Oh My God: mimes have a purpose.

Do you remember where you were when you 'saw' your first invisible box? I do.

I am in Second grade at the Boys Latin School, a towheaded and 'rambunctious' (a seventies euphemism for 'HUGE pain in the ass') lad already beginning to wonder why everyone in my class uses the same restroom, while the blonde and leggy Miss Yarbrough, who drives a silver Firebird, gets the other restroom almost entirely to herself.

Luckily my parents are equally astute, and by Third grade, I am at the co-educational Baltimore Friends school, where half the population gets fabulously bumpier and bumpier every year thereafter.

Anyway, at a school function we are corralled and force-seated, and a gent in snug pants and a horizontally striped shirt walks into a brutal imaginary headwind, ties a nonexistent balloon to a nonexistent string on his nonexistent belt-loop and is almost lifted away, and then walks smack into what I later decide must have been the spring-loaded back of an invisible box trap.

Bumping against the front wall, he used his hands to explore the extent of his prison. It was a good thing the walls were invisible, because otherwise they would have left marks on his fancy white gloves.

After a very thorough checking of his surroundings, including one attempt to do a pull-up and see if he could scale the wall that smashed his head against the invisible ceiling--yet did not displace his beret from it's jaunty angle--he was lucky enough to remember that he apparently carries a key to random invisible boxes in his imaginary pocket.

And all was right in the world.

Later that year a dance troupe came to the school, and I saw my first gay ballet dancer, whose hip-cut unitard and ability to lift his leg straight up the side of his body and not fall over was one of the first deeply complex and multilayered snippets I would later come to understand were the zen moments of a life in the arts.

But I digress.

Anyhoo, that was my first invisible box. And my first mime.

There followed years of tangential accumulated experience and understanding of mimes, and the generally mocked place they occupy in society:

From Die Hard 2:
Sam Jackson: "Are you trying to hit people?!"
Bruce Willis: "No...OK, maybe that mime."

From a hilarious joke to a grade-schooler:
"knock knock."
"who's there?"
"Marcel Marceaux."
"Marcel Marceaux who?"
"..."

Billy Crystal to Martin Short in This Is Spinal Tap:
"Did you do the dead bird? Do the dead bird. C'mon, c'mon; mime is money."

You get the drift. If your personal mime-ography differs greatly from this, you are either currently performing the dumb-show for money, or you're French. Either way, go fuck yourself.

I now eat my non-words, because this week I found myself not only cowering in my own invisible box, but desperately happy that I apparently had that skill inside my poisoned and ravaged frame.

I write this from the hospital. Night two draws nigh.

Oops.

This current sojourn in the city-state is caused by what, really, is the first full-blown bad call on the part of the Drs. Seeing as how I am not dead and all, I reserve the right to still think pretty highly of them and their attention to their craft.

But this week they dropped the ball. On my throat.

Maintenance chemo is designed to keep a patient just suppressed enough for the body to never forget it is under possible attack, and that is achieved with cocktails of poisons specific to the cancer you are trying to keep out.

For me, the largest drug in that mix is Mercaptopurine, or 6MP. Careful readers may remember that, months ago, I had to suspend the 6MP in my main chemo protocol because it was starting to damage my liver--along with the super-cheery addition of making my pee damn near rust colored unless I drank more than six litres of water each day.

This strong reaction was a building block in our developed theory that I metabolize chemo differently than the baseline info; that I hold onto the poisons longer than most, and create an accumulational overload many people don't.

You know, just over-achieving me.

This theory was, as far as we are concerned, unquestioningly proved when the Pegolated Asparagenase tried to kill me by collecting in my system to such an extent that my Pancreas attempted suicide and my blood turned to motor oil.

Whee!

Jump-cut to now, and the two 6MPs a day the Drs start me on. Two weeks in, my white count is 3.5 and my platelets are 75, which is the target.

N asks if that means that we dial back the dosage now that we've hit the numbers.

Nah.

OK, N says, then do we come in for bloodwork more frequently to make sure this is the good dose? I add something pithy like 'I got dark pee.'

Nah.

I get through the Vincristine and the pred, then crash as described in the previous post. I finish the huge long bad book with a couple nosebleeds and a scratch in my throat.

My next numbers are lower, so they dial me back to one-then-two.

Too late, it turns out. Shocker; N was right.

My throat gets worse and worse to the point where each swallow is like the soft tissue of my esophagus and uvula have been replaced with interlocking splinter-piles of crystal shards that crush together in joyous agony as my throat closes over everything.

We go in for bloodwork, and the numbers are lower still and I feel worse.

In fact, now I am neutropenic, fully thirty percent lower than I am supposed to be, and in the zone where activities like subway trips and VO auditions are what is medically termed a shitty idea.

My white count is at 1. Yes, it can and has been lower. But this is supposed to be maintenance. This is supposed to be something of a break. This is not supposed to suck this much.

But suck it does. Suck at a professional level. Suck like the sound you can hear if you are watching Glenn Beck and he tries to create a linear thought not driven solely by the fact the he is infinitely pudgier and uglier than the black guy running the country.

Then, THEN they hold all chemo. And put me on Augmentin, an antibiotic that apparently works best in patients who hate swallowing when administered in two 875mg pills that are each about the size of a bear turd. No gopher hair or berry seeds, but still...

That was Wednesday.

That night I go febrile--the cool doctory word for a fever--but not crazy febrile, and an intrusive call to the NP at home recommends staying put and roughing it out because coming into the ER would suck even more.

Concerning that point, she's dead-on.

Friday morning we haul ourselves back to the Citystate and are spelunking for Drs before 9am. We find the boss-Dr, who takes one look at how slowly I am walking--and likely also at the thinly veiled fury on N's worried visage--and fast-tracks us into the ER for IV antibiotics before admission to the cancer floor.

Being neutropenic and febrile gets you your own room in the ER, which is nice because we spent the whole day there, ably administered by a nurse who runs hundred-mile races in other countries in her free time.

They start me on an IV antibiotic, and fluid drips to counteract the fact that it hurts so much to swallow that I am not eating or drinking much.

We spend the predominance of the day alone in the room, neither gaining nor losing health or info. We discover that the different cable provider for the hospital has a Long Island-based syndicated station that runs Jeoprady a lot earlier. And the ER doesn't block channels until payment, so there's that.

OK, totally not worth it. But it is the Teen Tournament. So we get to see the snotty bitch advances to the semis even though she lost because she bet less.

We get a bed upstairs amongst friends and familiar faces by 8 or so. My roommate was called 'Tony Chevelle' in his youth because he had a blown '69 muscle car with a powder-blue paint job he and his pals raced down the then-less-choked boulevards of Jackson Heights, Queens--which I could have looked at all day through the thick February rain if Chevelle hadn't beat me to the good bed.

The muscle car is beat to hell, whimpering, short of breath, and calling the nurse's aides every hour or so through the night to get help pissing or shitting or getting analgesic cream wiped in his crack. When he naps he turns the lights out but leaves the TV, tuned to the particularly mindless Fox affiliate all day, on full blast. Just so you know, Judge Wapner's replacement is a shrill harpy, and Divorce Court could be the TV show likeliest to represent the bottom-most layer of human idiocy...not on Fox News.

They've given me Nupogen, the daily version of Neulasta, designed to speed the improvement in my counts. Nothing yet, but that's not surprising.

I've continued getting fluids, through an IV needle in my left forearm, along with drugs and antibiotics. I stayed non-febrile for most of the day but started popping above the line again a couple hours ago. And swallowing is still it's own wicked version of oral sword accidents.

Good times.

And all week, pounded by the imminent or active theft of my hoped-for better days, I have found myself in my invisible box. Arms tight around myself, avoiding eye contact with everyone--even N sometimes because I'll cry if I see how strong she's being forced to be. I huddle in my hypothetical port-o-potty, silent and staring at nothing, mildly more secure in the safe space of the imagined walls, ceiling, and floor.

And for that I am thankful for mimes. Which would be hilarious on a different day. Hopefully it will be soon.

I'm extra grouchy because this one could have been avoided. Or mitigated, to some extent. I understand that the medical establishment has to have generalized assumptions from where to base care, but I think I wandered close enough to the suburbs of Corpsetown USA showing them that I take the chemo a little differently, and more dangerously, than many of their patients with my Leukemia.

And because, as I said, we were supposed to get let off a little.

I know, I know. In the grand scheme the worst should be assumed, prepped for, and endured, and so any weakening of my or our defenses caused by an assumption of slightly easier days is our own fault.

But I gotta tell you, I was near the limit. The main fight drained the shit out of everyone; and we're strong.

That little reprieve bored into our consciousness, unavoidably glorious in it's promise of minutes on end not 'doing what ya gotta do' to make it to the next sludge moment or weak feeling.

That little reprieve was a slow day on a hot beach. A crisply bubbling coke and a tub of popcorn you could hide a midget in and eat for half the movie till you grabbed the top of her head.

That little reprieve was...sigh....needed.

But we don't get it. Not yet. One of the many reasons birthday requests and anniversary to-buy lists rarely include "item 1: cancer!"

We don't get it. Not yet.

And that's fine. You hear me, cancer? You still can unequivocally kiss my lily-white ass. Kiss it. Just fucking kiss it.

If you need to find it for a nice screw-you pucker, I'll be here on the cancer floor for a couple days. I'll keep it nice and humid on the rubber sheets in anticipation of your goddamn lips.

Kiss it.

If you cry on a dragon, can you put out its fire?

Up days, down days, and always learning.

I'm getting a little tired of always learning.

My list of accomplishments was, while of great value, not fully placed in context. All those activities from last week were real, and true, and made me happy.

But that was only one week. One week amidst many. The second half of that week on steroids.

I had worried about the pred hurting my voice, squeezing it like it had done during the main protocols. Rendering me incapable of earning my living, maintaining my health care plan's earning minimums. Feeling like I had any connection to the acting world from which the disease yanked me last year.

So far the pred seems to not hurt me that way in maintenance. We'll see how it progresses, but for now my voice was strained but not shredded, my bottom end harder to find and hold, but there if I really dug down for it.

Monday was the start of a full week recording an audiobook that had many pages, was with a new employer and was, how shall I say it?

Bad.

Audiobooks can be hard to do. It is a particular skill--reading over a hundred pages a day of somebody else's words, telling their story, filling their characters with life. All the while not moving your head more than a couple inches so that the microphone can have an even level of recording. Keeping characters in mind so that, when they come back eleven chapters later, they sound recognizable. Catching yourself when you mispronounce or misstate or misspeak, or hearing the engineer or director when they punch through the headphones you wear to tell you you messed something up. You have to go back to before the error and ramp right back up to where you were before, and then keep going. Keep telling the story. Anywhere from five to seven hours a day until the book is done.

It is an odd way to make a living. An odd form of acting. And when the book you are doing is horrible, it all just gets exponentially worse.

So Monday I am an hour or two into the book, trying to impress the new employer, trying to keep a good pace even though I feel a little under the weather. They know some of the general details about the Leukemia, but to use that as an excuse would disgust me with myself to no end.

Then I get a nosebleed.


Wheee!

I take a minute outside the booth to staunch the flow and it stops for the most part. So I go back in and read some more, make it to the end of the day. Go home and tell N.

Make an appointment at the clinic for Tuesday. The maintenance is still new enough that my platelets may very well be dropping, or any other number of possible badnesses.

So I go to the audiobook the next day and try to read really efficiently so that they are less angry that I have to leave early to go to the hospital.

I get stabbed three times--remind me again why I ditched the port?--and see the NP. My numbers are all lower than they were when we were in last week. N has looked at the past notes and the 6MP hit me more in weeks three and four than it did in one and two, so it could be that the poison is piling up and dragging me further.

It could be the cold I seem to have picked up. It could be the pred, or going off the pred. It could be the Methotrexate.

Jesus, it could be a lot of shit.

But, while low, the numbers are not dire. They tell me to alter the 6MP dose to one a day and two a day alternating, as opposed to two every day. Then they'll see what the numbers look like next week.

So home I go. And back to the audiobook Wednesday.

I get through it, but I am dragging. Arms limp in the chair, feet falling asleep as I read, intermittently not sure if I am reading with any skill at all, or just mumbling words in a nominally coherent order so that it will end. Wednesday's tough.

Thursday's murder. I get a good night's sleep, but when I wake up it is all I can do to get out of bed. Every time I stand up or head toward the dresser, I find myself sort of slipping back into the bed, flopping onto my back, not leaving the cocoon.

I feel very close to the border of ability, like there is a very thin membrane between me and simply not being able to do anything. I have visions of falling down the steps trying to go to the job, I have visions of passing out on the subway. I have empty flashes of sweat and fear blowing through my head.

I'm terrified. And I don't exactly know of what.

N tries to help, and does. It looks to her, from a vantage outside my own fear, that it is as much in my head as anything physical. I worked out all last week, I have a cold but am not floored, I have worked a lot but have been pretty much myself.

It has been a while, but she recognizes it--this is me, not getting out of my own way. This is me spinning my wheels.

This is the new dragon. Maintenance. Where the holes are not as deep, the battles not as pitched, but the stakes are equally high. This is swinging your sword into the mist, hoping and weeping and maybe making contact with an enemy. But maybe not.

This is two and a half years stretching into the distance, unbalanced, uncertain, unnerving.

I am paralyzed, in the living room. Can't seem to get out the door. Scared I won't make it to the job. Scared I won't make it home. Listless. Sad. Crying.

Crying.

It's been in the air for fifteen minutes, but finally N up and suggests maybe I should just take an Ativan and get past it.

You know...defeat.

She knows how I feel, but she can see me, in front of her, spinning my wheels. I can see me, feel me, sense the jittery thin-ice nerviness that I am clouded by.

I don't want the goddamn Ativan. I am on maintenance. I am progressing. I have been working, running, swimming, biking.

Smiling.

I can't stand the thougt of backsliding into needing some fucking drug. Just to 'make it better,' just to 'get through the tough spot.'

Defeat.

But I'm trapped, eye-rolling like a spooked horse, not leaving the damned apartment, sniffling and yelping and sighing, but not getting the fuck out of the house, not going the fuck to work.

I take the tiny bastard. Put it in my mouth. Cough-cry at the humiliation.

Shoot water from the water bottle. Swallow the pill.

Cry. Cry cry cry like a boy who lost his dog. Weep for the fleeting flight of whatever strength I thougt I migt have built back up, might have scratched back from the dragon.

Nope. Nice try, tough guy. Sniffle, sniffle, take your pill. Momma's little helper. Sissy.



Now, I know, stepped back from the immediacy of it all, that these reactions are overblown, overwrought, over the top.

But no less true in the moment. No less devastating in the moment.

I just have to live with that. Roll with those punches.

N did a bunch of research as I stumbled toward the bad audiobook, and it seems that there are many people with many ailments who feel very strongly that steroid withdrawal, in a word, sucks. Makes you feel extremely weak. Knocks you out of sorts. Throws you completely off. N's father the endocrinologist has explained the strained and wildly erratic manner in which steroids and the body's built-in systems hand the physiology back and forth when you are on, and then off, steroids. It is not a seamless handshake between two gentlemanly cooperators. It is more like a bully kicking in the door of a movie theatre, stealing as many junior mint boxes as he can fit in his pockets, and then leaving the popcorn machine to run all night, until the oil burns off and the screen burns down, and there's nothing to do in town on a Saturday night, ever ever again.

Steroids are brutal. And bodies give way to them. And when steroids leave, bodies react badly. People react badly.

I react badly.

So...that's good to know, I guess. Another bit of info to squirrel away until I need it again. Until I wake up scared to wake up again. Until I stand in the living room, lip trembling, scared to start my day.

Now I will know, and hopefully knowing will be enough. That little pill, which I have to admit helped get me through today, can kiss my ass.

Next time.

A list for the aged and the not-dead

This photo may not make sense to everyone.

And that's fine. Why, exactly, should everything make sense?

What, you might ask, am I doing in this photo?

Why, I'm wearing goggles and eating shortbread. Obviously. Sheesh.

It is February 13th, two thousand eleven.

I turned 39 two days ago.

I'm in remission.

I'm on maintenance.

I only have one more dose of Prednisone tomorrow and then I'm free of it for a month. And, aside from some scratchiness, it doesn't seem to have squeezed my throat.

Which is good, because I have a five-day audiobook job this week.

OK, the following list is first and foremost for me. Not as inspiration, because I already accomplished the list.

But as a turn-and-look-around:

When my dad was dying of cancer, N and Lugnut and I moved to LA and lived with a friend there. To be closer to dad. When we weren't visiting him in Santa Barbara, we lived a somewhat regular life on Sierra Bonita Avenue, just south of the Hollywood Hills.

Whenever I could, I would take Lugnut and we'd run up a dry sand-dirt path in Runyon Canyon: the eastern ridge run, for those who know it. The hard one.

The dog, of course, made me and everyone else look bad. But that's his pride.

I tried to keep a running pace the whole time.

There are three pitches that are steeper than the rest, scrabbly runnels of particulate tan soil that don't give much traction, seemingly straight up the side of the ridge, seventy feet or so each, the next a little shittier than the last.

The last one tops out at a survey spike buried in the hilltop. When you get to that spike, if you feel like you're gonna puke, you've done it right.

Then you do it: the turn-and-look-around.

Hands on hips. Eyes scrunched against the sun, running sweat, and the pain of breathing. You turn slowly around, to face south.

LA worms under the smog below you, in every direction. The frying pan of Museum Mile and Hancock Park, the little zits of skyscrapers undulating between downtown's pencil-cup of buildings to the left, along the spine of Wilshire, to the glass Legos of Century City, and off into the deeper murk of ocean-meets-pollution resting on Santa Monica like am expensive blouse on a coked-out Malibu teen.

LA's bits and pieces just lay there: the Cahuenga Pass a little behind to your left, two traffic copters telling the poor bastards they aren't moving.

LA. Wide and flat and beneath you. Beneath you. Because you've run the hell up one of her ribs and you were on top. The Hollywood sign, off your left shoulder, can kiss your ass. You're up there.

That's a turn-and-look-around.

Here's mine.

This week I:

Ran 12 miles--cumulatively.
Recorded three VO jobs.
Swam 1.13 miles--all at once.
Had a bunch of auditions.
Spun 90 minutes.
Attended four union meetings.
Did TRX training Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
Got Vincristine in the vein.
Saw an expressionist Korean Film.
Took four days of Pred.
Didn't die.
Turned 39.

This is not to gloat. This is not to mock whatever you did this week...I mean, I might, if I knew; but that's not my point.

This is just to lay it out. So I can stand over it.

Hands on hips, breath heaving. Squinting into the smog.

I miss Lugnut, but if I close my eyes, I can hear him panting, next to me.

Because we made it to the top. Kept running.

Got there. One more time.

'Where's the dragon?' or 'demoted'

I don't think I would have thought a few months ago that I would miss how hard it was, but in an odd way, I do.

But first, the torn landscape you see above you.

The really obvious slash is where they put in--and then later took out--the port. The Surgeon did not take me up on my suggestion to cut perpendicular so I'd have an an itersection adorning me. Ah, well. There is still dura-bond on the slice--the medical term for superglue that was actually supposed to stick your skin together. There are internal stitches that are supposed to melt away. Though with my hernia and when the port went in it didn't really work like that, and the NP at the city-state had to tweeze and pull to slide the not-disintegrated thread out of the holes. Very weird feeling--but not completely unpleasant. I think it resides in the same category as scab-picking.

Anyway...sorry. Got distracted. 'Distraction' actually comes from the Latin for 'scab picking.'

Did you know that if you pick a scab and put it in your mouth, but DON'T CHEW IT!, it will eventually become almost completely clear? I shit you not. Takes about as long as it does to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

OK, that was another tangent. I'm gonna blame the pred. Sorry. Back to the photo.

The two round red lumps below the slash are where the rattlesnakes went in over and over for nine months. Though the port wiggled a bit and was never absolutely locked down, it was always within a centimeter or so of the same spot, so the target area for the rattlesnakes was always pretty much the same. Hence the spots from all the poking. Not sure how much they will fade, or how long that might take.

Above that on my neck is the slowly healing scar from the removal of the lymph node in April for testing. That lymph node came back non-cancerous, but I guess they don't put them back in--it's not like a spark plug that turns out not to be fouled.

And just under my chin there's another scar.

No idea.

I thought that was where Lugnut--our dog who mercifully died before having to smell cancer on me or sense our devastation without being able to tear and kill what attacked--validated my jaw while we were playing once.

But I found that scar farther along my jaw, closer to my right molar.

This scar under the chin could also be dog-play related, but the list of possibles is just too long. Could be bike handle-bars. Gravel. Pavement. The head of a guitar. Anything, really.

Once when I was a tween I was lying on a skateboard as it sped down a hill, and the laces from my sweatshirt hood got caught under the front wheels--sucking my chin to the pavement at twenty miles an hour with an offensively efficient yank. But I guess skin bounces back when you are young, and there's no poison slowing down all your self-preservation systems.

Oh, and the talisman. I mentioned that a while back and then never returned to it. My bad.

The therapist suggested that, as maintenance started to envelope me and I kept pushing at the bounds of my health and wanting things to get better faster, maybe I should find or create some symbol that I could refer to in order to ground me. I originally planned a tattoo around the port slash--and will still get it--but my platelets stay depressed by the maintenance chemo, and so now is not the best time to go get a million needle holes plugged full of ink.

Even though I would return to Dragon Moon in Glen Burnie (one of the many Baltimore outliers with names significantly prettier than they are) where Mick would hopefully oblige me yet again with her skill with the paint-dagger. Other than the addition of some dates to my back, I have gotten all my tattooing there, and the place is clean and sterile and well-run.

But still, I see what the Drs are saying, so I'll wait...a little.

Until then I have my talisman. The silver tube has some stuff in it that is greater than I am. It's not worth getting into, and is totally personal to me and my take on things. It doesn't really matter what's in there; it could and should be different for everyone. It is just that it is something that has the power to make me take pause. Step back. Calm down.

You see, the nine months of main chemo protocol were a dragon. Legions of dragons, spitting fire and armored and cruel and powerful. Swooping above me, blocking out the sun, leathery wings reeking of brimstone and gore. I could point at their silhouettes against the sky over Long Island. I could hear their screeching shrieks. I could see the gouts of flame reflected in the East River.

In that sense, main chemo is easy (pause to observe a sentence I will probably never write again).

Main chemo is an enemy, and a time-frame, and distinct lists of shit that can and might go wrong with you. Demarcated catalogs of exactly what organs might shut down, what components in the blood might fail or turn into hydraulic fluid, what four days would probably be spent sitting or kneeling in the smallest room in the house.

There was a clarity. A battle plan. Even if you were losing, you knew where you were.

Maintenance is...is...

...is like trying to punch fog.

Everything is better, but there's nowhere to hang your hat. Its very strange.

I feel a little off--is it chemo, is it fatigue, is it a regular throat cold? My stomache is roiling a bit--did I eat the wrong thing? Is the methotrexate scouring my guts...again? Should I take a preemptive Immodium and not leave the apartment?

Two and a half years.

Too many if's and what's. Too much goddamn subjunctive tense.

I know that it is a fabulous benchmark, and overall I know that it is progress. But the first weeks and months of switching from watching for dragons to swinging at mist are surprisingly difficult.

Which the therapist knew. Hence the suggested talisman. And so far, it's working a bit.

I just place a hand on it--the gesture of quickly putting my hand to my sternum is new in the household and still freaks N out, as she thinks maybe my heart just blew a valve or something, but she's getting used to it.

No mumbo-jumbo, no quasi-religious or faux-karmic interlude. Just a very simple grounding of myself back to the couch, or the bus, or wherever I am.

Anyone who's been reading along these months will know that the second most dangerous threat to me--behind the, uh, cancer--is me. Between thinking that eating a baby's weight in steak will fix anything and spinning my wheels in my head so fast you can smell burnt rubber on my breath, I am still my greatest obstacle.

And when I get to feeling like I don't know what is an ailment and what is natural and what is main-chemo hangover and what is maintenance-chemo malaise and what is what is what is what the fuck is happening!?...

I just tap the silver bullet (heh heh, just thought of it that way for the first time) and hit the reset button on this jangling stew of a mind.

Doesn't work every time, and N and I are still trying to sort of lift me out of the doldrums of this first month. But I'm getting there.

I don't have any goddamn eyebrows yet. But I'm getting there.

And as for the demotion in the post's title: I am not interesting to the Drs any more. Hurts my ego, but it is a good thing:

Today the latest bone marrow biopsy came back completely clean...again.

My blood counts are all exactly where they want them to be.

They don't need to see me for two weeks, and then just to check blood again to make sure it is all going according to plan.

I had to get stuck twice for bloodwork and vincristine today, and I had to take Zofran in case the chemo dug into my guts, and I will be on (a mildly smaller dose of the) pred starting today and through Monday.

But you know what? That's all par for the course. And more than that--it's what happens when it is going well.

The Dr was downright dismissive, in a proud and happy-for-me way: "OK, you're fine. Now get the fuck out of here because we have sick people to see. Congrats!"

That's a wildly hyperbolic paraphrase, and if the Dr used the language I use I think I'd shit my pants. But you get the idea.

He and the NP were annoyingly mellow about the good biopsy report; "Oh yeah, that was fine. All fine. Sheesh, how 'bout this weather, huh?"

Again, I get it, and I appreciate that this is not a major event to them because this is what they have been working toward. But I'm a dancing bear; I get a little sad when the drama goes away...little drama bear sad face.

So, tapping the silver bullet, let's ground this bastard in reality and then go to bed:

Molecular remission. All on schedule. No organ failure. No arc-vomiting or bowel wars. I ran four miles Sunday and four miles Tuesday. I'm working out on TRX bands three times a week, hanging from the door of the apartment, sweating like a whore in church.

And, oh yeah, I'm not dead.

Left foot. Right foot. Repeat.

Always up for a new experience

Before:







Closer:







After:







Closer:











Speak of the devil:


That stuff where the metal tube-collar joins with the white plastic?

That's me.

Or, was me. Now it's...

...gristle.

Which, I'm sorry, still strikes me as really really cool. Still enervates some imbecilic, man-child bells and whistles in my mind. Still finds me stopping just short of saying "Coooool!" with all those extras o's and the exclamation point, like I did the first time someone took me to the Air and Space Museum and I looked up and Glamorous Glynnis and the X-15 were hanging above my head on tiny tiny wires.

The yanking of my port is a threshold crossed, albeit with misgivings.

The port was a heaven-sent gift in a horrible horrible time. It was put in by the same surgeon who re-fixed the hernia I re-injured 17 years after it was first stuffed back where it came from when I was 15.

That surgeon also took the port out.

Between the installation and the yank stretched arguably the worst months of my life. Being scared I might die, having the bubble of luck and relative ease of so many of my days pop, filling N's waking and nightmare hours with worry and worry and worry, and coming up day after day against the huge and distorted reflection of my weakness and succumbing body, over and over. Little victories, astonishing collapses, fear-surfing an irregular sine wave; every next crest always hidden.

I learned what I can take, how strong one can be with support, how precious good days can be. I learned how much lower humans can go than they think they can go. I learned that my shins look eerie and really weird with no hair. That puking Dilauded is a lot worse than puking Cytarabine (not sure exactly when that last one will come in handy, but you never know). I learned EXACTLY where my pancreas is: I can close my eyes right now and its outline glows on my midriff like the chalk shape of a murdered noir body.

And the port in my chest, the silly little iPod he slipped under my flesh, made so many things so much easier.

The Drs at the City State hated the port, and are certainly rejoicing in it's removal.

In this, as in very few other things, they are totally and completely wrong. Wrong like any thought that makes it out of the salmon-sieve of Sarah Palin's mind and through her mouth. Wrong like the Napoleonic folly of Peter Angelos' ownership of the Orioles. Wrong like not believing in evolution because deep down you don't have enough self-worth to admit we're predominantly monkey.

If you are ever in a situation even a tiny bit like mine, and you are offered a port: take it. Take it and hit anyone who tells you not to with a bedpan. Preferably full.

The Drs don't like it because someone else put it in, because it might be a source of infection, because...honestly, I don't know.

All I know is that in the weeks and weeks we spent in the hospital I was almost constantly flanked by roommates and fellow travelers through this wasteland who had PIC Lines (the main alternative to the port) that were inflamed, infected, red, annoying, and/or in need of being swapped by harried phlebotomists who ran around the hospital with efficient little shoulder bags filled with needles and tubules and gauze.

Yeah, my port got squirrely, it sometimes would not give any blood return, it sometimes was so hard to access that I got stabbed for times or more before I had a rattlesnake seated. It stopped N from putting her head on my chest for nine months (that sounds bad, I'm sure: whatever it sounds like, it's worse--we're animals, and being pet, feeling the warmth of another, makes it ll so much better).

But more often than not it was a simple needle-stick, then another. A little tape, and I was good to go, with two gaping access points into which poison and strangers' blood and antibiotics and steroids and platelets and cryo factor and saline and saline and saline were dumped, efficiently and faster than the poor bastards around me with single holes in a vein.

The port came out now because I will need it less through maintenance, and the infection risk, and the use time, and the fact that building muscle up around it would be sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes difficult, and a couple more reasons the Drs could give you if you asked.

It made sense and I am OK with it. As I said, it is a threshold, a line I have stepped across that indicates to me that the medical establishment charged with my not-dead-ness seems to think I have entered a new and easier phase.

And when the wound heals and I can rest my hands on my chest in the position I have slept in for more than twenty years (Corpse Position One: on back, arms crossed on chest, not moving almost all night) and not feel the distinct lump of unnatural invader in my skin...well, that will be very nice.

And when I get some strength back and pick up the pace in my running, I will not feel the cadenced tug of a foreign body leaping subcutaneously along with my stride. That will be very nice, too.

There's a line from "Angel of Death" by Slayer: 'Surgery, with no anesthesia; feel the knife pierce you intensely.'

OK, I had anesthesia, but it was local. I was wide awake for the whole thing.

I have inherited from my mother a chemical incompatibility with opiates and/or a high level of control issues: we have never 'gone under' very well. When they were putting the port in and the sleepy drugs started, I vomited a dashing yellow, and some kind or professional forearm hove into my fading view and was nice enough to turn my head and push a sterile cloth to my face so I would not choke or spend the rest of the operation smeared.

So when the surgeon said it could be local if I wanted, N and I both jumped at the chance.

It seemed like a slightly less good idea on the day of the procedure, when they are peeling off butt-access gowns and tightening the 'safety strap' across my legs.

The pulse monitor they put around one of your fingers beeps in time with your heart, and has different pitches for the various speeds your heart beats. I had enough self-awareness to find it amusing as I heard the beeps rise and speed up when the surgeon came in, and rise again when he started cutting, and fairly canter when the scalpel went deep enough to get close to where the lidocain hadn't been--just a little twinge, but still...wheeee!

I couldn't feel the actual slicing, but I could map the little slashes from their 'sszzzzt' sound and the pressure jumps along my chest. Things went taut, things went slack. We talked about the young people owning Egyptian streets in an effort to oust Mubarak. I did the HBO voice while they widened the hole. That went over big.

I did some breath-control stuff. I am sure it was annoying because they were using me as a table and I could feel the tray or whatever was on my stomach moving up and down in big deep roils. But it worked; I got the pitch and the pace of the beeps down, and mostly kept them there.

And as a side note, I have been used as a table a lot through all this, and I like it. I think it makes me feel more involved in my care; like I had more to contribute than just being the patient.

I said to the nurse setting me up, as she was explaining all that would happen, "I know, I get it, I'm just the steak."

They all had a good laugh.

When the cauterizer was going full bore and the room filled with the intensely particular scent of me being burned, I said something about being medium-rare.

That got a pretty good laugh as well. Beep! Beep! Beep!

The cauterizer is electric, and makes this little sparking fizzing sound which, when joined with that smell, leaves a real impression.

Apparently my port and I had gotten close. The surgeon--a good man I trust implicitly, with a great calm around him and a hearing aid bigger than a gherkin--had to pull very hard to get it out. I know, I felt it: not pain per se, but clearly a serious tug. He said that the tube normally slides right out of the vein and he had to sort of tease this one out. And he showed me the meat in the above photo, indicating that I had grown somewhat attached to my port.

Well, OK, yeah, I had.

He is not supposed to, but he gave it to us. The insurance worries you'll sue unless they can say for certain that whatever was in you got yanked, so the surgeon is supposed to give it to the pathologist, who will write up that he saw it outside my mortal form. And then he'll throw it away.

The surgeon is intelligent enough to see the idiocy in that, so showed it to the pathologist and then gave it to us, in the little plastic jar behind it in the photo--I smudged his name so Kaiser Permanente or whomever doesn't try to rough him up in an alley.

He said to cover it in peroxide for a couple hours, then drain it and do it again. He said that a bloody foam would result, and that the tissue might not come off, but it would clean the rest of it if you left it in there. One of the three of us used the word 'steep,' which seemed perfect. Like tea...only different.

We're gonna frame it. N spent an hour or so tonight writing down the dates and substances that make up the story of my port's life--taken from the copious and exact notes she kept and continues to keep in what this month became a two-volume Cancer Book. We'll write it all out on a background and place the port on the words, in a frame. Nice mass-reproduced Robert Doisneau print of French people kissing there, buddy: I'm gonna hang my personal poison pusher on our wall, 'kay?

They sent us home with a Tylenol-with-codeine scrip, but we didn't fill it.

It started to hurt when the numbing wore off in the early afternoon, and I didn't take anything for it. It hurt. Hurts a bit now.

N thinks I'm crazy, or stupid, or macho, or whatever.

She's right. But there's a reason.

I've said this before--I think about soreness from exercise. Pain means something to me.

Pain is a grounding point in a time when so much is floating and outside my control. Pain is a stake holding a line that keeps a tent taut and upright. Pain is a ghost hand holding you, saying 'Here you are. Right here. Right where it hurts.'

It isn't a lot of pain. It hurts, but I'll live. It stabs a bit if I move my left arm too fast, or throbs calmly underneath watching TV, or tightens and pulls against the sutures and the surgical super-glue when I yawn and draw the skin taut in my neck.

And that's all good. Immediate. Undeniable and undiluted.

You know when a cat feels you are ignoring it, so it swats you? Or when a dog wants your attention and shoves your hand with its muzzle?

It's like that. 'Hey; I'm here. In this room with you. Acknowledge me.'

Happy to. Because you can't really feel insubstantial when something hurts. You can't feel slow and tired and removed and withdrawn: it hurts too much for those dalliances, for those weaker sensations. They're like light bulbs against sunshine. They lose.

It's nice when they lose. It's kinda like I win.