Not even God takes this long to get back

Interior: A cross between a telemarketing call center and a military war room, complete with futuristic screens showing maps and data and shit. Camera pulls back to reveal an irritated Scouser working the phones.

Scouser [to caller] : Yes, Mrs. Tingle. I understand, Mrs. Tingle. Mrs. Tingle I’ve told you, I’ve already given Him your complaint. [Exasperated] Mrs. Tingle of course He knows about it — He’s God! He knows everything! He even knew you were going to call today! Look, it’s right here in my agenda for this morning: ‘Placate Mrs. Tingle, 10.15 a.m. Remind her that prayer is sufficient and that the phones are for dire cases only.’ No, Mrs. Tingle, I’m not saying your case isn’t serious, this is Himself talking here. Mrs. Tingle, you’re bordering on blasphemy! Look Mrs. Tingle there’s a jingle on the other ringle and I can’t afford a bingle, I’ll have to let you go. Goodbye now Mrs. Tingle.

Scouser [typing angrily on an Amiga 4000 keyboard] : Mrs. Tingle, 108 Briarcliff Road, Durham NC 27707 USA. Accelerate rash. Send.

Scouser is approached by a Peter Gibbons type.

Scouser: Ah, Mr. Bright Eyes and Bushy Tails, learning the ropes are we then?

Gibbons: Oh yeah, this place is incredible! I can’t believe you can look up your own files! I also can’t believe –

Scouser: What a wanker you were, and how many times?

Gibbons: Well yeah, that. But just reading through some of the other records — so many lives, so many amazing stories.

Scouser [bored]: Mmmmmm.

Gibbons: In fact this one guy really caught my eye. Can I ask you about him, or are you busy, or –

Scouser: I’m just sittin’ here watchin’ the wheels go round. Let me guess, Elvis Presley? Jimi Hendrix? Wot?

Gibbons: Um, actually it’s just some guy, David Simmons?

Scouser: Oh dear, we’re not really meant to look at the files if they’re still alive.

Gibbons: Yeah, but, let’s pretend we’re having this conversation a week from now.

Scouser: Ah, no bother then. What you need to know?

Gibbons: I’m just looking at everything We threw at this guy after 9/11. I mean, the thing with his mother-in-law, then the thing with his father-in-law, then making him live in North Carolina…

Scouser: Now that was harsh.

Gibbons: And then We send him cancer – in his ass! And then We get that freak of a surgeon to butcher him, then the permanent colostomy bag, then We let him think he’s in the clear for a while and then We spread lesions all over everywhere,

Scouser [bored]: Mmmmmm.

Gibbons: I mean, what did he do to piss off the big guy so much?

Scouser: Did you even read the file? Look, first he gets born a child of privilege — his father has more money than Jesus. We give him brains the size you wouldn’t believe. Naturally he turns out to be a massive nerd, and you’d expect as far as sex he’d be a hundred percent handy-shandy. But We set him up with a honey of a bird. I mean I had my share down there but this one tops anyone I’d ever pulled.

Gibbons: Wow, hotter than Yoko?

Scouser: Listen you cheeky git do you want to hear this story or do you just want me to keep talking in cockney rhyming slang and made-up British tree stalk?

Gibbons: Talk.

Scouser: Right then, you see this chap has basically won the pools, he’s got all the advantages, and what does he do? Fuck all! After waiting through the feller’s twenties and early thirties with nothing to show for His investment, He decided to light a fire under his ass.

Gibbons: The cancer.

Scouser [as if to an infant] : Ay, the penny’s dropped, has it?

Gibbons: Okay but then he beats it, and then it comes back — why?

Scouser: Well, it’s obvious innit! He wanted more material for the blog!

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St. Sadist Medical Center, how may I direct your call?

So I’m at the metastatic cancer support group meeting, chillin’ with three guys twenty years my senior my boys, bitchin’ about side effects, sad news, and the socialized medicine up in Canada. Well one guy griped about universal health insurance, at least until I adjusted his pillow for him just right. He didn’t say much else after that. Yeah I’m gangsta, I can kick an 80-year-old’s ass! Just, hold still while I get out the pepper spray.

Anyhow, the two senior citizens left my crew kicked around reviews of different doctors and hospitals, the consensus being that Kansas City was not known for superior health care* and that it was best to go to an elite hospital out of town. I pissed all over my entourage and told them about all the bullets I dodged at that Hospital of Eminent Influence in New York — HEINY. Then I looked for a towel to clean off the urine.

But I’d still rather go to HEINY than to St. Joseph Medical Center here in K.C. MO. Actually, I’d rather go anywhere than St. Jo. KCMO — a Dane Cook concert, a Ron Paul rally, Hell; anywhere’s better than the hospital where advances in medicine go to die, taking half the patients with them. If an ambulance driver tells me he’s headed there I’ll find the strength to bust open the back doors and roll my stretcher away to safety like Adam West did on that one episode of Batman. Technically two episodes, I guess, but, well, you know what I mean.

Why the hard feelings? Well there was that surgeon who bungled my first operation. Maybe ‘bungle’ is too good a word — all he did was leave a bunch of surgical staples kicking around my rectum, right where you’d want them to be. Then he lied about it. And he neglected to periodically dilate my anus in the months after surgery — as the British say, he couldn’t be arsed. He mangled the site badly enough that I now have a colostomy for life; I was told it’d be temporary. Maybe he figured I would be temporary and it wouldn’t matter.

Did I mention the pain medication Dr. Conner prescribed upon my release? Darvocet. Darvocet! As one nurse said, that’s only a step above baby aspirin. This nurse was a good one who also worked at St. Jo., but she got farmed out in a cost-cutting move. Her replacement at the radiologist’s office there couldn’t read a calendar and couldn’t pronounce the word “coccygectomy.” If you can’t pronounce it either, don’t feel bad — it’s an odd bird, this business of shaving off your tailbone. In fact, according to these guys,

This surgery is rarely performed, and the procedure is not even included in most spine surgery textbooks.

So you can see why the St. Jo radiologist was recommending it for a bout of anal bleeding. What could go wrong! I passed gas and found another doc in town to look into that bloody butt business. He ran a colonoscopy on me, or tried to at any rate. Come to find out that surgeon #1 had left a stricture in my rectum so tight that surgeon #2 couldn’t even stick the tip in get the scope past it. That sent me to surgeon #3 over at HEINY, eventually leading me back to surgeon #4 right here in River City. That feller saved my life — and come to think of it, he has an office over St. Jo. himself.

Focusing on the bright side — you know me Al.

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* Gang violence, meth addicts and a public school system that graduates teenagers who couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted them the ‘c’ and the ‘t’, sure, we’re famous for those. And ribs, we make great ribs here. But reliable health care, now that you’ve got to make an effort to find.**
** I stole that ‘cat’ joke from Reggie Jackson. If he wants to make something of it he knows where to find me, but I think he’s learned his lesson.
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Quick Post

Ralcorp Holdings, Inc.
P.O. Box 618
St. Louis, MO 63188

Consumer Services, Post Foods:

I need your help.

It all started on that day when my mom took three-year-old me and my baby sister out to McDonald’s for lunch as a treat — and as a trick. You see when we came back we found the house was a father lighter. My mother was used to coming home and seeing my father lit, so I don’t think she was surprised. She was probably in on it, to tell you the truth.

What’s that? Oh you wanted to hear the cancer story from the beginning. Sorry, I’ll get Ed. to ed.it that part out. I’ll try again.

It all started on the night my wife and I pulled into a small town in Texas, fleeing our future on a one-week cross-country drive that ended up the opener of a mistake that lasted two years. Hours after eating a rancid burger from the Shamrock Motel’s diner, I shat out some blood, and not a little either. This was like having a ketchup bottle up my ass and squeezing it with my cheeks — SPLAT! That was the last night for those pajamas, and the last night for me being anything but ill.

Hang on — is this the heart-rending memoir we’re doing or the letter to the cereal company? Oh am I embarrassed! We’ll get the editing team of Ed. and Ed. to gut those paragraphs altogether. Now, onto the flakes.

It all started when our apartment building put out word that they would have to turn the water off for a few hours last Wednesday.* Perfectly routine maintenance on the pipes, they said. But then they found the tumor at the sigmoid junction. And the apartment’s plumbing problem was worse than they thought too. To make a long story short (bit late for that now — Ed.) a few hours turned into a day and a half with no tooth brushing and no tank flushing. Oh yeah. Use your imagination, if you dare.

Fortunately, I wear a colostomy bag (that’d be the cancer we touched on earlier) so I was able to throw out my waste in the trash. My better half, not as fortunate, so around noon on URBAN DRYOUT: DAY TWO we checked in to a local hotel. Oh, that was a glorious shower. Then again for $145 it oughta be, right? But I can’t carp about the hotel bill because it was an Embassy Suites and you know what that means:

Free breakfast! (Dear God, does that mean that the cereal is somewhere on the horizon? I’d given up all hope — Ed.)

Jesus Ed. Lighten up! If this thing is too long it’s your own fault for leaving that early stuff in. What, you woke up late or something? Well then you must’ve missed your breakfast! Ha, ha! Sorry Post, where were we? Oh right, the hotel breakfast, where I enjoyed some raisin bran. I thought mmm, mmm, this is the best raisin bran I’ve had since — well I’d never had raisin bran before! Learn something new every day, yeah? (Like how not to write, for instance — Ed.)

Ed. for God’s sake you’re ruining this for everybody! I don’t know where you went to editing school but it seems to me that whenever I hand something in to the desk, it actually comes back longer than before. You bitch about the pieces being too bloated but there’s never a sign that you’ve taken anything out. The chemo plays tricks with my memory, so for all I know you could be adding material to my drafts and making the problem worse!

(Post, did he get to the part about how he and his wife eventually got back to an apartment with running water? No? I’ll take it from here. It was only last Friday that the drought drama wound down. The following day, our hero and Mrs. Hero went to Target to purchase a mattress pad, so comfortable and persuasive was the hotel bedding. They were also seeking, wait for it, raisin bran. Alas, there’d been a little trouble in paradise earlier in the day, causing mutual peevishness {I wasn’t peeved! — Auth.} that even extended to the selection of, yes, raisin bran. You’ll see — Ed.)

Anyhow, I walk halfway down the cereal aisle and I grab the two scoops of raisins in Kellogg’s raisin bran — boo, hiss, the enemy! I walk back to the cart where my wife is holding up a box of Post Raisin Bran**, as if to say, “It’s right here, dingbat.” So I peevishly (told you so — Ed.) throw the vile satanic rival brand down on the floor, right on its acid-head sunshiny face. I bought the box my better half proffered, and it’s good, but what I really enjoyed was that triumphant throwdown of the bad guy. I just, it just felt like I was finally a man, finally after all these years of questioning my (Aaaaaaaand we’re done – Ed.).

Sincerely,
David Simons

P.S. Please send me free cereal.
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* Jeez, that was almost a week ago now — time flies when you don’t have any.
** Only now does the cereal deserve capital letters. Only now.

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Warning Labels

As you can imagine, the doctors fob this job off on the nurses warn you of a thousand different side effects you may or may not experience from the particular chemo agent you’ll be taking. They run through so many potential ailments, stressing that they’re rare and probably won’t happen to you anyway, that you leave the consult room thinking, “Uh, okay, I might get diarrhea, or I might not, that’s the takeaway here.” There’s an hour wasted.

I wish someone had given me some more practical advice about life when I could have used it the kinky quirks and quirky kinks you get from taking these toxic chemicals. But maybe my loss can be your gain. I’ll share with you some of the side effects that I’ve noticed in the months that my veins have been sipping down Fluorouracil, Irinotecan, Oxaliplatin, and Xeloda. As always, this advice is worth exactly what you paid for it; your copay here is only $2,000.

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Your skin may exude oils invisible to the naked eye, but tangible enough to ensure that the first time you pick up anything with a surface smoother than sandpaper, you will drop it.

Your neurons may fire more slowly, causing your hands to keep strumming the G chord long after your brain has sent a message that the sheet music is calling for a D.

Your attention span may

Your hearing may be impaired just enough to ensure that you have to get out of your chair and go into the next room to make sure you got that right.

Your mind may forget whatever was said in that room in one to two minutes.

Your ability to concentrate may be

Your short-term memory may become so short that you find it difficult to keep track of the cheap jokes you make while blogging; you may repeat yourself.

Your sense of direction may be sufficiently impaired to require the use of your GPS to make it home from the infusion suite.

Your mouth may become just a bit sensitive to cold liquids; drinking them during your treatment cycle may feel like having dental work performed without Novocaine. You may wish to keep the iced latte on hold for now, unless you actually enjoy doing a spit take at the local Starbucks.

Your short-term memory may become so short that you find it difficult to keep track of the cheap jokes you make while blogging; you may repeat yourself.

Your feet may elongate sufficiently to make the act of changing trousers and boxers more of an adventure to you, and more of a potential source of humor to passersby wondering whether you’re bringing back the pogo.

You may experience confusion as you wonder how you can still be wearing the same size shoes if your feet are too big to fit through your regular pant leg. Your memory loss will take care of this problem for you.

Your cognitive functions will be too impaired for you to think of an ending for this one.

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That’s not Faith, that’s Desperation

In America, you cite Dostoevsky. In Russia, Dostoevsky cites you:

I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine. (I’m sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.)

Once again, Fyodor speaks for me. Usually he’s just saying “Here we have another pretentious liberal arts major who can’t find a job,” but in this passage he’s hitting a different nail on the head.* You see, I’m an analytical guy. Give me a spreadsheet and a couple hundred different convertible bonds to compare and I’m as happy a pig in a candy store. Baseball? I don’t care who wins or loses, so long as they generate enough statistical minutia for online showdowns. “How can you pick Perez and his career WHIP of 1.425 over Lowe and his ERA+ of 122?” Don’t get me started on Brian Bannister and the BABIPs.

But growing up Catholic, I can’t help but see purpose in every coincidence, imagining a cause for every effect in a manner that would do a paranoid schizophrenic proud. I missed the traffic light? Must be those impure thoughts from yesterday. Einstein Brothers is out of powerbagels? It’s because I said something blasphemous on Facebook. I have cancer? We know whose fault that is.

I admit it, won’t keep it a Secret. The idea that we’re responsible for everything about our lives, from our health and our love life all the way down to that guy taking our parking spot yesterday at the mall, appeals to my sense of justice and order. Even now I think that book has a lot to say about keeping the right frame of mind and maintaining a positive outlook. Or as they would have it, a positive “vibration.” Never knew that behind this billion-selling worldwide phenomenon lay Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, did you?

The reason I say “Even now” is because I broke with Oprah and Rhonda after following this line of thinking to the terminus. That station has a sign reading “You two million kids with AIDS over in Sub-Saharan Africa? Yeah, that’s on you.” Hey, no wonder it appeals to my Catholic side! Condoms don’t stop the spread of HIV — only an upbeat attitude can! The Nigerians and Kenyan babies should be thinking “Daddy will live,” but they keep expressing it as a negative: “I hope Daddy doesn’t die.” What do they expect from the Universe?

Here’s what I expect: That every seemingly mystical effect can eventually be seen to have a logical explanation. That if my tumors are way too numerous and huge for a 160-pound 38-year-old, it’s because of something in my DNA and my environment, not because of the raging self-hatred I carried in my heart for so long. That if a miracle cure is in the cards for me, it won’t be due to vibrations, but to the kooky organic foods I’ve been eating on the advice of David Servan-Schreiber. That guy was 31 when he started eating the seaweed and flaxseed oil, telling his brain tumor to eat a dick. He’s outlived his prognosis by more than a decade now.

And he’s an M.D. — science and reason ftw!

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* In the same paragraph he famously notes “I am a sick man… I am an angry man. An unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” Yep, he’s got me pegged all right.

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Anyone get the license plate on that thing?

Previously, on LOST GITGAW, we witnessed the thrilling adventures of the chemotherapy infusion suite, if by thrilling we mean anticlimactic and mundane. To recap, I tried to buy a snack and later enjoyed a sandwich. Yeah. That’s the kind of real-life drama you just don’t get on every other blog on the planet. Mmm mmm. And it was brought to you in gripping, real-time, “live blogging” style, if you ignore the fact that it wasn’t written live or in real time. Whether it gripped anything, I dare not say.

The good news was that some drama finally happened after I left the cancer center. The bad news was that the good news was bad and briefly made me wish for death. These good-news dramatics left me so weak that I never had a chance to document the bad news on the Internets.* The worse news is, now that I’m back on my feet, lying down with the laptop, ready to make the world sit up and take notice of last Tuesday’s shockers — I can’t remember anything that happened. Why do you, why do you think they call it chemo fog?

Let me see if I can piece together what happened using e-mails, phone records, and carbon-dating the carpet stains. I came home from the cancer center around 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, relieved that it was over and pleased with myself for tolerating the Oxaliplatin so easily. At about, oh, 1:31 p.m., as I explained in an e-mail to a friend,

Ohhhhhh it was vile. By the end it felt like my stomach was trying to digest a gallon of battery acid, maybe propane. Everywhere was hot and bothered, not in a good way. Appetite? Gone. Anticipatory nausea? Back for another stay. And I got a refresher course on how Oxy makes your mouth feel “sensitive,” meaning that if you take a swig of iced tea it feels like you’re trying to swallow some Lego pieces that have been in the freezer. A freezer in the basement of the Lawrence Livermore Labs maybe.

It seemed my pride at wrestling with the Platinum Ox had goneth before a fall. I crowed, inwardly, and then ate crow. To milk this e-mail just a bit further,

I had six months of that beast in 2006 and it was murder at the time — I would be flattened for two days solid after each treatment. Yesterday I was thinking “Well gee, I know what to expect this time — should be no problem!” Which is kind of like saying “I’ve been shot in the abdomen with a .38 before, I’m ready for the next time it happens, what’s the fuss?”

What could help our hero out of this predicament? Why, Oxaliplatin’s wingman Xeloda of course! After a dinner of who-can-remember with a side of all these moments will be lost in time, I took the prescribed 450 mg of m-m-m-my Xeloda. Then I lay down in bed and talked to my wife for 27 seconds before gently lapsing into a four-hour restorative nap. Thank you, Xeloda — you knocked my ass out, just when I needed it most.

Then again, three days later, the Xeloda had me vomiting up burgers and bagels, kicking my ass over into the land of the liquid diet. My better half rushed out and bought me some juice, some Boost, and something by Peter Coop. Sippin’ that gelatin and juice over the weekend, lying in bed, not a lot to say, felt almost like being back in the hospital, only with better Internet access.

And a cuter nurse.

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*How long does it take for a meme to turn into a cliche? Four and a half years maybe? Rut roh.
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In like a lion, out like a punk-ass bitch

Faithful readers of GITGAW may have noticed the slowdown in activity around these parts. Hey I just follow the economy as far as that goes. It was while I was processing refund requests from subscribers irate over the low post total for March that I began wondering why I’d been so reticent the last few weeks. After all, the unexamined life is not worth living, so the more I gaze at my navel the more fulfilling mine must be. My life I mean, not my navel — that’s actually undergoing an existential crisis of its own, poring over the pages of Sartre’s seminal text Belly and Buttonness.

A thousand pardons. Anyway, I went through a bunch of excuses theories for my diminished output of late. Was I just uninspired? Evidently, but why? Was nothing interesting going on? As interesting as anything else that happens to a guy whose big night out is a trip to the all-night Walgreen’s. Were things just going so well I had nothing to complain about? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, stop, you’re killing me! That’s somebody else’s job and they still aren’t getting it right.

Only this evening did I figure out the real reason I haven’t written a day’s worth of new posts over the last fortnight. Brace yourself for one of my patented, penetrating observations into the human soul, i.e. me.

I was tired.

I must have been tired, considering the astounding performance I put in today. It started round midnight, when I fell asleep easily despite my recent anxieties about death and taxes. Marrying some Ativan and Ambien will do that for you, with the added bonus fun of periodic sleepwalking, or sleep-jumping-up-and-down-and-giving-the-wife-a-heart-attack as I did around three a.m. Still, got in a solid nine hours before my internal alarm clock (that’d be the anxiety we just mentioned) had me bolt upright at nine. “Sorry I’m late boss I’ll have that earnings report on Sprint ready in an hour!! Where did I leave — oh wait, I’m only dying. Phew!”

So after some lunch I headed off 30 miles east for my 30th guitar lesson with a 30-year-old man. He was teaching me how to fingerpick Eric Clapton (gross) which I probably would have picked up on more quickly if I hadn’t been busy resting my head on the acoustic. The snoring helped to drown out my fumbling on the six string, itself a distraction from my knocking over a couple of the dozen guitars he has in his basement. To make nice I bent down to pick them up and proceeded to flip over a stool and two music stands. He sent me off with a book of sheet music where he had written down the day’s lesson, namely, “Acoustic guitar is not a contact sport.”

At least I think that’s what he wrote — my memory of this six-hour-old event is foggy because I crashed my Jetta on the drive home on the sofa the minute I got back. An hour later I heroically fought the brainy blurriness by ordering a pizza from Minsky’s. Even more heroically, I ate it and then passed out again, making it three hours with Morpheus over the prior seven, or twelve over the course of a busy, exciting, blogworthy day.

Time for bed.

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The Bad Guys Won

So yeah, I must have been fourteen when I first became a Mets fan, if for no other reason — no, for the sole reason that they were favored by my older brother, whom I idolized at the time. In fact it was only a couple years after becoming a Mets fan that I wrote an essay outlining what an icon he was for me. The essay was part of the application process for the private high school I attended junior and senior year after I washed out of public school by cutting class for days at a time and skipping final exams in hopes that somebody would pay attention to how screwed up I was inside. Guess it worked.

Anyhow, in the intervening years I gradually became disenchanted with my brother, whom I came to view as an underminer. Our relationship was pretty complicated for a few years there but now it’s a lot simpler: We don’t speak to each other. HA HA HA HA, just fuckin’ with you bro. Kind of. But that’s not the point. The point is, I had become a Mets fan for life! and it’s all his fault!

So I followed the team and watched closely as they triumphed on Page Game Six and then took their potential dynasty and pissed it away into the expectant cups of the random drug-testing program. I was more or less paying attention up until 1991, when I got what scientists call a “girlfriend,” who in short order became a “fiance” and “incredibly unfortunate wife.” At that point I went, Hmmm, sex with a blonde, baseball. Sex with a blonde, baseball.* The title for this chapter is “Sorry Darling, You Lose.”

So I pretty much skipped the Mets in the 90s — good decade to miss it turned out. But then we head over to 2000, we got the Subway Series, this is my ‘team,’ I have to watch, right? The blonde still hadn’t come to her senses at that point (still hasn’t actually) and she’s still the one that [REDACTED -- We get the picture, whether we want to or not -- Ed.] but it’s the Mets and it’s the World Series and how can you not want to see baserunning errors by the immortal Timo Perez? How can you pass that up? That’d be like passing on the future of Scott Kazmir for ten innings out of the wrong Zambrano! Who does that?

The Mets again went from penthouse to shithouse with shocking speed and, loyal fan that I am, I dropped them to spend more time cooking up paranoid fantasies about the Bush Administration. Then in 2005 right before I was diagnosed with cancer I got hooked into following the team again based on an offhand comment in an e-mail from, wait for it, my brother! This guy pops up everywhere! Because of him I went online combing through the partisan blogs in search for intel and perspective about a trade that didn’t look so good for the good, sorry bad guys.**

I have to thank him for that at least, because that’s what led me to join and eventually write a daily column for Metsgeek.com, where I have been lucky enough to make some of the best friends of my life. And yes, they do exist in real life and I’ve seen them, unlike the plenty of my own friends that are all above me. Deez guyz (and galz) have been an incredible source of support as I grapple with dying too soon. Last week they went so far as to send me a carepackage that moved me to tears as I tried to reconcile their kindness with my lifelong belief that I am fundamentally unlikeable. In addition to the weeping the silliness of the gifts eventually lead to some giggling and laughter.

Best medicine.

* For those of you listening at home you may want to pantomime with your hands as you figuratively “weigh” your options
** Mets sent Kris Benson to Baltimore for John Maine and Jorge Julio, who turned into Orlando Hernandez. Score one for Omar.
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TESTY? WHO’S TESTY??

Oh man, oh man, people I am freaking out over here! I’m freakin’ out! I mean I am just about to hit the CEILING folks, it feels like any second there is a going to be an eruption so violent that I’m going to explode into Dr. Manhattan only to have that Alien burst through my electric blue six pack. Anger! Anger! Kenneth Anger! Rage against the Kenneth Anger! Smash dishes, gnash molars, bash brothers, Crash Davis! Pick up the first thing handy and hurl it at the television screen! Remember you don’t own a television! Worry about visual disturbances caused by brain tumors! Panic about mental confusion! Forget what chemo fog does to your whachamacalit! Fall off the stool and land on your guitar and hope the wife didn’t hear that noise! Fall on your way to the bathroom and sprain your leg and get a blood clot! Captain we are sitting ducks here! FALL BACK, FALL BACK!!

Jeez, what’s he so worked up about?

Well, there’s that whole dying of cancer thing, that’s listed in this one book as a possible source of stress. Possibly. And I am going under the knife, the CyberKnife, in about five hours, so that’s been kind of on my mind, seeing as how if that doesn’t do the trick it’s only a hop skip and a jump to doggie heaven. I admit it, I’m a little distracted here.

And I have to admit a lot of this PMS daylong panic attack is my own fault, what with my drinking 20 ounces of French Press every morning brewed with, I don’t know, four tablespoons of beans. (Followed on by the daily venti latte and the continuous IV drip of iced tea.) Makes a guy a little short SHORT jumpy JUMPY WHO SAID THAT!!

And here again, I can only blame God myself for having such poor motor skills and coordination and balance that I instantly fumble just about anything I grasp, as if my fingers were coated in olive oil. I mean, when you drop the soap three times in one shower, that’s just an invitation your own fault. Why I ordered the tumors specifically to grow on the cerebellum I’ll never know. I must not have been thinking clearly. Chemo brain: Also my fault.

So yeah, your man here would be ready to snap in two by his ownself, without any help from the demons. I don’t need the demons right now, you know? This would be a great week for them to take a holiday and go pester someone who really deserves it, someone like Mugabe or Madoff or Alex Rodriguez. Cut me some slack for once demons, cut me some slack.

But no. They’re working overtime the last few days.

I don’t mean, like, personal demons, like regretting everything I have ever done in my life since I was nine and not being able to tell anyone about how I killed some guy once but he totally deserved it. I’m talking about, you know, the Car Key Gnomes from the Far Side. The imps who make the laptop crash right before I have a chance to save what I’m working on. The leprechauns who snatch away the one file that I know has always been there, right there in that same folder for seven years, right until the time I actually need it for this year’s 1040. And the pixies who move my cell phone from the coat pocket where it always is to the one where it never is, keeping me fumbling for it long enough that I miss the call from my doctor, which to be fair is just as well because I would probably have dropped the phone anyway and there’s never a rush to get bad news.

Still, demons, fuck off and give it a rest. I can lose my mind on my own.

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Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. The alternate Wednesday came and went with no reports from the chemo wing. But I have a note from my doctor with the perfect excuse — my chemo session was canceled, or as the doctor put it, aborted. Look, you can even recognize his handwriting, right under the part where he says to fill a prescription for 200 Vicodin.

See, it went like this. I came down with a UTI the night before and I — wait, that was a couple weeks ago. Ah, hang on, yeah, I was totally wiped out from too much Dilantin and too little sleep and — no, that was still two weeks ago. They ran an MRI of the brain and found that four out of eight lesions surveyed were growing — yeah, that was still two weeks ago, but that’s where our story begins. Unless you’d rather I push it back to what my lousy childhood was like and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (Ed. — works for us.)

All right, so let’s push it up to the non-chemo Wednesday, February the 18th, just a couple days after I celebrated my 38th. I meet with my radio-oncologist and he recommends treating the brain tumors with something called CyberKnife. I agree because the name sounds cool and on the web site there’s a picture of the device, which uses a robotic arm to circle your head and accurately hit you with its laser beam. Thing is we have to run it by the insurance company first, send them a tweet along the lines of “Hey this guy’s about to die, will you pay for him to not die, get back to me whenever.” It turns out the CyberKnife was actually developed from an assembly line tool used to manufacture cars, so I’m thinking if the insurance company balks I can work out some kind of Modern Times scenario with General Motors. I mean the bailout and all, it’s only fair, amirite?

Christ on his throne, 400 words in and we’re still a week away from this past Wednesday. Wrap it up motherfucker God! All right all right. Insurance company says okay, so all I have to do next is meet with a neurosurgeon and have my 19th MRI and my 20th CT scan and fill out a living will and then we’ll be all set, right? Well we would be except for that calf sprain I obtained by taking a stumble in the middle of the night two weeks ago, back when I was all dizzy from the too-much-Dilantin-too-little-sleep business I told you about earlier. The neurosurgeon said last Tuesday I should have an ultrasound to rule out a blood clot. I relayed to this news to my oncologist the next day.

“That’s ridiculous!” he said with disgust.

What’s ridiculous? The fact that we’re past 500 words and we’re just pulling in to Wednesday the 25th, the day of the regularly scheduled chemo treatment that never happened, is he ever going to finish this gripping yarn?

“If they think there might be a blood clot they need to look at it now. Let’s abort the chemo and send you over for an ultrasound and see what it shows.” Come to find out it showed (drum roll) a blood clot, which is being treated with Luvonox, which I get to inject into my abdomen every day for the next six months. It’s all right, the abdomen needs a distraction from my attention-whore stoma — that thing actually required a man yesterday to stick his finger directly into the large intestine to clear up a blockage. I was that full of shit.

The worst part is, he hasn’t called back.

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