Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Shortest Distance Between Two Point is a Straight Line









Summer dies. Arcs high and hot with a flourish, then dives face-first beneath approaching Autumn like a tectonic plate subsuming underneath its brother, to melt-boil back to magma beneath the mantle and wait its turn to become earth again.

See what happens? I stay away from a blank page too long and I write thick shit like that.

I mean it, though. Time passes. The bastard.

The first photo above is from an hour or so after the Grizzly Half Marathon. It is recommended that after an endurance event--a pushing of the self that has beaten the piss out of your muscles, creating loads of frothing lactic acid that squeaks and burns between the sinews--one take an ice bath, or cold bath, or in some way apply cold to the muscles.

The Grizzly takes place very near the South Fork of the Teton River, which spills from glaciers a mile and a half in the sky, and is sixty degrees or so in August.

There's a shrinkage joke in there somewhere, but I don't have the patience. That photo is from August 6.

The next photo is from August 30, about two weeks on the far side of the chemo punch I started to describe in the last post. And about two weeks before the second hit of he combination known as Intensification. But I'll get to all that in a second.

So that's 24 days. From half marathon at altitude to rubbing bald spots onto your head with the heel of your hand. Later that day I buzzed the corpses of my hair down to a centimeter so I wouldn't look like such a...patient. But the patches were obvious, and left to their own devices would have taken a week or more to fall out, so I stood in the shower for 45 minutes the next day and shaved it down to shiny.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

OK. Sorry: let's try to get our timing straight, hmmm?

I completed Eagleman on June 12th. My GI tract and I had a long, drawn-out philosophical discussion about the perceived value of intense exercise and the purposeful ingestion and infusion of doctor-recommended poison. My GI tract made some very salient points. Some very pointed arguments. Over and over. Compelling arguments, to be sure. Ones I pretty much ignored. There's health, and there's comfort: the difference means a lot to me.

Over July 4th weekend N and I went to Vermont, where she gave a reading and talk about her book and her work, after which we spent some gorgeously smooth time with friends on the rocky and green shores of a clear, deep pond. Happy birthday, America.

I got back to work, recording six audiobooks over the next five months, along with my regular HBO work and the odd--but very very welcome--voice-over gigs that were and will be again the meat and potatoes of a career.

I settled into my maintenance schedule: 6mp every day, methotrexate once a week, and Vincristine once a month. Got, to the extent possible, used to it: used to when it would feel bad; when I would forget for a day or two that I was even in treatment; when a flight of stairs would empty my lungs and set my legs on fire and get me all panty-bunched and scared again; and when I felt strong and capable and imbued with a strength- and love-derived patience: I can wait this fucker out. I can get there.

With a white count usually in the 4's I could go out and about with less fear of infection or cooties or whatever. I saw Kix, a band from Hagerstown, Maryland who built a solid mid-Atlantic following in the Eighties--and who were the reigning hometown heroes at Hammerjacks, the working-class heart pumping National Bohemian beer through the veins of Baltimore's twitchy youth as I was growing up. Then Kix had a bona fide hair-metal hit and two consecutive albums that topped the charts. Then they settled back into reality, eventually went their separate ways and did their separate things, but kept a core fan-base who are never sure if they loved the band or loved the Maryland and the age they remember being: most likely a deeply true mix of both. Kix played BB King's Blues Club on 42nd street in Manhattan. The place was packed for an 8pm curtain, and the band was tight and the lead singer, too much older to own all the high notes and long screams of his heyday, was pro and tight and talented enough to know the sneaky back ways to those notes, moving around the places in his range and endurance that had admitted the years. They put on a great, great show. And they thanked the audience--more Orioles and Ravens caps and shirts than I have ever seen in New York and will likely see again--for making a gig they had taken with a little trepidation (will we fill a venue in New York City? After all these years?) into the swollen messy blend of reunion, tryst, and guy joy that only a rock show can be.

In late July I flew to Seattle for the AFTRA Convention. Five harried, tiring, glorious days of union activism, political maneuverings, human interaction, learning, forgetting, and organizing. If you don't believe in that kind of collective power to do good, you'll have no idea what I mean. But if you do--if you think that we can be better standing next to each other than we can wandering alone looking out only for ourselves--then maybe you'll have a sense of the sense of accomplishment that can come from the barely-regulated coming-together of a whole bunch of people from all over the country intent on trying to be good humans.

N flew out at the end of the Convention so that we could take a train from Seattle to Montana, where Mom and Jim were. Mom's from Montana and they have a place there now where they spend as much of each year as they can: and I am proud to say that they spend a few of the months nobody in their right friggin mind would spend there. None of this snow-bird, retiree comfort garbage. If you find a Montanan (which can be tough, as there are only about seventeen of them) and ask him or her out of the blue if their state is a pretty or pleasant or a good place to visit, they'll say "Nope. Winter's ten months, summer's a drought, it gets to be twenty below a lot, and more'n'likely a bear'll eat you. Best thing would be to just get back in your Daewoo Leganaza and go back to wherever you're from and stay there."

And they're right. They're just leaving out that it is the most beautiful place in the world more often than not. All the more beautiful because it's liable to kill you.

In 2005 I ran my first marathon in Montana. The Grizzly, which went from...um...a line scratched across a gravel road about thirty miles outside Choteau (which is pronounced like a drunk trying to tell Dorothy's dog to be quiet) to...well, actually...that same line 26.2 miles later. The course rolled over an average altitude of a mile. There was a hill around mile 19 called Hillus Horribulus (a cute-ish version of the Grizzly's Latin name) that, between the lack of oxygen, the golf-ball-sized gravel roads that covered 18 miles of the course, and the 11% humidity, to be blunt, sucked. I ran a 3:43, and was hooked.

Now, six years later, I had changed my entry to the Half because the chemo held me a little lower than I thought, and because N didn't need any extra worry that me pushing myself unnecessarily would have caused. I could have run the Full, but it would have been awful, tearing, a little dangerous, and stupid. N was, as if often the case, right. Whereas I could actually train with a bit of oomph and try to put in a good time for the Half. Completion is victory. The battle is with the Leukemia. Note to self.

Our two weeks in Montana were wonderful: restful when they needed to be, hard and rough and full of accomplishment when that was needed. We ate and visited family and I ran and we hiked and we ranched and we got so settled into it that I was able to forget for pretty good stretches that we hadn't been there for two years because of the Leukemia. That we hadn't traveled much of anywhere for a year and a half because of the Leukemia.

The Half Marathon started half-way along the Full Marathon course--which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense. Because Mom and Jim live closer to the start--and half-way point--than they do to town, I was given special dispensation to not drive 27 miles into town at 4 in the morning so that I could get on a rented school-bus with a bunch of people and drive 14 miles back the way I had come. My family dropped me off and then went into town for breakfast and to wait at the finish line. The course has changed over the years and an in-town finish, while making for a less interesting race for the runners, makes for a better experience for the town. And raises the possibility of people spending money in town that day. In this economy, in a small town along the Rocky Mountain Front, that trumps almost everything.

The start of the Half was on a gravel road cut into the side of a small rise. As I got out of the car, a blush-hint of sun was glowing to the east, making stark black-on-lightening-blue silhouettes of men walking over the rise to pee before the start. Hobbling ghosts, with their hands in their short shorts.

The volunteer there to start the race at the pre-appointed time so that the finish-line clocks would be in synch for both distances was, well, interesting.

Usually race volunteers are runners or ex-runners or injured-right-now runners who are ebullient and sad that they're not out there with you, but who are in touch with the mildly laughable solemnity that we carry into a race start.

This guy had an AK-47.

So there's that.

I don't wanna stir up some bullshit stereotype about Montana. There are as many elegant, intelligent, sensitive people out there as there are anywhere else (percent-wise: remember, there're, like, two dozen people in the state). And there are as many batshit crazy denizens of the misty thresholds of reality and/or intelligence.

Yes, there are compounds full of people who have had forty-two meetings in their special hats to decide what the flag of the nation they are creating within their fences should look like. Yes, there are more nuclear missile silos than anywhere else in the country. Yes, there are poets and painters of the greatest depth and connection to the land and the soul. And yes, there are humans of every walk and smile who work hard and care for one another. It's a place; that's all.

Anyway, this gonzo dipshit spends the last five minutes before the start telling the assembled dozens of shivering, expectant runners how he's gonna fire three rounds off to signify the start, and that, though the light is starting to come up more than he'd thought, he packed the magazine with tracers so we should all be able to get a good clear view of the bullets as they whiz out of the muzzle.

Did I mention that the AK-47 had steel hardware? Silver in the pre-dawn, not dark gunmetal like you'd think.

Oh, and he'd sawed off the stock. So, you know, it would be easier to, I don't know, hide behind a four-year-old, or something.

Now, the runners assembled in the Rocky Mountain air are not the same sissy-ass, tech-wearing, GPS-obsessed hoohahs I scoff at in the corrals of New York races (while being one, obviously). You have to either have friends or family, or be a little off, to drag your ass out to this spot on this morning for the sole purpose of running around. They do a fly-over the night before and then tell you how many bears are near the course before the start.

But still, the ratio of people there almost solely because they want to be running, and the people who are there because they might be deeply interested in the firepower, munition-arc, and muzzle-flash of a modified Kalashnikov was approximately everyone-versus-that-guy.

So, at the pre-arranged moment, the gorgeous zen of a high country morning was torn in three by the rip-flaring thunder of an utterly pointless weapon, and a couple dozen people wasted the first two seconds of their race time crouching down a bit and huddling together a bit like stupid, nervous sheep who have just scented a dog. I'd bet a hundred bucks at least one of us shit our pants a little.

And we were off.

I ran hard but not too hard. I pushed myself as much as I thought prudent. And up there, with a frosty start and a sun-cleaved finish, and really very little oxygen, I crossed the line in front of the school in 1:48. Almost twenty minutes slower than my best ever at sea level, but a victory and a barrier felled and a wobble-leg, lung-sucking sense that Leukemia could, once again, at least for today, kiss my ass.

We came home to new York, I recorded an audiobook about a Minotaur working as a line cook, and then it was into the hospital for cycle A of the HYPER CVAD that makes up my Intensification.

MD Andersen in Houston, the respected cancer center, had been running numbers and kicking tires and blowing up gerbils, or whatever is they do to arrive at new scientific ideas, and they decided that poor schmucks with my kind of Leukemia would be best suited by interrupting the sustained mildly-ill-ness of my two and a half years of Maintenance with a couple nice donkey-kicks to the system. So at month 6 after Maintenance starts, and then again a year later at month 18, I would go back to the 10th floor. In August it was five days in with mixed and cross-timed drips of four chemotherapies non-stop. Then three weeks or so to recover and get my numbers high enough for another anvil to the face, and in mid September I would go in for a 24-hour drip of Methotrexate (they pulled the Ara-C out of the regimen for some reason, and I wasn't about to risk them adding it back in by asking why).

So in we go to the aforementioned private room. We were able to stay there the whole time. Having yanked my port (you can still smell burnt me on it if you unscrew the cap of the little medical tupperware it's in on our shelf and take a snort), I had a PIC line installed, which was kind of cool. This nice plebotomist poked a hole just under my inside right bicep, and threaded a tube into my artery using what looked and, oddly, felt like the G string from an electric guitar (I string with super-light GHS Boomers, so maybe it would feel like a B string to someone used to blues-gauge D'Addarios). She asked N to help her, handing clean gloves and stuff from her PIC-line kit, and was quietly pleased and a little shocked that a caregiver could be so calm and adept at the procedural aspects of care: we've been at this a while, and my wife knows her shit.

She was also a little taken aback by my performance. I guess she doesn't install dipsticks in a lot of actors. There is this great moment during the procedure when the patient is asked to turn his head in a certain way so that the tube forging against the current of blood doesn't take an accidental left and slide up into your brain. They want the tube end to hang just outside the heart, so the poison can drop right into a thrashing mix of about-to-deploy blood, the better to speed throughout the body and fuck you up all over at the same time. Wheee!

So she asks me to turn my head a certain way and kind of clamp my chin toward a certain spot, and she's still talking even though I hit the pose as soon as the director asked. She trails off after a second because I am holding the pose, stock-still (and likely looking towards her out of the corners of my head-turned eyes for approval or applause of some such ridiculousness) and steady. Then she makes a sort of positive-sounding harrumph (which is, I guess, all I was gonna get) and threads the tube the rest of the way home.

Then she put something that looks like a speaker-phone had sex with a shoehorn on top of my chest, and turned on a TV, and played an interestingly unnerving game of Thoracic Pong. Whatever the hell was inside me showed up through sensors on the phone-horn, and the TV screen showed a little green dot moving in tiny fits and starts toward the exact center of three shapes as she sightly pulled and pushed the wire through the hole in my arm with her left hand.

Satisfied that my Drano drip was positioned well, off she went, and we spent the next five days observing all sorts of fun crap being dribbled into me.

The last of which was the Red Devil.

Goddammit.

That's the closest I got to losing my control over the psychological aspects of the ordeal: the image of the PIC line mouth dangling over a valve in my heart; flash-memories of that moment I saw my Bergen-Belsen frame in the night mirror all those months ago and scared myself into A-fib; the candy-apple red of the chemo in the tube. It scared me down near the middle, down where the bass drum at a metal concert gets you, down where you hurt when you see people you love crying.

But they did their jobs and we did ours and it was up and out after the appointed time (plus a day or so for all the added hooey of a hospital visit). N and I celebrated our 7th anniversary somewhere during the third or fourth chemo. We don't really give a crap about dates like that, but still. Time passes. The bastard.

I lost about eight pounds at the bottom of the recovery, but, in all honesty, it wasn't so bad. I think that's an almost dead heat between the medical aspects all going correctly this time and just the change I've been through; what I now accept as not so bad that might have whipped me into foamy terror a year ago.

Then Hurricane Irene hit New York city. Most. Boring. Hurricane. Ever.

I don't mean to minimize the death and destruction elsewhere, and I think Mayor Bloomberg did exactly the right thing over-preparing New York so that we were good and ready. But, seriously? It rained for a couple days. And it was windy Saturday afternoon. Yawn.

Later that week all my hair fell out. First it hurt. Then it turned stiff. Then it fell out. My vanity took a hit, and the tan I got in Montana now looked really odd--a little like that half-hawk guy from the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers TV show from when I was a kid. But you know what? It's just hair. Hell, it's like a badge that I'm still fighting. And I'm saving cash on shampoo again, which is always a plus.

I got above 160 pounds, my numbers came back up, and in we went for the 24-hour drip. The PIC-line had been yanked as soon as I didn't need transfusions after cycle A, which was a few days; they did everything very well and I was in better shape going in, so I didn't need much topping off. Maybe two bags of platelets and four bags of blood over a week or so was all. So I just had a bunch of IV's for cycle B. Three going at one point, because Methotrexate at that high a dosage needs Leucovorin running through you all the time as a rescue agent. It grabs the Methorexate as soon as it has passed into your exit system. Because, apparently, if you leave Methotrexate alone and unattended in your exit system, your bladder turns into blood. To quote Bill Murray from Stripes; "I wanna party with that guy!"

And I needed another IV for something else. I swear to god I forget what. Maybe just blood work. No, I remember, I think they wanted me on regular fluids the whole time too, to make sure I was as hydrated as possible so that the chemo didn't have much chance to linger. Makes sense to me: where do you wanna pop that needle?

This was all right around the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The freedom tower should have been up years ago, the rest of the country is finally starting to have a mild distrust of New York like they did before the planes hit (which relieves the hell out of all of us here, 'cause it was a little freaky being 'everyone's citizens' there for a while), and we'll never be the same but we'll keep on keeping on.

On October 15th I ran the Baltimore Half Marathon. Another race I downgraded to a Half from a Full. I made a deal with the Dr and N that if my hemoglobin wasn't higher than 11 by a certain date I wouldn't shoot for the Full. And my Hemoglobin hit right on 11 on that day. Discretion:Valor:Whatever. Part of me will always think of it is a defeat and a weakness, but another part of me is getting a little tired of that first part of me being such an a-hole. And anyway, I'll use whatever rage or sadness is in there to train when I'm further off the treatment, because I want to break three hours in Baltimore. It's where I'm from, it's a really hard course (breaking your personal record on some easy flat course is for nimrods and poseurs), and breaking three in Baltimore is where I was heading when I got diagnosed.

So instead I ran the Half, and I ran it slowly, and I stopped and talked to Mom and Jim where they were cheering for me, and I enjoyed the humans, and I ran back ten yards on 33rd street to grab a handful of gummy bears, and my NP ran the full and finished 3rd in her age group her first time on the course, kicking my ass, and I just enjoyed the day and the weekend and everything. It took me over two hours to finish, and that's totally fine. Not everything has to be a battle. Sometimes you gotta just stop and smell the gummy bears.

And then I got on a plane and flew to San Francisco because N's book won the American Book Award and the ceremony was the day after the race. I was a little leg sore but over the moon to be on her arm, and a tidy, sun-filled room at UC Berkeley floated and popped with the talent inside and the pride I was beaming out like a 1500-watt Microwave pounding a ball of tin foil.

We've been home for three weeks. Regular days for the most part. I'm training for two races, and I want your money.

Next weekend I'm going to run my second Multiple Myeloma Race for Research with an in support of my stepfather. Last year I ran it bald, too. I was very fresh from the grinder, steroid-bloated, atrophied, scared, and adrift in the middle of the current. But even through all that it was clear that there's always--every second--a world outside the "I" that carries as much sorrow and danger as it does joy and glory. There are lots of people who need good things to happen for them. And even from the center of my ordeal it wasn't hard to know that running to support and raise money for a cause of general human value and direct personal value to someone about whom I care very much was a good thing to do. It seemed like not doing it would be like not helping someone who needed a hand just because you had a sore back. There's no relation between the two ails. Just help when you can.

So I'm running it again, and this year I'm gonna try and burn the pavement...or whatever that means in my current state. It's a 5K, and there's just one 'hill' (which is what they call the elevation change over an on-ramp in suburban DC, I guess) you hit right at the start and right a the end. I'm gonna wear my ROCK acronym again on the back of my shirt. Running On Chemo; Keep up. But this year I hope it makes more people feel bad as I pass them. What can I say? I'm that kind of guy.


And I want you to pay me to do it



C'mon. You got ten bucks? You got a grand lying around? Gimme it.

No, seriously. Gimme.