Oh gosh. That's a loaded question. All the time loaded, but especially on Thanksgiving, and even more so from my current position. So let's get the big answers out of the way, shall we?
On this Thanksgiving day of November 25, 2010:
-I am thankful that I am not dead.
-I am thankful that I am not a turkey.
Though, come to think of it, the second one kind of fits into the first. Ah, well.
The above photo was taken earlier today. N and I discovered that we would not be going into the hospital over Thanksgiving, as we had thought, but were being pushed to the day after--nothing worth noting, just scheduling, really.
So we decided, as it was last minute and we would be heading in soon thereafter--very soon, it turns out, as the hospital called tonight and said we could get there by 8:30am tomorrow--we would just lay low and prep for the chemo stint that was rushing towards us.
We therefore followed up on a bit of 21st century chatting we had been doing. Which is to say, a series of emails we sent each other from separate rooms in the same small New York city apartment a few weeks ago. Every time we do that--and it happens a lot, as I assume it does to many people--I feel a little weird. I could raise my voice--I do it for a living--and point out something I found online to her. She could mention as she walks near me on her way to the bathroom or fridge that she saw an interesting article.
But no. We email links and observations and pleasant greetings and thinkings to each other...from thirty feet apart. Silent, engrossed in nothing but dolled-up zeroes and ones, hypnotized by the screens that stand between us and the real world. And perfectly happy, I guess, because we also take walks and talk to each other or other people; leave the apartment alone or together to interact with nonfiction, non-digital truths lurking everywhere outside the ether. So we're OK, I guess.
Anyway, I saw an article on the AOL homepage about the fact that the 6 train on the east side of Manhattan uses an old station-stop downtown as a turnaround before it begins its trip uptown. If you take the train to the end of the line--a romantic notion in just about any situation...or morbid, I guess, but there's often not much difference between the two--and simply exercise your right to not get off, the train will screech around a tight bend and head back north.
And off to the right at the tightest part of that screeching left turn sits a silent, darkened, short subway platform, with the words "City Hall" sliding slowly out of the gloom on the left, hovering in a dusty kind of visual quiet for a moment, and then creeping off to your right.
I know this because my email to her "hey, do you want to do this sometime?" was accepted and responded to "yes. that sounds great." and remembered "Hey, do you want do the secret train ride you sent me that article about a couple weeks ago?"
Why yes. Yes, I certainly do.
We walked from our place, got some lunch, went to Union Square, and took the 6 train...to Union Square. OK, actually we cheated: after the slow and lovely empty-train ride past the ghost station, which was no less wonderful for its fleeting snip in time, we became impatient NY residents again and hopped on the 5 back up to Union Square, skipping Canal, Spring, Bleeker, and Astor place as if they were nothing at all. Then we transferred to the L and went home, as it had started to rain and so walking back west held less pleasure.
Then we had dinner at a French place that was packed with other versions of calm, if displaced, Thanksgiving participants, went home to watch a DVR'd Masterpiece Mystery, and are getting ready for bed and an early rise to go into the hospital.
Which has been lurking just behind me like Death in Catsañeda's "Journey to Ixtlan." Just lingering there, out of reach, edge of vision, wavering, flickering, ever-present.
I started getting scared days, maybe weeks, ago.
After the fantastic 5K and weekend, I had a relaxing and wonderful week in Baltimore. I ran a 2.2 mile out-and-back from the front door of the house I grew up in to the back door, through the park I walked through to go to school. I did that three or four times that week. Slowly, huffing and puffing, hairless head steaming.
I went to the clinic Jim uses; met his Dr and his chemo nurses, and was cared for in substitution by his team while I was in Baltimore.
It was fascinating how everything they did accomplished the same goals but was completely different. Different rattlesnake, different saline-draw from a different bottle into a different syringe, different barca-lounger, different tone. All adept, all done with great care for procedure and patient, but with a sense and rhythm and look unrelated to that which I have grown accustomed. I had not realized until then the extent to which hauling ourselves to the city-state of a hospital, getting jabbed by the same woman (as her with-child belly grows to prove and insist upon the passage of time), sitting in one of the same little rooms, standing on the same scale, and waiting for the same Drs to tell me my fate for the next little while had become part of the fabric of the days, something I cling to without knowing.
I'm a creature of habit, likely to a fault. My mother and wife are almost incapable of eating popcorn near me because of the insanely specific way I scoop out a handful, jostle it into place with the same number of shakes in my hand, and then toss a pre-set number of popped kernels into my mouth, with the same rhythm and the same timing, until the huge bowl is empty. When it is time to wake up, I rise to get the tea started, get the pills down, and get seated over whatever breakfast I have chosen in time to watch NY1 do their 'In the Papers' bit, which happens at 43 minutes after the hour, right after the Stock Market report and Weather on the Ones. If I miss 'In the Papers' it's a good chance I'll feel cruddy most of the day, chemo or not.
Repetitive motions, repetitive actions. Left, right, repeat. There's comfort in knowing what comes next.
Especially these days.
So the Baltimore break from routine was both refreshing and unnerving. N had a very good residency in KY, which was good for her and good for me to know; I could hear from the first phone calls that things were going to be low-key and pretty smooth, and that made me feel better.
But by the end of that week I was already thinking about the chemo. Coming off the psychological obstacle course that was the last stint, I knew that I would get nerved up about returning to the mechanical bull bed long before it was time to do so.
And I was right.
It will be a relief to get there tomorrow even as I dread it typing these words out, just because at least I won't be able to feel it looming any longer.
I'm tired. N's tired. It has been a long haul, a rough slog, up and down and up and down, and sometimes down and down.
And it is not over, by any means. Even a picture-perfect roll-out of the last stints, which would have me off the first-round chemo brutality as the New Year announces itself, is still only the curtain falling on one piece and rising on the next. Two and a half years of maintenance--much less of an attack on the system, much less of a wrestling match with mortality and fear and the bottom of murky internal seas. But still: two and a half years is nigh on three times longer than we've been fighting so far.
So it isn't about being 'done.' I have taken Jim's advice as much to heart as possible, terms of not getting ahead of myself. Usually it works. But as the 'end' of the first bit of this war gets closer, it becomes harder to stop shading my eyes from the sun, squinting down the road, and trying to see what may rise out of the heat-wiggles and shimmer into frame, roaring toward me, no brakes, full throttle.
In Baltimore and since returning I have worked some, rested, ridden the bike a bit, gotten caught up with N and enjoyed quiet time in her company. And sensed the shadow of the next stint. First as a peripheral nagging, an edge-of-vision blur. Then creeping into the frame of everything I see. Then closing out the regular angles of what happens day to day. And finally dropping across my eyes like a fighter-pilot's visor or Luke Skywalker's blast shield, so that everything I can see has the taint of the stint. At that point you just want to get in and get it over with, because you can't get out from under it any more.
The upside to being so owned by the chemo schedule is that you have certain way-points you know you can't fight, and in a certain way those replace the earlier repetitions and certainties that calmed and guided me when I was just me, and not me-with-cancer.
So in we go, for the second part B, to be followed by the second part A, and then we're done...sort of.
At months 6-ish and 13-ish of the maintenance they want to hit me with an A and a B once more. But that's a ways off, so I won't think about that.
Think about what?
I don't know...get it?
So in we go, for hour after hour of Methatrexate and Bi-carb, Ara-C, and signature checks, and the ever-present Vincristine, hanging around like a new bride, hardly to be shook off (another Bard moment for the theatre nerds).
So for what am I thankful?
Everything. All of it.
Friends and family, wife and Drs, pain and sorrow and fear and entanglement in tubes and poisons and schedules. Agony, terror, the tears that stream from my eyes all day now because I don't have the lashes to stop them anymore.
Because, unlike a shitload of turkeys today, I am not dead.
I. Am not. Dead.
Happy Give-The-Natives-Smallpox Day, to you and all of yours.
