The alternate title to the above photo: "Mom, I'm just posing for a picture. I'm being very, very careful."
Just got back from the Scarsdale Library, where N read from her book and answered thoughtful and intelligent questions from the crowd (after-reading questions are not always thoughtful or intelligent, as often as not starting along the lines of "I'm a writer myself. Well, my nephew Murray, who lives with me, or really in the room above the garage we re-did after David's first wife finally moved out of town and we didn't have to worry about her louse of a brother sneaking in there with his druggie friends--anyway, Murray says that my stories of growing up near a greenhouse factory, and the character I made up named Greenhousia, who can fly and soothe jittery squirrels, are really wonderful..." and going downhill from there).
The book was just announced as a finalist for the Foreword magazine Book of the Year in the 'Book of Essays' category, so the reading became a celebration of that, too. We were there through the efforts of our aunt and uncle, local denizens with generous hearts and library connections. And it went well.
Said aunt and uncle live up a huge friggin' hill from the train station--there may be roads to Scarsdale, but I wouldn't know. It is a place to which you take the train from the city. Driving is for people in ties, or who use rakes, in that part of New York.
Anyway, about this time last year, going to their house for Seder, I had a very difficult time getting up the hill. Muscle fatigue, shortness of breath, all that crap.
It was possibly Yahweh trying to keep the goyest goy in the world from his wet eggs and horseradish.
Turns out, oddly, enough, I had Leukemia. Go figure.
This evening, not only did we walk up the hill (the family are wonderful and offer to pick us up, but we live in Manhattan and so walking a tree-lined street is something of a rare pleasure) but I carried twenty copies of N's book in a backpack. While not a tome along the lines of the last Harry Potter, N's book, and certainly twenty of her books, ain't light. But up the hill we went, with nary a wheeze or cramp.
It's been a good week.
I ran about six miles Monday and five Wednesday and will do at least five more tomorrow. These miles are coming...not easily, but at the level of effort I was hoping they would. My pace has picked up a bit without me having to push or do anything stupid like force it. My endurance was not killed. It was sent into hiding. I have Bin-Laden endurance, not Saddam Hussein endurance: it seems to know just which cave in the hills to retreat to so the bunker-busters and the special-ops can't find it.
And now it is poking its tawny, sinewy head out of its hole, stretching out a bit, taking some deep breaths, and getting back to work.
Not a marathon. Not my old pace. Not yet. Not by a long shot.
But improvement. Muscle tone. Hunger based on something other than well-shit-I-didn't-eat-last-week-because-I-was-fighting-for-my-goddamn-life-again.
Fitness. Son of a bitch, it feels good to feel it returning, even slowly. Even better that it is slow, because that way it feels like it is real, sending shoots high and roots deep. Preparing to inhabit me again for the longer term.
Cancer is not a sprint, not a marathon. It's cancer, stupid. You stay as strong as you can, you steal fitness and strength whenever you can. You know how a crow barely steps back from the cars speeding past when there's good carrion on the roadside? You know how seagulls master eddies and gales and the shifting gunwales of boats to hover in place because some asshole's holding out a french fry? You know how a boxer sometimes has to just let his guard down and take a shot right in the face because that way he creates an opening for a solid hook or uppercut?
That's cancer. Stay as close to your objective as you can. Take ever, EVERY goddamn advantage. Take what you need. Risk for reward. Be strong. Be strong enough to be weak, so you can return to strength when it's time.
Which, of course, leads to tomorrow, when we go for blood work and I will almost certainly get put back on chemo.
Wheee!
But it is maintenance, and the dosages will be lower to start, and the blood work intervals will be closer together, and basically all the mistakes that sent me for my golly-gee super-happy eight day sojourn in the City State a week and a half ago will be actively and definitively avoided.
And, you know, you have to do the maintenance. It is just like the induction and the biopsies and the transfusions and all of it. Just shut up, stick your arm out or open your mouth or offer whatever orifice they need to create or access, and take your meds.
I never let go of that knowledge. Even mid-week this week, when I felt life surging, flooding back into me as I sweat and ran and did TRX and ate and laughed with N and did voice-over jobs, and saw that little line between bicep and shoulder I had lost months ago start to reappear. Not even then did it leave my mind for one second that I would be popping poison pills again.
Likely tomorrow.
No problem. Open up and say 'fuck you, cancer.'
I'm reading a book by an actor who got Leukemia. That may very well let you know what book, but for now I'm not telling you the name because I am not finished and if it sucks, screw him, I don't want to sell any bad books for him. But I don't think it'll suck.
I was pleasantly surprised to find how jealous I was within four or five pages of starting his book. Pleasantly because this time a couple months ago I was too preoccupied with terror and illness and death to get worked up over something as petty and small-minded as actor jealousy or worry that somebody else has already gone through this or that not only did some other person predisposed-to-please-people write about getting poked and bled and poisoned, but that maybe that person actually suffered more than I did at times.
The book tells of a leukemia diagnosis in the mid-eighties, and even before I read the book I knew that medicine has come a long way since then. Not so far that I still don't get the same basic "kill this guy, but at the last minute don't kill him, then give him a vitamin or an aspirin or something, then drill a hole in his ass and see if he's still sick" form of treatment as the actor I am reading. But far enough that the nausea drugs are more specific, the chemos are more specific, and--at the base of it all--the survival rates are better.
So it was nice to have a negative bullshit myopic egocentric competitive reaction to the book, because it meant that the laundry list as long as my bruised arms of terrors and questions and pain that recently occupied all my waking and good hunk of my sleeping time was, at least for now, at bay. And I could be free to just be a selfish little prick. Aah, that's nice.
This guy had a different leukemia than I do, was a different age and in different shape, blah blah blah.
N asked me tonight if it felt good to read about someone with something similar to me who survived, lived to tell about it, made it out.
No.
She had given me a book about meditative thoughts and controlled breathing and straightforward body awareness that had helped her physically center herself and get through some of the more stressful sleeplessness. She thought that, even though I am very body-aware and use a lot of those techniques unconsciously already, it might be good to see them laid out, explained in simple language, worked into a sort of plan for getting past high levels of stress.
No.
Not to malign any book or thought or process or story. I'm just not put together that way, I guess, for better or worse.
I read about someone triumphing over something similar to what I have and I think: it's not exactly what I have, and that guy's not me, so why place any weight on that success versus just busting my ass to get better? I read about a pre-sleep technique of tensing and then releasing muscles in each area of the body, starting with the feet and working up, as a way to remove a day's abuses and get your body dialed down and able to sleep, and I think: yes, I have done that, in exactly that way, and it has worked; why am I reading about it?
I love books. I love words. God I love words. I love reading. I am easily transported by certain works and genres and music--both music music and word music, the song words make when well written.
But I don't tie it back into myself. Not directly anyway. Maybe I read something and think about how it might be worth trying to do, or worth adding to my opinions about something. I then outline in my head why it might be good to try or add to my opinions And then I try to try it or add it to my opinions.
There's a remove, a lack of instant connection. And it doesn't bother me at all.
I read this guy's book and I know he's not dead and he's done well for himself and he seems to have come out the other side unscathed, or scathed to an acceptable degree considering he isn't fertilizer.
And I think: great. Good for him. What's for lunch?
And already, and I just started the book yesterday and am only on page 115 or something, I have had a million moments of connection with his experiences--doctors, nurses, bloodletting, nausea, fear, crying, fake hope, bullshit optimism, what-have-you.
And I think: great. I know what that's like. What's for lunch?
And here I am, writing this down. There's a perverse meta-fictional displacement for me, writing about reading someone else's writing about how they experienced and ultimately escaped the Kracken tentacles of a disease only slightly different from mine, and not feeling a connection to it any deeper than the connection I am feeling to the Sci-Fi book a friend sent me from LA, or the American Motorcyclist Magazine article on the Ten Best Riding Roads, or the Technology Review piece on cellulosic ethanol, or the repeat of The Good Wife (fine AFTRA programming!) N and I watched last night.
Tonight N read from a book I have read in some form or another nigh on a dozen times. Maybe more. Read portions I have heard out loud anywhere from four to ten times before. Maybe more.
And she got to a part where a young man sings like a fool to cheer up his grieving cousin. And I almost broke down. Found my hand pressed against my lower jaw. Found tingles in the corners of my eyes where tears might spring any second.
I'm not emotionally remote. Just the opposite: this whole battle has so far scraped a lot of hardness off, and emotional reactions are a lot closer to the surface than I have ever had them before. I think I wrote earlier about a commercial almost breaking me. I work in fucking commercials! I read the damn words behind them, or act in them. I create false emotions for a camera or audience all the time. I know professionally and technically exactly how fake a commercial is. And I almost cried at one.
That's battle fatigue. On Star Trek, they would divert power to the front shields, because that's where the Roumulans were firing on them.
Well, when you divert power to the front shields, a shitty commercial fired at your stern can leave you weeping into your Apple Jacks, can't it?
It isn't about emotion, it is about finding myself in the works and words of others.
And I can't do that right now.
Some of that is surely ego--the ingrained distaste for being 'like' anyone else. But mostly I think it is that I have to focus. I have to focus. I have to focus.
Peep my head above the trench wall, see where the leukemia is dug in a few yards across the blasted wasteland.
Do not waver. Do not hesitate. Do not be distracted. It is a war of attrition, it is the Maginot Line and Gettysburg and Gallipoli and unionism in a Republican America. It is a long, long slog against an organized and tireless enemy.
Eyes front, soldier. Take that one hill. Eat your rations. Don't abandon your post.
Before this week ends, I will have run 17 miles. At least. Done resistance training three times. Made my wife laugh. Earned money. Taken my pills. Not died. Not gone to the hospital.
This week: I win.
Next week is next week. Let's see what happens.
