Saturday, May 21, 2011

Victory is not boring yet, but is is tiring.




I've been working my ass off.

A lot has happened, so I'll try to skim.

We got back early, as previously mentioned. It took N a couple more days to shake the sinus infection. We'd be walking, or talking, or having dinner, and her head would snick to one side, and she'd slowly lift her hand up and press one long slim finger against the underside of her ear: Eustachean tubes still rumbling, gurgling, and popping, days after we got back. It marked a return to an aspect of our life from before I was diagnosed: we'd get exposed to the same bug, and I'd shake it off in twenty minutes and she'd get stuck with some horrid plague for a week.

While I am sure we'd all agree I'm doing my share to catch up in the medical unpleasantness sweepstakes, I still feel really bad. Maybe even more now. She's endured so much to take care of me--had to ignore ailments and aches and sadness and terror because I needed immediate care. And now that I'm feeling better, she's bogged down in snotville for the week.

We landed in New York off the red-eye and I went into a studio and started the audio-book I was going to do from LA. Three days later that was done. For the first time I read with an iPad instead of paper copy, and it took my reading rate--which was already one of the higher page-to-hour rates around--and shot it through the roof. The producer at one point thought I might have figured out how to read faster than real-time. I'm not sure that's possible, or what it exactly means, but if there's a chance to do it, I will. Or have.

I managed another voice-over job in there somewhere as well, and the first weekend in May was ushered in with relaxation. Oh, and a 2000 yard swim. Oops.

Monday I did some more auditions and work, and in the evening I was the Chair of the AFTRA New York membership meeting, where the union members from the New York area come out twice a year and get updated on the inner workings of the union, what lies ahead, and in this meeting's case get to hear the candidates for local and national positions give speeches.

I was running for reelection as a Local Board Member, Local President, National Board Member (I'm a VP but that gets voted on at AFTRA's highest confab: Convention) and a Convention Delegate.

All unopposed. Which drives N friggin' nuts. She wants to join the union just to run against me. Just on principle. If she got the gig she'd probably shoot herself in the face.

I would love to think I run unopposed because everyone loves me. And there is a facet of it that ties into the fact that I am clearly busting my can for the good of the membership and--ego-maniacal as I may be--don't really want the positions because of power or whatever. There are blowhard a-holes in any group who only really want positions of leadership because they are empty and useless and it makes them feel good. But AFTRA has a very small contingent of those people, happily.

N had work all week as well, mostly prep for her trip to the South to teach at the brief-residency program she has been a professor at for about a decade.

Tuesday we went to the Clinic for my Biopsy, Vincristine, day One Prednisone, and bloodwork.

Wheeee!

All the goofy not-agonizing stuff taken care of, it was time for the core sampling. There was the usual chitchat, some mixture of everyone overcoming nerves and trying to distract me. But I was really not into it.

I have discovered that one of the first real hurdles to 'reintegration into the wild' is the shift in perspective in terms of medical and physical unpleasantness.

When we were in the thick of it, when any given day could bring three needle-sticks, a bout of nausea, and a Live Direct From Hell This Is Spinal Tap! (kinda feels nice to write that again), I was very much in a place of "OK, what body part do you need? Where will I be invaded next? Yes, I feel the piece of steel deep beneath my skin...is that a new tie?"

But as things seem to even out a little, and as I therefore have more and more mundane time between medical events, each one is allowed the pre-heating time to grow very unpleasant in my mind.

When you aren't getting holes jabbed in your bones and spinal column every couple of days, there is time enough to really concentrate on how shitty each procedure really is.

So, for the first time in a long time, as we were walking into the Hospital, I looked up at the looming CityState, pushing the clouds aside under a 9/11 blue sky (I can say that, we were there, so stuff it) and I really just shouted into my own head "I don't wanna be here I don't wanna be here I don't wanna be here."

I had to latch onto the simple physical tricks that the therapist gave me in our third or fourth session, and that N repeated to me many many times in the opening trimester of treatment: keep your head up, keep your chin up, feel your feet hit the ground. Just be there.

Dropping trou and hugging the pillow to my face (prison-rape joke, anyone?) was just really bad. Tense, keyed up.

The Dr went through his normal procedure and was a calming factor, and everything went well and was as I remembered it.

But the pull. The soul-stealer. Oh christ. That was brutal.

I don't know if he got a better handle on the meat, or what, but the pull itself was faster and lasted less time than before. But god damn did it hurt. Just plain old 'ow goddammit OW!'

I did that quick sucked-air-through teeth thing, and I am sure the muscles along the bottom of my back all bunched up like a mother. The Dr wasn't even finished the pull, and I wasn't finished the hiss, when he said "Oh yeah, you're still in remission!"

Let me make it very clear that, in the very near past, I would have thought that a Dr telling me I was in remission--even from a somewhat admittedly home-remedy viewpoint like 'the more it hurts, the healthier you are'--would overcome any negative feelings I was having.

And, yes, I did hear his positive ejaculation (snicker snicker) and feel good about it somewhere in my head.

But mainly, I was just trying not to writhe and trying to find the capacity to focus that my eyes had lost. I could too clearly feel the warm, meaty worm of remiss me getting hauled, unwilling and under extreme duress, from the warm bone-hole it had been born to.

Party.

OK, gotta speed up; still have a LOT to cover.

Bloodwork was fine, Vincristine plopped happily into the vein, N didn't have to run and get me food because it all went pretty fast and we were home by the middle of the day.

There followed a week of work and life and whatever normalcy looks like through the jittery high-speed camera work of Prednisone. I stayed up late doing some really important work like looking at my stocks online for forty minutes without once thinking or doing anything at all. Or going through all the mp3 music I have on my desktop computer and adding a 'rating' so that I can have a visual sense of whether or not I like the song. You know; God's work.

The weekend was a trip to N's mom for Mother's day and a call to my mother from there, as well as a check-in with my step-mother. And we did some domestic stuff that had been hanging out there in the wind not getting done. Housework, etc. Kind of nice and boring. Task-completion, leukemia-independent. Hoo. Ray.

The following week was more work, jobs, auditions, N prepping for her trip, and another clinic visit. Since N would be out of town for a while and I would be on my own, she felt better with frequent bloodwork to make sure I was staying correctly bracketed by the maintenance.

Oh, and I was gonna run across New York state.

There is that.

What seems like three lives ago, I was motivated to go to the doctor because I had extreme rib pain, and because I had performed very badly--in relation to my usual fitness level--in three races at the start of 2010. In the Coogan's 5K, the Wurtsboro Mountain 30K, and the Manhattan Half-marathon, I was approximately a minute per mile slower than the pace I had grown and trained to expect from myself.

Get it looked into...congratulations! You have leukemia! Tell him what he won, Charlie!

We got me into the hospital for Induction chemo by the third week of April, and the first race I had planned to run--but would be missing in favor of Drano to the aorta--was the Ragnar Relay.

Ragnar was a badass from Norse mythology (something like me in my own mind).
The Ragnar Relay, though the route changes a bit each year, is an approximately 190 mile race across the right half of New York state.

In 2009 I did it with a 12-person team, composed mainly of my running teammates, and we finished the 188-mile course in just shy of 24 hours. Sleeping intermittently or not at all, driving support and/or handing water and food and headlamps to teammates when you are not running your own legs. It's a blast. A crazy, eventually foul-smelling blast that tests your ability to persevere, gets harder as the night wears on and each of your three running stints happens with less rest and more soreness. It becomes the kind of thing you have a vague memory of before it is even finished, but you know it was incredible and you know you are insanely proud of yourself and your teammates for finishing.

For 2010 a smaller group of people from my running team had set up to run it as an Ultra: six runners instead of twelve, with each runner doing two stints back to back, so you still have three stints, but each is about twice as long.
Plans were made and headlamps re-stocked with batteries (each runner does at least one stint through the night, wearing a safety vest and seeing only the bobbling cone of LED light spearing out from their headlamp as they traverse back roads and reveler-filled college towns along the Hudson). I was all set to run it with the team.

And I had the gall to go and get cancer. Annoying.

So one of my earliest memories of having been torn from the life N and I didn't even know we were taking for granted every second was sitting in the hospital bed, still very new to the crawling horror that is the sensation of Induction chemo, feeling veins rebel and the body begin to erode, twitching on the pred and watching my leg muscles atrophy by the day, and watching N pierce the faces and actions of everyone who came in the room. Getting a text from a teammate about how hard a stint was, or some hilarious tidbit about one runner getting a little lost and then screaming at his support car for the next mile, running faster during his diatribe than he ever had before.

I'm staring at the distant lumps that are my feet, under the blank white hospital sheets. I want to throw up, I am stuck in the thick of fearing for my life like a marker stick in the marsh-mud at low tide.

I remember crying a little as I read a text that they had finished. I remember N leaning my head to hers. Telling me it'd be alright. We'd make it. I'd run it again.

The 2011 race was last week...

...you're goddamn right I did.

I haven't clocked the exact mileage--this year taking a more 'just keep going' approach as opposed to my mileage OCD of regular runs. But somewhere around thirty.

I asked for some of the hilly stints. I knew I would be slow, but I didn't want it to be easy (not like any set of legs is easy, but I didn't want to return to the race and have special dispensation).

My team knew the whole story. They were very supportive, and were prepared to take over for me if it proved too much, and they asked all the right questions about medication and preparedness and how I felt and everything. It helped N that I could tell her with all honesty that the team was super-aware of my condition and wanted me to run as just another teammate, but were prepared to baby me and care for me and support me as a guy just struggling out of the most hellish and debilitating year of his life.

And N was fucking amazing. I could see in her eyes every single time the Relay came up--every time she thought that not only would I be attempting this crazy piece of shit, but that she would be hundreds of miles away, working--she was devoured by worry. By anger that my go-for-broke physical life was returning too fast, that I was jumping back into it without any sense of safety, of understanding my limitations, that I was being a damn fool.

And she's right to think that. Has every right. Hell, two weeks earlier I ran more than eleven miles in LA smog because I felt like it, and got myself sick and scared her and jeopardized our whole vacation.

But she knows what matters to me. She knew that not making it to the start line of this, the first race I missed last year, would really damage me. I had already pulled out of the Wurtsboro Mountain 30K because I knew I wasn't up for it, and she saw how that hurt me.

But she also saw that I pulled out of that race. That, momentary lapses of intelligence aside, I was trying. Trying to incorporate the new truths into the old life. Trying to make it all make sense. Trying to be alive, to feel alive, but also to stay alive.

And the day before the race, we got the word: Marrow Clear. Still in full remission. Still on track. Good to go.

So she let me go. Worried, admonishing, with many an instruction. But she let me go.

And go I did.

The first leg was the hardest of my three. The most hills and the longest. I knew that. Kind of welcomed it. One teammate left the start line, running strong across Yasgur's farm at the Bethel Woods Arts Center, and a few hours later I took the Relay token from another teammate, and off I went.

And it sucked. And it was glorious. Hills rearing out of turns to laugh in your puny, sweating, shuffling face. Hills of gravel back road, and crunchy road shoulder, and never-ending white lines stretching across more fucking hills.

By the last third of my first leg, I was slow and I was tired and my legs were burning. And I knew somewhere back in my head that it was one of the most wonderful feelings I had experienced in a long time. It was a superlative kind of torture.

And I started talking to myself. Simple barked orders to keep my head up, keep my fucking chin up, feel my feet hit the ground. Just be there.

I started thinking that the last time I had heard "I don't wanna be here" screaming in my head, the times I had heard "Just make it over, just get me away, just make it stop" screaming in my head, for the past year, had been about cancer. About poison. About throwing up and breaking my own heart and stumbling into walls on sleeping pills and about staring at the wasting corpse-in-training I was becoming. About trying to jog a mile and feeling my port bouncing, foreign, under my flesh.

I started thinking that I had been through a lot. That I had stuck it out, with help from loved ones and strangers and family and friends. That I had taken the goddamn beating. And I was still here.

I am still here. Still shuffling along, puffing, working, fighting it. Fuck cancer.

At one extraordinary hill, one of the last really mean ones in the stint, I actually just repeated 'you motherfucker' over and over until I made myself laugh. A shuffling leukemia patient, in horridly ugly yellow shorts, pale-to-translucent haven't-seen-the-sun skin slick with sweat, barely running up the face of a hill, murmuring to himself, laughing to himself, and cursing over and over.

Good times.

The two Ultra teammates in your car who are not running do support, leapfrogging you with the car so they can hand you water, or food, or just check on you, or cheer you past, or yell at you from a hilltop, or urge you from a hill-bottom.

I was about a third of the way up this near-the-end beast of a hill, and one of my teammates behind me yelled, having given me water with electrolyte salts in it, fading slowly--very slowly--away as I trudge-ran up and up:

'Fuck cancer!'

And I started crying.

Let's just get this undeniable truth out of the way right the hell now: It is extremely, EXTREMELY difficult to run while crying. I would almost say impossible. One or the other activities wins. Well, one of three: you keep running, or you keep crying. Or you drop dead. Those are your options.

It feels anaphylactic, the way the throat closes. Not just 'hard to breathe.' But a closing throat. Like: it is had to pull into the garage when there's a lot of shit in the garage. But pulling into the garage when the garage door is closed? It's like that.

So you have to get hold of yourself, push the emotions away. The emotions linger just below the throat, vying for space with the bits of banana and Clif Bar one tends to intermittently barf into one's mouth on a run like this.

The emotions kept popping up, strangling me. When I'd think about the year. The battles. N's love and care. Friends' worry. Family's work.

When the finish line of this first stint became almost too meaningful to me. When putting the hardest leg behind me, when completing my appointed stint, when not letting my team down again, when re-finding the control and the power, the ability to make my body heed me, to push it because I could trust it, at least a little, again.

I'd get overwhelmed. I'd start to blubber, and snot, and suck in air.

Then I'd start to choke to death, which very quickly stopped the crying. The body has its priorities in order, and just shuts shit off if it needs to.

So that was the last few miles of the first stint.

I sped up as the transition area got close. I always have a finishing kick, always have that actor's cheesy 'make sure you are running your ass off when they're all looking" thing. It is something I have to work on, because a good runner knows that an extremely hot finishing kick just means you didn't leave it all out on course, that you didn't dose your effort well enough.

But c'mon, I'm a prettyboy dancing bear. I wanna look good if I can. What are you gonna do: gimme cancer?

So I came tumble-sprinting into the transition, turned the last corner, and handed the Relay token--a slap bracelet--to the first runner from the other Ultra van. My team would have a few hours down time. Then start all over again, but this time in the dark.

Wheezing, chest heaving, sweat slick and caked with salt like little white dunes around my eyes, I just started bawling. And I didn't have running as a way to stop.

But I didn't want to stop. I'd earned these tears. These were newborn baby cries, a slick little life yelling at the world, saying a sad, tired, environmentally shocked Hello.

Hello.

My teammates, and some of the members of the 12-person team from our running team, were there. And they tried to give me space, while not going too far in case I collapsed or somesuch nonsense. A lot of them did that "stand near the guy but look really hard at something above your head or supposedly in the distance" thing, that "no, I am not trying with all my might to not know you are weeping three feet from me."

It was kinda cute.

I told them 'You don't have to look away. I'm...I'm--hic--fine with this. This is good. I'm OK.'

I walked slowly in a circle, arms clasped above my head, seeking out a clear breath between sobs. Laughing, crying, wheezing, walking, sweating.

God, it was great.

Our Ultra team covered the 197 miles in just shy of twenty-nine hours. Everyone finished their legs, everyone supported everyone else. We left no man or woman behind, broken in a ditch somewhere. We averaged just under 9-minute miles over that distance. I was over 10 for my first leg, and under 9 a good bit for my last leg, so I didn't drag them down too much. We made it.

I made it. I walked like Yosemtie Sam for three days. But I made it.

I'm gonna stop here, because there's too much more, and even reliving the Relay just now for this post has exhausted me.

I'm exhausted. With a big dopey grin. Good night.