice-to-water ratio between the water cooler in the lounge and the industrial ice machine in the "nutrition station."...which is room with a fridge and a microwave.

You get the point. There's not a lot to do here on your own behalf, so you grab at what you can. I grabbed at water. Nice metaphor.

Turns out--and if you didn't see this coming by now, you're an idiot--there is most certainly such a thing as too much water. Especially too much ONLY water.

The nurse drained my morning labs already and I assume the Drs on rounds will have them and we'll get it figured out, but the long and short of it is that I was thinning what trickly pathetic blood I had left even more. My salt numbers were never coming up because I had basically had a garden hose in my mouth for three weeks. I think the issues with the beet color sticking around longer is also tied into it, into the kidney system getting just a little tired of me running the friggin faucets. I might have even been drawing some red from the veins onto the offload system--that last theory is totally crackpot and totally me awake at 5 looking for reasons to be worried: ignore that one.

Anyway, I don't think too much of it. They saw some numbers, they came in and made me stop drinking any more than a litre a day--which is probably a fourth of what I had been taking in--and they had me measure output for twenty-four hours--which was easy because little do-gooder has been measuring output and writing on their boards since day one.

I have made sure they know that I was drinking an inordinate amount of one thing, I will make sure they know that on rounds, and I bet they just say tone it down a little and add some nutrients and other stuff, and we'll be good to go. Nobody has seemed worried; just doing their job.

But still. Water. Just kind of bums me out. Is nothing safe?

And, seriously? I'm thirsty.

The Rock Star Hour

It is 5:09am. I am up, plowing through the remains of the chicken and rice my mother and stepfather brought up last night, eating as if maybe they'll stop letting me later today.

I am partially awake because members of my running team, BPTC, are already half way through a 180 miles relay race from Woodstock NY to the city.

http://www.ragnarrelay.com/newyork/index.php

A race I was slated to run. A race I would kill to be suffering through right now, shattered, exhausted, sweaty--pretty much the same as I feel here a lot, but without the cancer. I miss the team, and the effort, and the joy of overcoming. And I wish them well.


My stomache is solid, I have taken no anti-nausea pill, my hair feels pretty much still attached into all its little holes, and my body isn't droopy and grey like a squirrel, dead on a rain-slicked road.

I have felt this before, and thought of it as Rock Star Hour--hence the photo from a transmedia concert tour of Serbia a couple of years ago when I was about as vital as I have been. Believe me, that picture is not from right now. Though I have the Slayer shirt, if not the soccer Hooligan scarf--that was a loaner.

My wonderful 71 year-old Italian neighbor figured Rock Star Hour out ages ago. By 5:30 he is usually rummaging (which is a word you do not truly appreciate until you can only hear it happening through a curtain; it is exactly the right word) through his fridge, finding some sort of pre-breakfast or extremely late dinner. He's known these precious minutes and I have not; I have lain through them, hoping maybe to fall asleep again, and usualy failing.

And, as always, the sense of well-being carries the ever-present commensurate terror. Feeling OK just isn't right in here. It's off, like you're breaking a rule, or you forgot to take something.

It is, in fact, the distance from the pills that does it. I firmly believe that the pile of prophylaxis I take in the morning has as much to do with making me feel off as the chemo or the sickness. It is part of the treatment and therefore accepted, hands down, but it is there. And the pred at 2:30 is nothing more or less than an acrid mouthful of jittery uncertainty and grainy skin-layering that pisses away whole layers of the second half of the day. So, I think, a little Ambien curtain, and the greatest distance of time from the 8am feeding of pills, and you get the Rock Star Hour.

But the terror lingers. In the wonderful JOURNEY TO IXTLAN (which is either a fake book about a real shaman or a real book about a fake shaman; I can never remember) Carlos Castaneda's spiritual guide identifies this space--I think it is off behind you and slightly to your left--where your death lingers. I think that in the book the author or shaman try to whip around around real quick every once in a while to catch a glimpse, but the whole point is that it is there, where it can keep an eye on you, but out of reach.

Or the Bowie lyric:
My death waits like a beggar blind
Who sees the world, through an unlit mind
...Let's not think about
The passing time.

For whatever lies behind the door,
There is nothing much to do.
Angel or devil, I don't care.
For in front of that door, there is
You.

And I am not looking to be maudlin--this morning I do not fear death per se, as the light rises over my sleeping wife and the vaulted windows of the old hospital wing that is our view now. Sure; I am scared to die, more aware of dying and scared to die that I have ever been for more than an instant in as long as I can remember.

But that is relegated, back in the piles of paperwork and the possibilities of marrow transplants to come, or not, and trickles of my sanctuary disease into the spinal column, or not, or getting released from NY Hospital so I can get beaned by a falling tower crane, that newest NY tourist attraction. Or not. Left foot, right foot: repeat.

So it isn't death right off my shoulder, it is just the certainty that, in a few hours, a few pills down the line--even while getting sicker enough to get better--this Rock Star feeling, this normalcy that is so far from my normal that I now sense it as an invincibility, will fade, as the light grows.

The chicken and rice is gone, and I am full for however long that will last. I weigh twenty pounds less than when I got here--5 foot 10 and 145 at last count--or at least did yesterday; there's about a pound a day loss unless I really pack it on. The pred, the pred, and Vinchristine, too.

I caught an unbidden look at my thighs yesterday: right now I think a hungry coon in an alley would step displeasedly over me to see if there were any dried flakes stuck inside a Fancy Feast tin; that's the kind of meat I have to offer these days.

The chicken and rice makes me smile, as it is a source of family comedy. One of the foods my mother can make with her eyes closed that inhabits that 'mom' space in a child's gullet--just always good and filling and makes you know you are loved.

But I was raised in a house with a basement freezer by a woman who was raised out west. We cook a lot and then pack it, and my childhood was defined by running my thumbnail across the frosty strip of masking tape as I ascended the stairs to see how old a dish was before we brought it out. And the carbon-dating was mainly for informational purposes:

"This stroganoff says 9/97." Can that be true?"
"Yeah, that's when the Seilers brought lamb so we didn't need it. They had been cooking all day. Remember? I'm sure its fine."

And it always was. I can safely say that, off all the things I have thought about that might have given me leukemia, frozen homemade food aint on the list. Eating love can't hurt you, no matter what.

N, on the other hand...not so much. Not a big 'cut-around-that-lovely-mold-bloom-and-hand-me-the-rest-of-the-cheese' type of girl. Not so much the 'I was wearing completely different fashion when this was originally heated but I'll eat it anyway' kind of lass.

Her mom has a chocolate cake that makes N happy and calm. Her dad does some soups and elegant Indian dishes that do the same. But they get eaten, and the plates are usually lifted out from under me and cleaned before I have finished sucking tasty detritus off my fingers...then wiping them on my jeans.

So out of respect for, mainly, my wife, and, secondarily the medical establishment: this chicken and rice still wore the the masking tape, but in a bolder, firmer, more confident pen stroke: "Chicken and Rice. 5/10"

Take that. Delicious. Gone. Here comes Saturday.

A day passes

Not much to report. Which is, in many ways. A triumph. I am loathe to pronounce that it was better this week than last week, because that will invoke Murphy's Law and an anvil will hit me in the head, or the gullet.

I am either still working a lot of the Devil through my system, or I am now being snuck beets when I sleep. It seems like it is taking longer to get the stain out of me this week, but so far the nausea that was the worst part without question has floated just a bit lower than it did last week. The overarching greying of the world is there, and the squeeze within myself, and a coating on the tongue and mouth that makes everything I eat or drink seem like maybe I have emptied the old sock I kept pennies in when I was a kid into my mouth.

But the three-burp crescendo of fear, and the terror at the encroaching tray; those seem a little less. I get the shakes a bit when I lie down (lay down? I never got that one). But not as as bad.

Not as bad. Kind of odd how triumphant that can seem, but I'll take it.

If they come in in time I will simply type out my lab numbers for the day, from blood pulled this morning. I am pretty near the bottom on all the ranges, which is interesting while being very very scary. But it is nice to have these pieces of paper for when I feel like maybe I can wander down the hall, maybe I can step outside. Then I just look at where there are large arrays of the letter "L" next to everything. It indicates that the number in question is Lower than it should be. And I think they have an LL category which translates, roughly, into Holy Shit Sit Down Right Now.

It is a strange dance. In rounds this morning there was discussion of the fact that sometimes on my protocol people's bodies are actually starting to refill the gutted passages with good stuff while they are still in chemo: that the final chemo in induction actually crosses purposes with your own rebuilding.

It had been bugging me: I understand the kill-you-but-don't-kill-you-to-save-you thing. I really do. I have tried to embrace it as hard as I have ever tried to embrace anything. And so I actually felt a little worried that maybe this week was not as horrific.

I had to kind of firm myself to the thought, and it occurred to me mostly at night, but I kept kind of thinking: Are they hitting me hard enough? Should they be knocking me lower? Faster? Should it be worse?

On the one hand, the past week, and last Thursday in particular, were dark places of the body and emotions I could cry with joy just contemplating never living through again. On the other hand: I've got more to give, right? I wasn't hurling, crawling through my own screams, just quivering and burbling like a badly tuned outboard?

Did they need to do that? Would that have killed the cancer better? Should I be closer to dead, to get better?

And the medical extras make it hard. As much as I hate the pred--and hand on chest I hate the pred about as much as anything I can hate--it is doing some sort of weird medical cover-job, keeping me falsely lighter or better or whatever it does--along with muscle wastage at an alarming rate and the kind of gas I used to only be able to create with a heady mixture of beef jerky and microwave popcorn over hours and hours of gestation.

And there's a slew of morning pills, that seem to get a little bigger and more acrid each day. Pills to save me from stuff I may or may not get. Prophylaxis. That word was hilarious years ago because it just meant 'condom.' Ah, to be young.

So, like my Ambien issue--and I'm just a junkie now; that took one night's pretty-good sleep and I'm a Mickey Rourke character for the cracked half-nugget--I am trapped between a lot of medicine, and a little lost.

They tell us whatever we ask, it isn't that. It is just that I'm lying in this body, feeling like maybe my hair is loosening finally, feeling like densities are shifting, feeling odd swells of hum in my ears that wander away again. And I can't get my footing, you know? Can't get that locator point.

Then again, this time last week I couldn't have typed half of this blather, so maybe I should just shut up and leave it at that for now. I'll do a medical-numbers bit later if the labs come in.

Happy Thursday.