David Hlynsky in the beam

2006-11-21T01:55:00.000-05:00

November 20, 2006 (1st follow up appointment)

2006-11-21T01:28:00.000-05:00

The Chinese dogwood we bought the day I was diagnosed has bloomed, grew strong all summer, turned rusty red in October and lost its leaves during a cold rain last week. I suppose the fact that I’m almost a month late with this post is good news. I’ve been distracted and busy…. My last checkup on October 26 went well. My blood tests showed that my PSA number was heading downward… not quite down to the normal mark yet and certainly not an indication that the cancer has atrophied… but nobody’s sounding the alarm and that’s all I can expect for now.

I’ve learned an odd biological lesson… something I ought to know instinctively but never really thought about. I can grow eight inches of hair in a year but not eight inches of tooth. Different kinds of cells divide at different rates. My body grows and regenerates unevenly. So it happens that the prostate cells divide at a snail’s pace… usually. This means that they’re in a state of torpor until some mini alarm clock wakes them up and announces that it’s time to divide. Then these cells rummage through the archive to find the blueprints. But thirty eight doses of radiation have eaten holes through my prostate’s DNA faster than moths can chomp through a Newfoundland sweater. The blueprints are unreadable…. The cells slowly wake up, take inventory and die. As Bob Dylan says, “It’s getting dark but it ain’t dark yet.”

I read in the newspaper just today that it might be renegade stem cells that cause cancer. This new research suggests that current therapies may target the wrong cells. A small number of bad stem cells are the real troublemakers. Human history is land-marked with momentary thresholds. Eve tasted the apple and condemned humanity to tight underwear and everlasting shame… but at the same time, she accidentally discovered the secret ingredient in blue-ribbon, apple pie. Go figure. Run the scenario again and I’ll bet you pick the apple pie. We’ve got to take a peek at those stem cells.

On another note, something else has happened to me but I don’t know how to tell you without sounding like I’ve survived an Alien abduction. Sometimes when I’m in the midst of the most ordinary chore, my consciousness switches into a reflective mode and I find myself thinking that my very existence is utterly ironic… and that even the words, “utterly ironic” are utterly ironic.

I mean, just think of the complexity of someone like me (or you) washing dishes. All those molecules behaving according to some arbitrary cultural order. I’m wrangling lemon-fresh, multinational bubbles for God’s sake! Scrubbing away the alfredo sauce that I didn’t mop up with my whole-grain, French stick!

Is this the meaning of life? … if it is, it’s fascinating… if it’s not… it’s still fascinating.

Call me crazy but I’ve begun to say hello to the colours at least once a day. Hello blue… hello green… hello red. All art begins with the word, “hello.” I don’t really think the colours can hear me but it does give me a moment of pause… a moment where the past and future mean nothing at all… the moment I’m in is utterly fascinating and ironic.

I think we could stop all war if we only imagined that our enemies were sometimes up to their elbows in dish suds saying hello to the colour white… “hello, sound of splash… hello, slippery spoon draped in a soggy fettuccini.”

Life is lemon-fresh by nature; mellow yellow beyond words… way beyond words. And if you’re afraid to say it out loud, at least say it under your breath.

“Hello” pushes the garbage out of your path for just a moment. What else can you do? Cancer taught me this and I hope I never forget it. Ask anyone who’s been here.

2006-07-27T16:58:00.000-04:00

July 27, 2006 (Final treatment) Out of here, kicking up dust.

2006-07-27T16:53:00.000-04:00

What do I do on a day like today? Look over my shoulder and shrug. That was then and this is now.

Being under the beam today was almost a non-event compared to the anxiety I felt last April. So what have I learned? Panic and rage come with the season… but under the storm, life stays sweet, too. The present moment can be beautifully crisp if you let it.

If you ever fall into the clutches of this scourge, wail and shout till you’re done with those feelings. Then figure out a strategy. Pop culture portrays cancer as a death sentence. It doesn’t have to be. Orthodox medicine demands precision but that’s not a sin. Alternative therapies are not instant voodoo, either. Close scrutiny is better than blind faith. Ask questions until they turn off the lights and stack the chairs on the tables.

If your friend gets cancer, just listen. Depression is normal and expressing fear releases its pressure. If a question comes at you, give tentative advice in very small doses. Avoid the temptation to cast yourself as Albert Schweitzer. The cure is not a contest… it’s a collaboration. Good sense takes time.

Cancer can drive the fun right out of living… and putting pleasure back into the equation helps enormously. Pleasure’s the secret energy within every worthwhile strategy because it makes the fight really mean something.

As I finished today, all the therapists on the shift expressed sincere hope that they’d never see me there again. I couldn’t agree more… but in another life, maybe we’ll share an accidental cappuccino in some sidewalk café.

I stopped to see Houdini and his crew on my way out, too. Houdini’s real name is Harry Easton. He was still bubbling with enthusiasm about more accurate imaging systems and more precise beams. My conversations with him are not finished, yet. I’ll visit him again.

I haven’t mentioned this before but all of my treatments happened at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. My Oncologist is Dr. Andrew Loblaw. His handshake is strong enough to rattle the cancer right out of you. He always has the smile and patience to answer my questions, no matter how peripheral. My follow up appointments are in mid October. I’ll post new entries then.

Friends have thanked me for writing this journal. Other patients have found sympathetic familiarity in it, too. Andrew has passed it on to his colleagues. Harry and my daily therapists have read bits of it. I was happy that we could talk face to face. It made the work we shared more poignant from both points of view.

But most of all, I wrote this blog to keep my head clear. I did it for me. If you ever get called into this grim club, keep talking about your fears. It really won’t kill you to be a little pissed off. Write about it. Draw it. Dance about it, even if you can’t hold a beat. If the demons come back, stare them down and stomp your feet until they go away. Don’t let a day end until the scary stuff and the sweet stuff are in proper balance.

I’ll put this blog to rest for now.

Thanks, Shirley, for all the days and nights only you and I will know.

Beam Off.

Not a simple place.

2006-07-26T15:52:00.000-04:00

July 26, 2006 (37th treatment) Time for a parade.

2006-07-26T15:32:00.000-04:00

Sometimes while I’m in the waiting room, a man in gray coveralls comes by pushing a rolling cart loaded with toilet rolls and cleaning supplies. I’m sure you’ve seen him somewhere out of the corner of your eye. Every day, yesterday’s newspapers disappear from the side tables. Someone keeps the hand sanitizers full of goop.

A few weeks ago, I followed the wrong EXIT sign down the wrong staircase and found myself in the hospital basement. The corridor seemed to stretch from one vanishing point to another. This is where they wash the gowns and sheets. This is where food inventories are stored and meals are prepared. This is where shipments come in and garbage goes out. It’s easy to forget this industry is part of healing. Janitors never make it to prime time TV.

After I finished today, I have only one treatment to go. Once upon a time, this radiation machine made quaint sounds. Last week the chirps and beeps become a little bit irritating; like a story retold too many times. Today I barely heard the buzzing at all. My mind was elsewhere… reviewing the past few months in this room.

Before my exposure today I asked Lin, one of my therapists, about the meaning of some of numbers the on the radiation machine. He explained that they were controls to modify the intensity of the beam during exposure. Older machines had wedge attenuators. This machine has a “virtual wedge attenuator.” When beaming from the side, for example, hips are usually wider than bum cheeks. Therapists use these dials to vary the exposure according to body density between machine and prostate. For photographers, it’s like an automatic, mechanical dodging tool. I was happy to learn more because the hows and whys fill up the ennui. Lin’s explanation was a generous one. Somehow we’ve become collaborators in this business.

Each day, as they align me under the beam, one of my therapists will gently grab my hips (“Pardon my cold hands.”) and give me “a little roll” until my tattoos and their laser beams match. I asked, Lin yesterday if it was harder to roll a big person. He said, “Not especially. But it is hard to roll someone who’s in really good shape. They’re just too solid.”

Each day I’ve had small conversations like this with my therapists during the minute or two of prep. Connie always smiles and touches my arm as we enter the room. A smile and a touch are important beyond measure. Farnoosh and Joe ask about the blog or the weekend. Fiona is ever ready with a wry aside. There are three or four other therapists whose names have disappeared into my fog, but they too have always treated me as a real person. The routines they must repeat again and again, day after day, could easily become mindless moves on the assembly line, but they haven’t.

If I could, I’d get all their former patients to line up along some parade route and shower them with ticker tape, poodle-shaped balloons and pastel marshmallows. The Therapists would wave back at us from high atop their gold, Cadillac convertibles. Their blindingly white, lab coats would flow in the slow motion wind. Laser beams would crisscross the sky above them. Majorettes would high step and twirl titanium batons. A brass band would follow, tooting Bolero. Everyone would get a slice of sweet watermelon and we'd blow seeds at each other just for fun.

But the best I can do is send them this fantasy. They are saving lots of lives and if they passed you on the street, you wouldn’t know it.

Waiting... one more time... and then again...

2006-07-25T18:56:00.000-04:00

July 25, 2006 (36th treatment) I’m curious and shooting blanks.

2006-07-25T18:53:00.000-04:00

I dream of pissing clear across the road just like a nineteen year-old lumberjack. I’d write my name in the snow in one pass. My middle name too… “Alexander”. But today even shorthand would be difficult. Best I could do is Morse code and that might take all night.

_ .. ._ …_ .. _.. ._ ._.. . _.._ ._ _. _.. . ._. …. ._.. _._ _ _. _ _ _ _._ _._ _

As my treatments wind down, I’m curious. Which symptoms are the result of cancer? Which are from radiation? Which are permanent? Which will pass? Is cancer banished forever or just hiding someplace else? Finishing radiation this week will just move me into a different state of waiting.

The past is haunted by could-have-beens. And tomorrow’s agenda over flows like a shopping mall toilet on Christmas Eve. Don’t bug me! I’m busy borrowing money to do the stuff I promised to do yesterday. I really don’t have enough time to enjoy the moment. Sound familiar?

Scan your surroundings. There’s a lifetime of detail in this moment alone. To wait for something better is a waste of the only time we have. But I’m still a dilettante. I only dabble in the present moment if I have nothing better to do.

Call me tomorrow and we can take the whole afternoon off and do nothing. Better yet, just think about calling me right now. And I’ll just think about not answering the phone. Then I’ll just take this moment and watch the cats sleep… and if you have one handy, you could watch it snooze, too…. It would be sweet.

But today I’m curious about the future. So I talked with Andrew. Here’s what he said. “Have you felt better on Mondays than on Fridays?”

“Yes, Mondays are great! But I could hardly move last Friday. I was exhausted.”

“That means your body is recovering from radiation quite quickly. We don’t give you treatments on weekends so you can heal. But some patients feel just as lousy on Monday. You’re doing very well.”

“How long will the side effects persist?”

“The radiation burn will be gone in a week. Bladder and intestines should recover steadily over the next three weeks. When you stop waking up at night to pee, taper off the Flomax.”

Flomax is a daily capsule I take to help me pee better. It’s the only pharmaceutical I’ve had to take. Watch out for the commercials. They’re going to be everywhere. It’s a man thing… Flomax is replacing Jaguar convertibles as a must-have item for the man who thought he had everything.

“We’ll have a follow up appointment in a month to monitor your side effects.”

“And then?”

“Your prostate will slowly disintegrate. It could take a few years. Each time a prostate cell tries to divide, it will fail because the DNA is unreadable. The cell dies and is washed away. You may still have cancer cells in your body right now but they’re dormant. When they try to multiply, they’ll fail, too. You’ll have two consultations per year. Your PSA should drop steadily to a very low number and stay there.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“We’ll start a different therapy if your PSA rises. Oh, yes. If it hasn’t started yet, you should expect to shoot blanks from now on. That’s what some guys call it. Shooting blanks.”

At this point I feel pretty confident that the cancer’s on the run and the side effects should clear up soon. But as a side note, I spoke with a man this morning who had his prostate entirely, removed more that twelve years ago and now he has bad news that some stray cells have multiplied enough to give him a PSA count five times that of a healthy man. He’s been taking female hormones for a decade just to keep the wild boys humble… but it hasn’t worked. He says he’s trying to laugh a lot. And that’s good enough for the moment.

I’ve also met men who have received an all-clear reading years after treatment ends. So my waiting will continue but with distance and distraction the suspense will fade to a six month blip.

So Shirley’s cowboys have massacred the bad guys; left them mortally wounded and shooting blanks. Hi Ho Silver! I have two treatments left… and the tomorrow after that is empty. Hi Ho Silver... away.

We wait

2006-07-24T22:43:00.000-04:00

July 24, 2006 (35th treatment) The countdown.

2006-07-24T22:16:00.000-04:00

Three treatments to go. I shouldn’t be impatient but I am. These last few doses are just to make sure. As I lay down under the beam today, my therapist asked, “So you’re in the countdown are you?”

“I’ve been counting down since June 1st.”

“What will you do after?”

“Laundry… pay some bills.” These things came to mind immediately as representing what I remember about living a real life. Real life is a bit hard to imagine just now and that’s why I’m impatient.

In three more sessions I will have done all I can do for now. The diagnosis, the research, consultations, the big decision, the daily commitment to get to the hospital and read every magazine in the waiting room… these things are almost behind me. Treatments have averaged three hours a day, door to door. Processing the experience and writing takes another few hours. On bad days, the side effects eat up a a few more hours. So it adds up to almost a full day’s work. All kinds of other projects have been interrupted, distracted and slowed down.

I usually save summers for escapes to the North. Any green forest will do…any lake with water in it. The last two years I’ve had shows in Europe. I always learn so much there. I usually spend summers making art, or on the administrative tasks that exhibitions require. Obsession is the fertile ground where inspiration can really take root and fruit. I really need a week… or a month… with a clear head.

This year, cancer ate up most of my summer. I had no choice except to try and nip it early. This blog has kept me focused on immediate experiences while it drained my creative juices. This writing hasn’t been the art I would have chosen to make… but it has filled a hole where the itch used to be. They don’t call art’s daily efforts, “a practice”, for nothing.

Laurie Kingston (see July 7) wrote today saying she would miss reading this blog. I’ll continue reading hers. Cancer comes with an entourage of sweet and sour emotions. Everything Laurie writes is poignantly familiar to me. Her radiation starts next week and I wish her the best. I appreciate her support both as a fan… and as a cancer compatriot. But I do look forward to not having to write mine any more. I have enjoyed the creative process for it’s own sake…but, just now, I’m really getting anxious to change the subject.

P.S. Laurie, Just think of that machine as your low wage tanning booth. You just drop your loonie in the slot beside the pillow and the thing’ll buzz for a few secs and give you a spotty little tan about the size of a fifty-cent tangerine. You know what they say on the T shirts?… Life’s a beach.

Start with predictable allignment.

2006-07-23T13:29:00.000-04:00

July 21, 2006 (34th treatment) Still dizzy from thinking about cancer.

2006-07-23T13:20:00.000-04:00

A million human cells could occupy the head of a pin. Given the total number of cells in a body, it’s hard to believe that all of them are behaving themselves all the time. Perhaps we all live with at least a few cancerous cells all the time. A healthy immune system keeps them in check. Trouble comes when mutant cells thrive and multiply into tumor-sized communities. By the time symptoms occur, there may be billions of cancer cells growing and dividing. This is why early detection is so important… and why the ability to visual ever-smaller details is so critical.

It’s been three months since my diagnosis. The tests that searched for the presence of cancer began a year before that. During the past fifteen months, I’ve had approximately seventy-five scans, pricks, probes, consultations and treatments. I’ve actually lost count. It’s still hard to believe that I even have cancer. It never shouted its presence like a scarlet carbuncle on the tip of my nose. It appeared as a shy chemical trace in my blood and a few misshaped circles seen under a microscope. I don’t know exactly when my prostate cells went berserk. And I don’t know if there are any angry survivors left today.

The end of my radiation is in sight and I definitely plan to celebrate my return to an ordinary life. Does that mean I’m cured? It actually means that I have 90% odds of being 100% cured. Further tests will refine those odds. I will do what I can to help my body route out any nasty stragglers. Nutrition, meditation, exercise… new habits. Tune in again in five years. The really good champaign’s on ice till then.

Cancer has made me dizzy… not physically tipsy, but mentally and emotionally disoriented. The past week I’ve felt a lot of rage and sometimes I’m embarrassed that I let so much of it wander around in public. Since all this began, my life has been fearful, troubled, ironic and just plain miraculous. Cancer has amplified all of it

Hollywood wants us to believe that a fly-bitten, sandy-haired botanist will find a rare Amazonian orchid pod and cure cancer before the popcorn’s gone. In reality, researchers work in crowded, windowless rooms trying to figure out how to measure the uneven densities of the human body and visualize the margins and threads of cancer.

I had another tour of the research wing today. Houdini, the engineer, introduced me to research director I’ll call, Captain Invisible. The Captain showed me the insides of a dozen labs each piled high with pedigree hardware. Diagnostic devices were being repaired, modified and even created from scratch in order to see inside a living body with ever-greater detail. Seemingly vague electromagnetic evidence is teased out of X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, radioisotope emissions and ultrasound images. Computer algorithms massage data streams into fully dimensional, virtual representations. Isn’t amazing how we need to “see” something in order to believe it? Captain Invisible makes the unseen, seeable.

I was astounded by the devotion of his research staff there. Scores of people working in scores of rooms, each tasked with a small piece of the cancer puzzle. And these tasks were not what you’d expect.

Imagine the softness and volume of a woman’s breast. Imagine its perpetual motion. Imagine tracking the location, size and change of minute populations of cancer cells over a week or a month. Measurement is everything. Rather than picking Amazonian orchids, Captain Invisible collects endless puzzles of numbers and nurtures them until some blossom of logic appears… an image… a target… a strategy…a tool.

We live inside huge dimensions of technological magic. The explosion of information and artistic expression has produced an extraordinary awareness of each other. It’s impossible to predict where all this sharing of mind will lead us but if we sincerely care for each other, things will turn out right.

Technology is polluting our environment and giving us cancer. Technology is curing our cancer and giving us hope. No wonder I’m dizzy.

Counting to five.

2006-07-20T16:55:00.000-04:00

July 20, 2006 (33rd treatment). Meditation on the number, five.

2006-07-20T16:36:00.000-04:00

The number five fits in the palm of my hand. I can count to five on one set of fingers. I have five treatments to go. I have five side effects; radiation burn, painful peeing, fiery shits, nausea and cranky impatience. There are five letters in “anger”.

I once thought that the final few treatments would be smooth and easy. I can say now that they are not going fast enough. I want this routine to end. I want to do something else with my time; five days off… a five-mile hike without a pit stop… five minutes in my garden without thinking about cancer.

On my way home today, I pulled off the road to listen to a CBC radio interview with a biochemical researcher. (I suppose CBC could give you his name from today’s play list) He has spent decades researching chemicals leaching from plastic drink containers. A chemical called BPA comes out of polycarbonate bottles in room-temperature water. BPA is a sex hormone and has caused enlarged ovaries in mice. Polycarbonate bottles are clear and glass-like and may have the number “7” in a recycling triangle on the bottom. The number is not mandatory so it may not be there. Polycarbonate containers are used as baby bottles, sports canteens and Britta water pitchers. There are lots of other uses but these three really pissed me off because they are products we usually associate with health and optimism.

What’s wrong with this picture? First, we place huge value on convenience and style. Secondly, our legislators turn a blind eye to lots of small dangers in favor of commercial innovation and success. Third, consumer fashion is a pack of white lies but we buy the fantasy because it feels like prosperity.

I can’t prove that plastic bottles gave me prostate cancer… but something did. Wouldn’t it be ironic if drinking spring water while jogging could give a woman ovarian cancer? Wouldn’t it be ironic if washing baby bottles in ordinary soapy water could give your child breast cancer years from now?

This kind of irony really sucks!

Shirley found an interesting article on the net today. It’s worth browsing. It’s essentially a study that suggests that using polycarbonate cages and feeding bottles in the care of laboratory animals might negate cancer research results because these animals have been contaminated with BPA leaching into their water and feed.

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2003/5993/5993.html

The Nalgene site contradicts these findings with arguments of its own.

http://www.nalgene-outdoor.com/technical/bpaInfo.html

Five is the number of letters in “trust.”
Five is the number of letters in “chaos.”

It used to be that you’d count to ten to dissipate anger. Today I count to five and think that anger is a good place to stay until my last five treatments are done and the five side effects are gone.

Greens

2006-07-20T00:11:00.000-04:00

July 19, 2006 (32nd treatment). The true nature of happy meals.

2006-07-19T23:29:00.000-04:00

I’m quite exhausted today, both physically and emotionally. I can keep a creative distance on this experience for only so long. I've tried to remain curious. I've tried to be my own clever tour guide. Just now I really want to have a good night’s sleep.

A burning bladder wakes me up every night. Cock a dripple dooo. Eventually indigo insomnia gives way to the dawn… but by mid morning I’m feeling a bit cranky and by evening, I’ve lost all appetite for complex thought. At the first sign of an emergency, my brain plays possum.

Of course, this is because my body is diverting precious resources to the disaster zone down below. So today I’ll only scribble a small note that’s been running around my head for weeks.

Happy meals are not happy.

A lot of the folks I see in fast food franchises, don’t look very happy. And most of the people I see in organic markets look well-balanced and alert. Anecdotal observation... not scientific... try it.

Back in my Coach House Press days, I spent some good time with a remarkable Buddhist typesetter named Nelson Adams. He would spend evenings printing small, beautiful, messages on fine art paper… He’d compose these one letter at a time, using antique bits of lead type … and then carefully ink his design by hand. He energized each simple sheet of paper with ephemeral grace and wisdom… then let them float into the world like leaves in a stream.

Tonight I remember one in particular. It read…

Nothing is better.
Nothing is best.
Take care of your health.
And get plenty of rest

2006-07-19T14:21:00.000-04:00

July 18, 2006 (31st treatment). A very strange club.

2006-07-19T14:02:00.000-04:00

I came to a grim realization today. I hope this doesn’t piss you off. Humanity can be divided into two groups; those who have had cancer and those who haven’t. If you haven’t been here, you don’t quite get it.

Last April, my doctor gave me the bad news. I was in the club. I never wanted to join. If you’re not already here, I really hope you never have to join either. But now that I’m here, I’m relieved that there are others in this club, too. I don’t mean to imply that I’m glad they have cancer. I’m not. It’s just that it’s better not to do this alone. Strange club… tea and cookies… don’t wear perfume. Some chemo patients are extremely sensitive to smells.

Tonight I went to Wellspring with a friend. Wellspring is a support group. The only criterion for membership is a cancer diagnosis. We met in a stylish living room in a cute modern bungalow on the hospital campus. Everyone in the room, (except the psychologist moderating the group) has had cancer. Even though many of us had never met before there was an unspoken culture in the room. We shared a certain sharpness of experience; a mélange of fright, fight and anger. We shared an uneasy waiting for the next shoe to drop. We each had memories of the moment of diagnosis and the roller coaster of good and bad news that follows; the confusion of unfamiliar terms and options. And under it all is a realization that membership is for life. I don’t mean that we can never be cured. Many of us are. But there's always another checkup... and another wait. Cancer sits in that room with us, like the devil in a very flimsy cage. All other thoughts and feelings have to skirt around it. At least that’s how it seems today.

The question that haunts me now is a simple one. When will I know for sure that I am cured? When will I believe it?

Friends who don’t have cancer try to be supportive by painting bright rainbows on a dark horizon. But once you join the club, hope ceases to be a primary emotion… rather it becomes a mere side effect of our fierce determination to chase the devil out of the room.

I have only seven treatments left. I really can’t believe that I’ve actually had thirty-one doses... except that the memory has so much texture. As I was under the beam today, I thought that I had learned everything I need to know about laying here... it's not interesting any more. Enough all ready! I told the devil to kiss my ass and he left a big radiation burn as a memento… and now it’s getting really painful to sit down.

But a war is raging in the Middle East and I have CNN, couch-potato-itis. Lots of people have more urgent troubles than I have. My burning ass is a small thing really, but it is a constant reminder that I have to get off my butt again and finish the job.

Site sanitized daily.

2006-07-18T00:15:00.000-04:00

July 17, 2006 (30th treatment). The nature of the blog.

2006-07-17T23:57:00.000-04:00

Over the past few months my spelling checker kept challenging the word, “blog”. Finally I told it to learn the damn word and stop bugging me. The name is so new that it wasn’t even in the Microsoft dictionary five years ago. But blogs have become part of our culture. They are gossip networks, research chronicles, political weapons and public diaries… a new journalism. My son and his lover wrote a blog in India. That was my first experience with blogs. Blogs are second nature to young people. We, old farts need to figure it out, too.

The blog, is a unique form of vanity publishing. It costs nothing. It has global reach. It is ephemeral. It exists without ticket takers, pollsters or accountants. It travels by rumour. It finds its own level.

Shirley told me to start writing this blog the day I started radiation. I’m very glad, she did. I think if I didn’t have this task, I really would go crazy.

Mundane experience is pretty unpredictable if you just watch it come at you. This cancer has made the banal experience of being alive sharper than it has ever been… and more mysterious as well. I can understand, now, why some people bungee jump… and why others free fall into spiritual rapture. There’s an element of both in fighting cancer.

Today, the man next to me in the waiting room was locked in a vacant gaze and I found myself falling into his same stupor. There were maybe fifty people waiting there and most were zoned out too. The four storey atrium above us catches sound and blends it into a murmur… soft whispers, slow foot steps, mumbled conversations, magazines shuffled and reshuffled… the cash register beeps very quietly in the coffee bar. I wait only for a single sound to emerge from the room tone… the sound of a therapist calling my name... my turn to stop waiting.

I could easily forget that I ever lived this afternoon. How many empty afternoons have I ignored already? I write this blog to sharpen my attention.

On other days, I write to shrink the panic. A new side effect blind-sides me and my imagination brews an unpleasant surprise into a bleak poison… or fatigue wears down my resolve and unfinished tasks swarm me like black flies.

This blog is my metronome. It measures my rhythm. It reminds me to take stock, process my experience and pack it away.

Today my radiation therapist observed that my bony ass was getting red.

“Like sunburn?” I asked….

“Something like that.” He replied…. “Try sitz baths.”

I suppose coconut butter would stink up the place.

Three quite talented artists complimented me on this blog over the weekend. I had no idea they were even reading it. We’re all getting older. We live in a polluted world. If these notes help demystify some of cancer’s curse, I hope it’s useful. Having the support of friends is hugely important. If you’re reading this, now… thanks.

2006-07-14T23:38:00.000-04:00

July 14, 2006 (29th treatment). Single digits and the fog.

2006-07-14T23:17:00.000-04:00

Today I crossed a border into single digits. I have only nine treatments left. It seems so manageable . I can imagine even smaller numbers… wimpy numbers like “3”… or “2”. I can imagine only one treatment left on some Thursday two weeks from now. So today’s a celebration of sorts; an “almost there” celebration. I won’t spoil that Thursday on the horizon by planning it too much, except that I’ll probably flip a coin when I get to the traffic light outside the parking lot.

Routines can be numbing; and this one even more so. Laying under the beam is a passive, motionless, chore. I still find it bizarre but not because it is as novel as it was on June first. Six weeks ago I asked, “What am I doing here?” Today I ask myself the same question but the subtext is different. This rotating machine is too predictable... the ceiling tiles, too familiar. I wonder if I will miss it. That’s what’s so bizarre.

Earlier this week, I met with a hospital nutritionist. I think I made the appointment just to see how closely orthodoxy correlates to alternative nutrition. The surprise is always in the details. My nutritionist agreed that good nutrition was crucial to health, but she thought real food was better than supplementary pills. From her point of view, it was silly to ban whole food and supplement it with chemical extracts. She said naturopaths will tell you to stop eating red meat and wheat… and substitute soy powder and buckwheat honey. I buy most of our groceries from the organic market and I have a closet full of supplements, but how much of this is real science?… how much is marketing?… how much is fashion? I'll go with aesthetics... food that looks good on a plate.

She says, “radiation makes your body crave protein to repair damaged tissues….” You can eat a bowl of extruded soy paste or a salmon filet. Your energy will drop as your body works overtime to repair itself. You can eat a plate of pasta or a nut-butter, brown-rice -bread sandwich. You can eat a handful of lycopene capsules but tomato sauce tastes better.

I asked her about alternative therapies. She’s a great fan of homeopathy and acupuncture. She thought naturopaths were generalists and not as knowledgeable. OK. So orthodoxy is not as rigid as we are lead to believe. If the past two months has taught me anything, it is that the middle path is rich.

Today, after my treatment, I felt like I was in a fog. I had a long list of jobs to tackle but couldn’t get past the first step on any project. I made no phone calls, sorted no files, wrote no proposals, answered no academic emails. I didn’t clean the basement. I didn’t fix the leaking drainpipe. These things were all on my list, but I just passed out on the futon instead. I woke up not really knowing where I was… not feeling rested either. I think these last doses of radiation are giving my body a new set of priorities…. Repair the damage… get more fuel.

Does anyone know a restaurant that will deliver a T-bone steak and baked potato? I’ve misplaced the phone. I’ll sprinkle the potato with wild salmon oil and vitamins. I promise. I’ll just snip some capsules in half.… Has anyone seen my scissors?

Or maybe I’ll just have another long nap... celebrate Bastille Day in a fog this year.

2006-07-14T01:10:00.000-04:00

July 13, 2006 (28th treatment). A hall and a wall.

2006-07-14T01:06:00.000-04:00

Doctors warned me that radiation might make me tired. Today it has. I think that fear has gotten me this far. The routine doesn’t allow much flexibility. As much as I’ve dreamt of a day off, I itch just get this thing cured.

There’s a very long underground corridor in this hospital and it’s straight as a tightrope. It bisects a complex of treatment rooms, offices, utilities and maintenance closets. Thousands of people pass through here; some in gowns; others in lab coats. This corridor is not a place one would travel without purpose… and so I have begun to see it as a metaphor for single mindedness. I only walk here determined to get cured….

Tonight, at a gallery opening, I spoke with another artist who’s been in a very long battle with cancer. He’s had forty doses of chemo. Sometimes, making good art takes the same intense determination as moving down this hospital corridor … and living a good life does too. There are lessons here I will never forget.

Yesterday, new war broke out in the Middle East. I napped in front of CNN all afternoon. It was exhausting. I watched complete strangers plucking the life out of other complete strangers. War is the chaotic antithesis of the compassion I feel at the hospital. It all seems so counterintuitive. How can human creativity exist in such contradictory modes?

Tonight I’m exhausted from the radiation. But I’m even more exhausted from watching wisdom and compassion hit a brick wall.

My new trophy

2006-07-13T03:05:00.000-04:00

July 12, 2006 (27th treatment). Two gifts.

2006-07-13T02:36:00.000-04:00

Back on the first of June when this ritual was just beginning, thirty-eight sessions seemed to be an impossibly far off number… Now I have only eleven treatments to go. The number eleven seems so scrawny by comparison. I will finish this chore in two weeks plus a day.

The side effects no longer surprise me. I itch to have my time back. I once imagined that these treatments would be a summer job. As it turns out this job involves staring at ceiling tiles, without moving a muscle, in a room alone with my knickers around my knees. It hasn’t been brain surgery or rocket science… at least not for me.

Today my friend, Amy, came along for the ride. I don’t suppose it was fun for her to watch the gurneys come and go but she wanted to come along.

Before my treatment, we spent an hour in just about the best gourmet supermarket in the city, just reading labels and drooling. Amy has worked for quite a few TV cooking shows and writes a culinary column in a national newspaper. We taste tested organic maple-flavoured candy floss. We marveled at a school of anchovies that could have been solid silver if you believed the price on the jar. We caressed a very small bottle of $48 balsamic vinegar. Food is art. But for that hour, food was forgetting. I was almost late for my radiation appointment but it was time well lost. Aimlessness with Amy was today’s first gift.

While I was entering the radiation room, one of my therapists said that Houdini, the engineer, wanted to see me today. He has no official involvement with my personal treatment so I was intrigued. But when we entered his workshop, his real surprise waited on a side table…. He had made me a gift out of spare parts; a cancer fighting trophy!

It makes me grin. It reminds me of a rocket ship and a ray gun and a few Freudian robotic devices I’ve seen on late-night Internet. It’s as shiny as a gourmet anchovy and lethal as the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet. It once helped a bunch of people beat their cancer.

We talked for a while and looked at his new projects. New jargon shimmered in my mind's ear. Every new word is a new idea and ideas make this Universe rich. As I left Houdini’s studio with my trophy in an old liquor store bag, he said, “Good luck with your treatment. I hope it works out well for you.”

“Thanks, Houdini." I thought, " I’ll bet you say that to all the drifters that stumble into this joint!”... I’m sure he really did mean it!

Tonight the trophy sits on my TV set but I think I’ll find a better place for it. Television is too full of senseless war these days to be a proper plinth for such a treasure.

2006-07-12T00:42:00.000-04:00

July 11, 2006 (26th treatment). A maudlin thought. An exuberant thought.

2006-07-12T00:20:00.000-04:00

Today while I was driving up the Oriole Parkway on the way to my 26th treatment, I remembered my late friend, Mary. About ten years ago I visited her in the hospital just after her double mastectomy. In the polite language of my mother’s generation, Mary had once been quite well-endowed. But when I saw her then, she was suddenly flat-chested and wrapped in a tight white bandage. I was glad that she had made it; glad that her renegade flesh was in exile . She was radiant with morphine and Buddhism and happy to be there, too…. But she was different.

Anthropologists mark the birth of civilization by evidence of language and tools… and the traces of rituals to mourn the dead. It dawned on me today that we still don’t have a ceremony to honour the missing limbs of soldiers or the lost breasts of cancer victims. We hold wakes for friends who have passed away… but when an important, but smaller, piece of us dies, we mourn alone.

I’ll be happy when cancer is behind me but I will always remember the time before it. This prostate gave me pleasure… and the pleasure of a son. It was a very good piece of me while it lasted.

I propose we create a new tradition… a demi wake to celebrate the parts we all have lost…. We ought to have butlers with Betty Crocker hors d’oeuvres and lots of toddlers underfoot to munch cheese puffs and make us dream about tomorrow.

Here’s a toast to the selves we once thought we were.

•••

On the way back down the Oriole Parkway after my treatment, I listened to Latin Jazz on CBC. It was exuberant and baroque and curled back under itself, sure and proud as Niagara Falls. It was baroque as new love… hot as a habenaro in heat! I was overwhelmed by the complex mosaic of it all; the drums and saxes and trumpets giving each other just enough space to turn around and dance. There were no notes missing and none was extra… and not a single silence needed filling! It was music!

And then I saw the city with this same music flowing through it; all the buildings made of stone and sweat; the traffic seamlessly weaving through itself; pedestrians in a hurry to find a day off and a trendy place to spend it.

There are no extra notes here either and none is missing. It's a traffic jam with air conditioning. It’s a torrent of creativity! Ideas trip over themselves to find a parking space! It’s boogie-woogie just for the hell of it!

Iceberg

2006-07-10T23:44:00.000-04:00

July 10, 2006 (25th treatment) Two negatives never make a positive.

2006-07-10T23:15:00.000-04:00

There seems to be a corollary to the “envision-your-cure-and-you-will-make-it-happen” rule. It goes something like this… “If you imagine the worse, you will bring it on yourself.”

Please, if you are trying to support someone with cancer, don’t ever tell him his worrying will hasten his demise. It is tantamount to saying that fear itself is a death wish. Two negatives do not make a positive. An old friend told me this today and I immediately felt myself spiraling downward … and, to be brutally honest, it’s taking a bit of energy to pull out of the spin.

Cancer threatens my life and my own ignorance of it threatens me more. It’s natural to be afraid.

Prostate cancer is highly curable… but it is still one of the top four causes of cancer fatality in men. I’ve read about at least twelve methods for treating prostate cancer. I won’t list all their possible downside consequences. And I won’t rail against the hollow promises of snake oil in pretty bottles. Some treatments help beat cancer. Others do nothing. Some do more harm than good. Skepticism is not suicide. It’s just one of the tools I use to find my way.

OK so what power do I really have? I can read the stats, assess the side effects and challenge the methodology of clinical tests… and then compare these with the similar (but not equal) stats, side effects and research methodologies of other treatments. The clock ticks very loudly… and sooner or later the only power I have is to plug my nose and jump. Taking the plunge is a positive move but is doesn’t completely wash away fear.

Attitude does affect quality of life enormously. So if you want to help someone with cancer, just hear both sides of their internal squabble without passing judgment. Give permission to be afraid out loud… because being afraid solo eats away at life faster than anything… and calling fear suicidal only makes it worse. After a good airing, panic will usually wear itself out and turn away… only then can you pin a “kick me” sign on the back of the boogie man.

One of the first casualties of cancer is pleasure. I sat with a man a few months ago whose wife stopped having sex with him after his diagnosis. After he saw her shrink away, he lost his will to seduce her, too. Dignity is a fragile resource but it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you know someone who has cancer, play hooky together. Procrastinate shamelessly. Bring more sensuality into your lives. Imagine something with maraschino cherries, bubble bath and lava lamps… Oysters trump the blues, hands down.

Free wigs

2006-07-07T13:00:00.000-04:00

July 7, 2006 (24th treatment) Beyond the Water Buffalo Club

2006-07-07T12:54:00.000-04:00

Each day I sit in the waiting room. Actually I sit in two. The inner waiting room is close to my machine and most of the people waiting there are men with prostate cancer. One of my therapists said today, “There really are a lot of you.” We should lobby for a large, water buffalo taxidermy in that corridor… just a big gnarly head hanging on the wall to watch over us.

But I also wait in a pleasant atrium with a sandwich shop. The populace there is more mixed and most notably, there are many women wearing head scarves and hats. Yesterday there was a long table with rows and rows of wigs. I sat near a young woman who wore an Annie Hall hat… but the brim was much narrower. Underneath it, I could see that she had no hair. No eyebrows either. If you see her, tell her I said she was radiant.

I suppose you know who these women are. Many are breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation simultaneously. Many have already had surgery. Breast cancer is a scourge, not only because it can be so aggressive, but also because it strikes so deeply at a woman’s sexual identity… and, in the West, we all know what that means.

The prostate cancer club is Mickey Mouse by comparison and we who sit there (praying for a water buffalo) don’t really have much to sweat about. Yes, prostate cancer can be fatal but the odds are not as grim as with other cancers and the treatments (knock on wood) are generally less severe. We’re wimps compared with the women under those wigs.

Three days ago, a friend sent me a URL for a young woman named Laurie in Ottawa with breast cancer. Laurie is also publishing a blog with snapshots. I read it start to finish and wept through much of it. I was most moved by the familiarity of her emotions; anger, denial, defiance, depression, fatigue and irony. There’s really a lot of irony with cancer. Some days, you just can’t believe what you’re doing. And if you didn’t think it was funny once in a while, it would be unbearable.

There’s also a unique emotion that looks like courage from the outside… but it really is just a tight-jawed will to outlive the curse. You can choose bravado but you don’t choose courage. It’s just the last thing you find when you scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Laurie’s blog is here.
http://notjustaboutcancer.blogspot.com/

Maybe I'll just sneak away....

2006-07-06T23:42:00.000-04:00

July 6, 2006 (23rd treatment) Am I going crazy?

2006-07-06T23:25:00.000-04:00

It’s 4:00 AM and I can’t sleep. It seems that my optimism is suddenly wearing a bit thin and some hidden doubt is wreaking havoc with my dreamtime. I can’t relax my mind and when I do nod off, I can’t stay asleep. A fullish burning sensation in my crotch keep waking me up… but the discomfort is not unbearable pain… I am awake because, in the stillness of the night, my prostate is reminding me of its demise. I really wish that I could only chase away the bad cells and save the good ones. We’ve been friends for as long as I can remember. Now I’m just turning my back on the whole lot.

Cancer is a job. It’s like the sewer has backed up in the basement and everything else gets upstaged. All the plans and ambitions and pleasures of a normal life have to step aside.

Cancer hogs the spotlight like some ugly, bad-actor, muttering drunken insults and tedious one-liners into his smoky microphone…. We jeer and booooo…(his mike agrees with loud feedback). But it just doesn’t phase him…he just squawks out the same tired punch line again and again…. Cancer just won’t let go of his stinking, self-importance and leave the stage… and I can’t sleep.

I want to take a day off… play hooky. I don’t want to go for radiation today. I have too many better things to do. Call me up and I’ll go fishing. I haven’t been fishing in years and years… but I’d rather be there today. I have too many unfinished jobs. Projects in limbo… household chores to finish… or at least get a start on before the summer’s over… and what about just enjoying a bit of summer?

I want to spend a week in the woods just soaking up the silent sunbeams of it… but my weeks are all full… full of waiting rooms and bathrooms. The radiation has irritated my bladder and bowel. Some days it feels like I have to take a dump and a piss all day long… but I don’t have to… or at least, I’m not quite sure if I have to or not. It’s not a big thing but it messes up my focus. I can’t seem to focus… I can’t seem to get anything done either and it’s driving me crazy.

It’s 4:40 AM. I still sit here wide-awake, planning to call in sick tomorrow…. I’ll call in sick, tomorrow so I can skip the radiation and feel normal again… get the basement sewer mopped up…(did I say that already?)… take a long walk in the woods… maybe write a novel before supper. All those things before the clock runs out.

I’m not supposed to think about the 10% odds that this treatment won’t work… but sometimes I do and it drives me batty. If optimism is an angel singing arias over my right shoulder, the devil is an actuary with a loud abacus chattering in my left ear… and cancer mutters on endlessly in the limelight.... Am I crazy?

It’s 5:30 in the morning. Radiation is only six hours away and I’ve barely slept a wink.

I’m sorry if I’m not getting things done for you these days. It’s just hard to stay focused.

••••

OK… I was grumpy most of the morning but I did go to radiation anyhow. Then I made myself finish as many chores as possible and I didn’t quit until 10:00 PM. I have two things left to do… post this and drink a glass of wine

Feeling the woosh!

2006-07-05T18:43:00.000-04:00

July 5, 2006 (22nd treatment) The arrow of time.

2006-07-05T15:12:00.000-04:00

With eyes wide open I'm continually scanning this hospital for clues to its workings. Today I noticed a very long shelf behind the reception desk. Fifteen small hand-written signs dangled from it’s edge. At first glance they were cryptic but then I realized that each was a label representing a different treatment machine. “Pla 1”, “Pla 2”, “Pla 3” and so forth. Then I noticed that the shelf behind each sign supported a potted plant or greeting card… maybe a small stuffed toy… thank-you gifts from those who have left treatment behind.

If you could reverse the arrow of time, would you? We could all rise from ashes to find ourselves in damaged bodies… and move quickly through pain into increasing wellness. As we grew younger, friends would rise, too and we’d all march together, backward through loss and into fresh passion... then to flaming desire and the calm, quiet of un-imagined possibilities. Physical sensations would grow increasingly sharper… smell, sound and sight would burn brighter as time retreats. We would gradually un-know the meanings of all words… un-remember the lessons of our experience. Our bodies would become lighter and lighter until we could leap and bounce like giggling bubbles. Rusty brown flowers would fly off the ground, explode into brilliance and then shrink into buds and seedlings… roots would contract into seeds. Eventually everything we have learned would evaporate into pure sensation and we, too, would shrink into human tadpoles… then further into the dreaming of protoplasm floating in a salt sea. Does time finally stop in the cool, mathematical boogie of quarks and antiquarks?

I think this vision of time running backward portends just as much loss as moving in the direction we are now headed... and just as much gain. It doesn’t much matter which way time flows because creation and destruction are always simultaneous effects of the same changing moment.

I have sixteen radiation treatments left. A once healthy part of my flesh is withering away even as I write this… but the strangeness of this odyssey has become familiar and I look forward to the pleasure of another task. Nostalgia doesn't help a bit.

So today I know that I am riding time’s arrow through cross winds of fear and hope… but this is infinitely more interesting than spending an eternity standing still.

Take off your wristwatch and feel the wooosh!

To dance or not to dance...

2006-07-05T02:30:00.000-04:00

July 4, 2006 (21st treatment) No news is good news.

2006-07-05T02:19:00.000-04:00

I almost fell asleep on the treatment table today. The thrill is gone. I had to focus on staying alert so I didn’t nod off and twitch out of position… embarrass myself by drooling on the public pillow. But almost falling asleep is very good news. It means that I’m becoming nonchalant about this business. I even had to check this blog to see what number I’m at.

Seventeen more to go. The chill’s gone, too.

I never suspected that cancer would someday get boring but it has… for me anyhow. I’ve actually meet lots of bored patients in the waiting room. I watch some of them walk into dressing rooms wearing soft blue hospital robes… and leave strutting kick-ass street clothes. Just like that! You’d never know where they had been….

So I wonder how many people on the street are secretly cancer patients. I wonder how many people living with cancer are sipping cappuccinos in that café over there… smiling and not telling the waitress.

I think there are more of them than we suspect and this alone ought to shrink the stigma a bit. I know that it has for me. But I also know that most healthy people would rather not be reminded about it at all. So I have good news especially for them. Sometimes having cancer is just plain boring.

I’ve developed a new tenderness for people living with AIDS… and for anyone who has stared into the abyss and turned away dancing. We’re all mortal, after all… but some people are more conscious of it than others. You don’t have to look very far to see how our life force proclaims itself.

Sex giggles and screams from every billboard. The road is all yours! Your dust-free, T-bird, ragtop glides fast as a magic carpet toward an ice blue horizon. True love rides shotgun with all the windows rolled down. The glove box bulges with Viagra and breath mints!

But Life’s line of credit is not as bottomless as a roadhouse coffee cup. Every day I see barely conscious people on gurneys being wheeled into their radiation sessions. It’s clear that they’re in fierce battle with this disease. Exhausted and holding slim odds, they choose to dance anyhow… or dream it as long as they can.

Dreaming the next dessert.

2006-07-04T00:24:00.000-04:00

July 3, 2006 (a weekend off) Visualization.

2006-07-03T23:40:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long weekend. Canada Day… Fourth of July. I’ve had three days rest from the radiation. Details about angry bowels are not important just now. They persist but I vow to persist even longer. There were lots of summer parties the night before last and we hit a few. At one I met a friend of a friend who insisted that I try to beat my cancer through visualization. She was an artist.

I believe in visualization, too, because I live among gifted people who imagine things all the time and make them happen as easy as switching on a light bulb. But this conversation was troubling because she was so insistent. Intense dogma makes me cringe because it narrows my horizon too much.

While she insisted that I cure my cancer by thinking it away she was also lighting one cigarette after another. I asked her if she could visualize not smoking any more. It was a nasty move on my part. She made the usual excuses for herself… she was battling other demons and needed a bit of pleasure and space. I am sorry. We all have our death-defying gestures of bravado. Nobody deserves to have their cover blown…. and she did have a point.

So I visualize my antisocial prostate gland as a manic kumquat, working like the devil to become a rotten grapefruit; all mouldy and bitter. I visualize holding a steelworker’s blue-hot, cutting torch up close to it until it withers to a cinder…. Then it turns white and blows away with a less breeze than a mouse sneeze. OK. I visualized that. It was a good cartoon. But did it cure me? Maybe I can swash-buckle my way to perfect health but I’ve wished for lots of things that never came true… and this life is too important to trust the whole enchilada to wannabe genies torching sour kumquats. So I tried another vision.

This time, I visualized my one-hundredth birthday. The trees I planted when this cancer first announced itself to me have grown thick and gnarly as a big man’s ham. All of you are partying in the garden with me and we’re all sipping extra lite bourbon with lots of Perrier water through bendy plastic straws … and we’re singing Mercedes Benz with growly certitude along with Janis Joplin on our MP3 hearing aids…. It’s a great party because nobody’s in a hurry anymore… except to hear the next joke.

The party’s even greater because all the women I used to see in the cancer wing are there too… the women who used to wear headscarves to hide the chemo baldness. They all have Dolly Parton hair… or whatever hair they want.

Yup, it’s OK to visualize my cure… but it takes a lot of people dreaming to make a real miracle. We’re all very lucky that the doctors, engineers, nutritionists, biochemists and environmentalists are dreaming too.

When I left the real party Saturday, I had a strange vision. Maybe it was just my own projection but I saw four of my friends in the kitchen, moving easy and glowing with a soft,warm sheen. These were the very same people who didn’t shrink from me when I told them about my diagnosis. They kept on glowing just enough to make a difference.

It’s easier to visualize a cure when people aren’t scrambling to get away from your contagion. So mark it in your daybook… a garden party at our house, May 2047… leave your bendy straws at home.

Two Lucy Phantoms

2006-06-30T21:40:00.000-04:00

June 30, 2006 (20th treatment) The machine shop.

2006-06-30T20:05:00.000-04:00

I’ve reached the top of this Everest and begun the descent. Before all this started, much of the territory was hidden from view…. Today I’m more than half way through my schedule and I don’t expect any real surprises. Writing this blog and stealing snapshots has made me focus on the mundane bits. Fear loves vague places. If I hadn’t given myself the task of picking away at the minutia, I might still be anxious.

Yesterday I praised back-room engineers. Today, one of them invited me to see his workshop. In the spirit of confidentiality, I’ll respectfully call him, Houdini. Wiry and full of twinkle, he has the perfect, inventor’s, dream-come-true job. CAD programs flash from big monitors. Lathes and milling machines twirl at his command. Esoteric parts and ragged manuals crowd every nook of his small office. Family snapshots hang sweet among digital printouts of his prize gadgets. Plastic sheets and metal blocks wait his inspiration like pristine carrera marbles.

“Most hospitals don’t have workshops like this.” He says. But this is a research centre and some of the best doctors on the planet work here. They scratch out their ideas on paper napkins. Houdini makes them real. Curing cancer is a work in progress and it will inevitably be a complex one. Designer chemicals and surgery work for some tumours. Others fade from radiation. Good nutrition compliments all of these. But imaging machines guide almost every move. Millions of lives are being saved, simply by seeing dark things in dark places.

Six weeks ago a tattoo needle pierced my skin in three small places. Since then, no instrument has given me so much as a mosquito bite. The radiation beam is invisible to the naked eye and it works in a place where no light has ever shown.

With a team of four or five other machinists and engineers, Houdini’s daily task is to keep fifteen large and expensive machines in critical tune. My machine is in his care, too . We talk about the quaint noises it makes. He shows me spare parts. His team has patented some exotic puzzle pieces and pampered them to a jewel polish. Some look like trophies… others really are trophies.

But most impressive of all is Houdini’s enthusiasm and his eagerness to share these inventions with me. Technical names flow smooth as fine scotch and each object he holds is charged with magic. One of his team’s inventions is called the Lucy Phantom. It’s used to tune the gamma knife for stereotactic radiosurgery. I hold it. It looks like a crystal ball.

“What is Stereotactic Radiosurgery?”

He explains that it’s brain surgery done with an energy beam as fine as a scalpel. In some cases the patient is placed on a rotating stage while the beam turns around a different axis… Imagine the patient and robot dancing a dangerous, but life-saving, pas de deux on the head of an invisible pin! I wouldn’t do this jig for the fun of it… but I would give the choreographers a standing ovation even after the curtains closed and the house lights came up.

Russians call electrical batteries, accumulators. Alone on a table, each of these assemblages seems humble and anonymous, like some spare part waylaid between box and shelf…. But the inventions I see in this unlikely hospital workshop are kinds of accumulators too; focusing and preserving the rare energies of magical minds.

I won’t get Houdini in trouble by saying just how long he entertained me in his gallery of robot appendages… but suffice it to say we almost maxed out my parking budget for the week.

Thanks….

Radiation Beam Flattener

2006-06-29T17:04:00.000-04:00

June 29, 2006 (19th treatment) Half way.

2006-06-29T16:48:00.000-04:00

Today marks halfway in my treatment. Nineteen down, nineteen to go. A thunderstorm rumbles outside preparing to wash everything clean. This halfway mark gives me a moment to contemplate where I’ve been and where I’m going. Just over two months ago, I got the fright of my life. Twenty nine days ago, I took control by trusting in human ingenuity and kindness. It was the only bet with any real odds.

Ingenuity and kindness take many forms… supportive visits, organic foods and remote control ray guns pointed at renegade prostate cells. Thanks again to Shirley for more than an ample supply of green jello… and all her imaginary cowboys blasting away at the bad guys.

This job is a team effort. It would be Pure Hell to tackle it solo. No single person has all the answers. But each friend lays down a stepping stone.

Is the treatment working? When the radiation is streaming through me, I don’t even feel a tingle. But now we’ve reached the halfway point, the collateral damage is becoming painfully obvious. I wrote yesterday about feeling that I was passing white-hot briquettes. The stewed prunes and fruit smoothies have helped a little… but only a little. When the moon is full, I may start combing dark alleys for a dope fiend who deals morphine suppositories… (it’s just a fantasy I entertain to laugh through five minutes of squirming agony.) The burning really doesn’t last that long and I’ve seen lots of folks at the hospital that are bearing up with far, far worse. This pain in the ass is a sign that my prostate is slowly dying. Perhaps a hundred years from now those cowboys will be better shots but I don’t think I can wait that long.

The thunderstorm just started pelting hail…. A sign from heaven? I feel like sitting outside for a while. I’ll bet there are some kinky tricks I could do with tiny balls of ice.

Yesterday, I had a few spare minutes on my parking meter so I wandered the hospital corridors outside the treatment centre. I found a display case containing spare parts from the radiation machine. These had all been milled by a team of resident medical engineers. Someone bumped my shoulder and I turned to see Andrew, my oncologist, waiting for his elevator. He was amused to see me photographing machine parts… Linear accelerators need replacement bits… and Andrew needs custom widgets to refine his craft.

As an artist, I’ve always been surrounded by a community of creative people… and a few times, I’ve had to get the advice of engineers for my projects. Creativity comes in many shades and forms. The engineers down the hall from my cancer treatments are just as creative as the artists and writers I know. But the problems they address are different and here begins a strangely artificial divide in our culture. I really think that writing an Ondaatje novel about the nuances of the human spirit is just as hard as designing a linear accelerator to parse the good and evil in our flesh… and visa versa.

But our political and educational systems tend to set up a silly and counter-productive competition between the arts and sciences. We stream our children into one mind set or another … but rarely into both. If the Italian Renaissance had categorized curiosity that narrowly, DaVinci would have been only an eighth of the man that he was.

So at this demi anniversary of our attack on my cancer, I propose a toast to the home team. Artists and Engineers everywhere, please raise a glass to each other's creativity.

... I’ll take a prune juice with about twenty ml of Bushmills.

The green jello cure

2006-06-28T16:04:00.000-04:00

June 28, 2006 (18th treatment) Green jello and stewed prunes.

2006-06-28T15:37:00.000-04:00

I do almost all of the cooking in my house and have done so for decades. But I’ve never stewed a prune. Stewed prunes in small, green-band, porcelain bowls remind me of summer camp or department store cafeterias circa 1959. But today I hope they will become nouvelle ambrosia.

(Hide your children’s eyes… scatological references to follow.) This morning’s constitutional felt more like I was passing a white-hot charcoal briquette…or two. The radiation has damaged the mucous membrane in my colon. It will keep me on my toes for the next six weeks. Nurse Grace says eat more vegetables. I went to bed last night reading a cookbook on pureed rutabaga soup. It was riveting….

You won’t find green jello in the whole foods store. But like big macs, red jelly beans and fudge brownies it is part of American, heritage cuisine. The next time you are feeling poorly, stand tall, wave your crutches in the air and shout, “I demand green jello!” And don’t let anyone trick you with organic wasabi tofu…. It’s just not the same.

Thanks, Shirley, for making green jello and leaving me some.

Today I met two men in the waiting room. One complained that he was forced to wait so long with a full bladder. He had his timing worked out to perfection but a delay in treatment could send him into agony. Radiation increases a feeling of urinary urgency. (bad word, “urgency”) Even when you don’t have to pee, it can feel like you have a bottle rocket between your legs. And during treatment, the Wizard of Oz hides behind a curtain and bellows, “Thou shalt not squirm during radiation exposure.” So we felt deep compassion for the man.

The third man and I both responded in surprise, “The doctor told us to arrive empty!” For a moment the family of prostate cancer patients was divided into two distinct species… the bloated bladder species and the vacuum bag species. I asked the therapist if there was a difference. Apparently men’s anatomies are not all alike. For some, a full bladder holds the prostate in the beam… for others, it gets in the way… or something like that.

Today’s writing has been uncommonly scatological. Wikipedia claims that scatology can be a form of sexual deviation , a psychological obsession or a zoological research technique.

It can also refer to a form of improvised jazz singing.

Zippety doo da… zippity aay!
My oh my! What a prune-tiful day!
Wing a wappa, wing a wappa!
Do wop wop…
Zabba dabba doo!

Our thanks to the boys in the band...
Whitey Coal on Tuba....
Rudy Bega on crumpet...
Big Green Jello on spoons....

Good night, Mamma, wherever you are!
Eat your prunes!

Drink your Water....

2006-06-27T19:27:00.000-04:00

June 27, 2006 (17th treatment) My porn star days are fading fast.

2006-06-27T19:05:00.000-04:00

Today was my weekly meeting with Nurse Grace and Al, my oncologist. It’s an opportunity to refocus my attention on the science of all this… and ask about another spot of blood on the Charmin this morning. I’m approaching the half way mark in my treatment so I assume that the radiation has done some of its work already.

Nurse Grace asks the usual questions about urinary discomfort and troubles with my “back passage.” Yes, I did cramp up a few days ago and took some Imodium… then got constipated and started to bleed. Nurse Grace suggests that I drink much more water… and eat more fruits and vegetables… and sit in a warm salty bath. It’s all so banal… no panic here… it’s just a little rain on my picnic.

So I ask Al (his real name is Andrew) to explain what’s happening in my prostate just now. He says that the cancer cells divide rapidly. Radiation is snipping my prostate DNA into confetti… so when the cancer cells try to divide, they can’t read the secret blueprint… and my immune system mops up all the lost parts. Now the rest of the prostate DNA is also getting shredded, but these cells are not poised to divide just yet. But when they do, a few months or years from now, they will die too… one by one. By the end of radiation, most or all of my prostate cells will be so damaged that they will no longer be able to replace themselves. My cure will be determined by watching my prostate activity slowly diminish to near zero.

They will monitor me for five years and I suppose that a sudden increase in prostate factors in my blood will be a warning that renegade prostate cells lived to party elsewhere... lymph nodes, lungs, bone.

The radiation is also damaging my bladder and large intestine… but to a lesser extent because peripheral tissue is getting a much lower dose. The slow, steady series of radiation exposures is intended to give time for the collateral damage to repair itself. Weekends off are for healing.

Before this all started, I didn’t have much of an idea about what the prostate actually does. (and maybe you don’t either.) It makes the fluid part of male ejaculation. So my days as a would-be porn star are rapidly coming to an end. If you see my name writ large on some Amsterdam, red-light marquee, don’t believe a word of it. Probably an imposter trying to cash in on my reputation, charm and superhero physique…. Oh yeah, and the twelve dozen condoms I wanted for Christmas? Give ‘em to charity.

Sometimes doors open… sometimes they close. Eat your vegetables.

Counting minutes through the secret passage

2006-06-26T17:45:00.000-04:00

June 26, 2006 (16th treatment) Counting and accounting.

2006-06-26T17:31:00.000-04:00

Over the past thirty five years, ever since I moved here, Toronto has become steadily more and more exciting. Waves of immigrants have brought new food and music. Enlightened governments have supported cultural development. Almost everyone, it seems, is a part time artist or knows someone who is. Smart urban planners, inspired by the late Jane Jacobs, have kept neighborhoods vital and walkable. But as a consequence, the city has become a much more expensive place to live.

During this course of cancer treatments, I am also catching up on book keeping and reviewing spending habits. I’ll bet you do this too from time to time. So I empty my wallet of bulky receipts to try and discover where my money flies to. Food, naturally. And lately with health concerns in the foreground, we’ve been eating organic as much as possible. I do think a careful diet is a good strategy. The slow accumulation of agrichemicals is creepy in the least. But so is the accumulation of paranoid dogma. A high-fat fudge brownie once a month is a good thing. It keeps you humble.

Back to my wallet full of receipts…. After pulling out the grocery receipts this week, there was nothing left but parking chits. And these are especially important just now. Hospital parking lots are among the most expensive places to rest in the entire city. Each day, I try to arrive as close to my appointment as possible. In the waiting room, I glance at my watch to mark the passage of half hour chunks of parking costs. If treatments are delayed by an hour, it could cost as much as a fresh filet of wild arctic char. Why am I obsessing? Maybe there’s nothing else to do. Maybe the ennui is making my imagination itch for a new challenge. Maybe my fear of cancer has become second fiddle to fear of Visa. If so, this is notable in itself. If you are diagnosed with a treatable cancer, keep in mind that some day soon you may worry more about the ticking of your parking meter.

So I began counting minutes as well as treatments. I have discovered that there’s a faster, but hidden, way to walk from the underground parking lot to the cancer treatment wing. It goes out through a narrow underground passage, past some long abandoned construction materials hiding under a beautifully deteriorating canvas drop cloth… and then up an asphalt path to the yard across from the T Wing where I get treated. I’ve also realized that if I am a few minutes early, I can constructively use those minutes to search for the parking space closest to the exit. When exiting, I try to psych out fellow drivers to guess which will take the longest at the teller booth. There are two tellers, so the right guess could save a couple minutes.

OK. So you think I’ve gone crazy. But I did save $3.50 today with thirty seconds to spare! That's half a filet! One filet of arctic char is a daily dose of heart-healthy, omega-three oil. One brownie is 20% of our daily, heart-damaging, trans fat allowance. By rough accounting, finding that secret passage out of the parking lot has erased the effect of 2.5 poisonous brownies.

If you see me on the street and I start telling you this story, just avert your eyes and keep moving… don’t step on any cracks... promise me… not a single one… and wash your hands frequently... use that stuff in the squirt bottle near the elevator door... and only eat brownies once a month… and only after eating wild fish... but you can eat fish without brownies any time… any time…promise me....

I’ve had sixteen treatments… sixteen and counting….

a wing

2006-06-24T03:11:00.000-04:00

June 23, 2006 (15th treatment) An uneventful day.

2006-06-24T01:48:00.000-04:00

For the past two months I’ve been struggling to fit into a new self image. A week or so after the first shock of my diagnosis I’d go on long walks alone and say the words, “I have cancer.” out loud to myself. It’s a chillingly succinct soliloquy. Even if you don’t have cancer, you can scare the buttons right off your shirt with those three words. Few sentences this short have so much muscle. It took miles and miles of walking to tire it out.

Later, I dared to look into the bathroom mirror and speak those three words to the face speaking them back at me. But I couldn’t watch the eyes because they seemed so frightened and ashamed. A pathetic mockery, really. I didn’t know what to do with the image… this darkly self-indulgent inward spiral. But it wasn’t an entirely unproductive performance because it scared me into action. For the next few weeks nothing I discovered about my cancer was nearly as terrifying as those three words spoken into a mirror.

Speaking those words was a reluctant rebirth. I’m different now. Friends see me differently… and I see the world differently. I hope my treatment cures me… but I also hope that I never take my life for granted again.

During my treatment today, one of the radiologists said she had read my blog. Like a bridge emerging in a fog, we now have something to talk about beyond our daily chores.

Today, I wished my good friend, Tanya, a happy summer in Nova Scotia. We’ve been steady friends through many crises. Nova Scotia is her well-deserved sanctuary and she’ll be on the road heading east in thirty-six hours.

Tonight, I went to the Power Plant with Ashley and saw some stunning new drawings by the Inuit artist, Annie Pootoogook. It is her first major exhibition. Great artists create their own languages and, as Burroughs claims, language is a virus. Our human voice might go hoarse and die if it weren't infected by art.

The radiation can produce intestinal cramps and I felt a bit of that tonight… but three months ago, I would have credited the same rumbling to a sour sandwich from a sunny street vendor… or a bit of dim sum that somehow got too ripe. When I left the washroom stall, a large, skinhead man with camouflage makeup stood bare-chested at the sink, scrubbing away his disguise. He was a street mime at the end of his shift. We shared political disdain for a world too addicted to war. Then we traded business cards.

These are all normal events in the big city. My cancer has faded into the background, at least for today. Today was uneventful. Today, nothing special happened… or everything that happened today was special.… It’s a matter of placing today in the right context.

Today, I had a normal life with cancer in the background.

Say that into a mirror and notice how much sharper everything gets.

2006-06-23T02:03:00.000-04:00

June 22, 2006 (14th treatment) Theatre and anti theatre.

2006-06-23T01:50:00.000-04:00

Five times a week, I sit in the same waiting room. When my turn is called, I pass the same bank of computers and enter the same treatment room. So far, I’ve been treated by perhaps eight therapists who work in teams of three or four. These teams change in compositions according to vacations, patient loads, maintenance breaks and the like. But our routine remains predictable.

I’ve written that radiation therapy is tedious. I should apologize to my therapists because their work rhythm is much more grueling than mine. I sit beside some very sick people who depend upon their diligence. The machines work long into the evening treating maybe four patients per hour. Over a normal career, my therapists will save tens of thousands of lives simply by repeating the same cycle of measurements and adjustments again and again.

Four hundred years ago, my helpers might have draped my body in wriggling leaches, fermenting leaves and rancid fat. Torch smoke would have filled the night air. Shadows would have played an arcane mime against mossy walls. There would have been prayers in obscure languages… curses… spells.... Instead of numbers, an invocation of forest plants with magical names… a more pleasurable touch or a harsh one… a gaze directly into my eyes... more intensely penetrating.

Is this why the strangest alternative therapies attract so many adherents? The avoidance of statistics and beam geometries in favour of more baroque theatre?

But it’s the twenty first century now, and medicine has become more Bauhaus… cool streamlined and rational …. Each day I hear them calling numbers to each other. “82.3, 91, 84, 88.” They are measuring the length of the beam to my skin. They add the depth of my flesh from the CAT scans in my chart. They leave me lying as still as stone with numbers circling like ghosts.

The beam shall always travel exactly one meter to my prostate. It will transect my body at four precise angles. It will buzz for six seconds, twelve seconds, ten seconds and eight seconds, pausing at each of my compass points…. After a minute, the door will open and my silent solo ends. The stage will fill with my helpers again and they will clean the surfaces I might have touched and start to read the next patient’s chart.

If this were theatre, the box office would be covered in cobwebs. The ticket seller would be gray and stiff; a very long ash hanging solid off his frozen cigarette. But I am not in the spot light. I am under the beam…

I wonder how this experience could become more social. The social dimension is critical because art heals by being social. But is personal interaction critical to this collaboration? Might it be a distraction?

I only know my own instincts. I print some business cards with this URL on it and pass them out to my therapists. This is not a story for prime time TV… but it is a story of the time we are sharing.

Lessons

2006-06-22T09:56:00.000-04:00

June 21, 2006 (13th treatment) Unexpected side effects

2006-06-22T07:46:00.000-04:00

I’ve expected all sort of physical maladies as a consequence of my cancer, but I did not anticipate the social side effects…and some of these have been surprising. Today I met a South Asian woman with her husband in the waiting room. She joined me over the jigsaw puzzle and for fifteen minutes neither one of us found any pieces that fit. It didn’t matter. Where did this fifteen minutes of spare time come from? Does cancer produce extra time?… or merely call my attention to it?

My mother, Mary, is in her mid eighties and hasn’t traveled much in about ten years. But three days ago, she left the comfort of familiar routines in suburban America to come and visit. My brother and nephew have driven half way across the continent to bring her here. Although it remains unspoken, I know that they have come to check up on me.

My mother has serious trouble walking. For the first time in her life, she agreed to being taken for a public stroll in a wheelchair. We passed quite a few pan handlers on the street. But none asked us for money. One sincerely wished us a good day. Another folded his cardboard, begging sign in half and hid it as we approached him. He was embarrassed to beg from an old woman in a wheelchair. He displayed his sign again the very second we passed by. I never knew it was impolite to beg from the infirm. I don’t think the rule is written down anywhere but somehow we all know it.

My mother is not computer literate but a spare computer has materialized among us. Her visit has become a family exercise in teaching her Internet skills. Computer navigation is amazingly complex when examined move by move, but she threw extraordinary attention to the task. She wants to read this blog on line.

Tonight, we had a long supper. Berenicci brought an unusual but delicious rosé from the Côte de Provence. Pink wine goes well with white haired mothers. Dennis, announced that he has to get rid of a manly, midlife indulgence back in Rhode Island; his 1967 aqua blue Mustang. Parking costs and insurance are trumping Sunday cruises in the way-back machine.

We all fantasized about chucking the routines of an orderly life and hitting the road… we could join the strip-club circuit. All five of us… four baby boomers with salt and pepper hair and a matron in a wheel chair. It would be a blast! We could develop our stripper patter while cruising mid America on the plush wide seats of an aqua blue mustang! We’d need stage names. We’d combine the name of a childhood pet with a street once lived on. Mom would be called Bossy Grandview… Dennis will be Blacky Argonne. Shirley is Smokey Dufferin. Berenicci is Petey Grace… and I will be Goldie Spring.

Today, as a unexpected side effect of my cancer, a puzzle refused to be solved… beggars stopped begging, a woman discovered new powers in cyberspace and after a bottle of pink wine, five aging wannabe strippers dreamed of hitting the road in a six cylinder Mustang. Keep an eye out for a pale, smooth streak of aqua blue… it’s a new stretch mark in the fabric of time.

The target

2006-06-21T01:24:00.000-04:00

June 20, 2006 (12th treatment) Pictures as weapons

2006-06-21T01:04:00.000-04:00

My family has come to visit from Rhode Island and Cleveland. Shirley’s pneumonia has degenerated into a raspy cough. But all my domestic pleasures and chores are interrupted daily by a three-hour trip to the radiation beam. I'm almost a third of the way through my course of treatments and I feel both experienced and a bit tired of this daily obligation. I don’t think I will feel this way when the finish line is in clear sight. But just now time seems about as fluid as cold oatmeal. Impatience is deadly because it stimulates my imagination to play the “what-if? game”

What if this treatment doesn’t work? Surgery, hormones…chemo? On the far side of treatment number thirty eight, there will be time to ask this question… and ways to answer it. Just now however, my premature, hypothetical meanderings only threaten to hijack this summer solstice.

Today is Tuesday and every Tuesday I meet with Nurse Grace and she asks the usual questions… urinary comfort, bowel function? It’s hard to answer these questions statistically because I don’t go to the bathroom with a score card. I’ll try. But today, in the Hospital men’s room, I did stand shoulder to shoulder with a man who shivered and grimaced at his urinal… and panted in agony. I’m not going through anything like that just now. I’m really OK.

I haven’t asked for permission to use staff names or faces in my public writing, so I’ll call my oncologist, Al. It’s not his real name but to have an anonymous character this important, just won’t work. I hope he’s amused. Anyhow Al asks me if I have any questions. I say, “only technical ones.”

He leans forward and says, “What do you want to know?” I am grateful that he’s taking the time. I sense that we both share a similar, how-things-work , curiosity….

I ask questions about dosages and beam angles. His answers are fascinating. He pulls open my chart and shows me the targeting data and the calculations they use to maximize the effect and minimize the collateral damage. The more detail I learn, the more I am assured that all that whirring and beeping will add up to something.

Before my diagnosis I assumed that the holy grail “cure for cancer” would be chemical one… and I suppose that many cancers really are beaten with the latest pills and drips. But now I understand that mine, at least, is being battled with digital pictures.

Medical imaging has come a very long way in the past few generations and I can’t emphasize enough just how much computer images of my internal tissues are making treatment possible. The linear accelerator has a camera attachment. It’s about the size of a coffee table and the technicians sometimes take it off and lean it against the wall. When attached to the machine, it rotates around me directly opposite the beam aperture. Sometimes they take pictures just to check that things are still lining up. These pictures are fighting my cancer. It’s all in the details. Computers control radiation beams through tight spaces imagined from three-dimensional, digital pictures made in invisible light.

Al tells me he appreciates my blog because Doctors don’t often get a chance to hear what their patients are feeling. I pull out my pocket camera. He takes my direction and poses his pen over my chart. I’m taking the pictures now… digital pictures to put into my computer and post to friends tonight…. His pictures and mine are fighting this thing from both directions.

Face to face

2006-06-19T19:11:00.000-04:00

June 19, 2006 (11th treatment) Meeting your skeleton.

2006-06-19T18:57:00.000-04:00

Whether I think I’m the son of Zeus, child of God or a good Darwinian joke written in cosmic lint doesn’t really matter much. I am what I am. A few months ago I passed through the cancer portal and for a moment the cosmos went mute… nothing could penetrate my shock. It’s important to note here, that gradually the bluebirds began to sing again. “Zipidee do daa, zippity aay. My, oh my. What a wonderful day!” I feel healthy. I’m happy. I know that stress will change things again some day but for now, things are just peachy.

The treatment went well today. Things were a bit behind schedule. The jigsaw puzzle I worked on last week remained unfinished and there was a man wearing a tan Tiley hat bent over it. I wanted to point out to him all the pieces I put into place four days ago but he seemed absorbed… and absorbed is a good thing.

I can write now about a test I had a few days after my diagnosis. I was sent immediately to have a series of about twenty head-to-toe x-rays and another set of scans to be done after being injected with a radioisotope. This second set was especially interesting because I was technically radioactive for a few days and these scans were records of my bones glowing inside the darkness of my flesh! Not in bright visible light... but in some wavelength the computer could only see. I asked the radiologist if I could have a look and she said that a lot of people are too scared to look. But I did look and I could see my entire skeleton glowing! It was fascinating!

Years ago I had some other head and neck scans and x-rays made for another ailment and I got copies of them. The above (quite handsome) profile is one I show to my New Media students at U of T as a way of introducing myself on the first day of class. It isn’t quite honest because I’ve Photoshopped all the glowing dental work out… vanity wins again. But the image will serve my point today. It’s OK to look at your own skeleton.

I once visited a small church outside of Prague, called the Ossuary in Sedlec. Due to the high cost of cemetery real estate in the late nineteenth century, some 40,000 human bones were exhumed and used to decorate this church. Among many strange bone mosaics, there are two alcoves, each with mountains of skulls… each skull was about as special as a discarded walnut shell. It’s hard to imagine that each of these once contained a lifetime of memories… images of naked lovers in morning slumber… the sound of one’s own name spoken in a mother’s voice… the feel of a pebble in a shoe… a sneeze felt from the inside… the pressure of a fart suppressed until a better moment.

My entire universe is squeezed into my brain inside of my skull. My skeleton is an exquisite bit of natural engineering. The universe has not been lazy in bringing me here.

So I was thinking about the fear I felt two months ago…. the shock of coming face to face with my own mortality. I don’t quite know how to say this… but imagine the softest part of your heart. There’s a security guard standing just outside and he’s wearing a bad toupee and his sidearm is only a plastic, Roy Rogers, six shooter. If you push right past, he won't resist any more than the wind resists a breath.

On the other side, you can glimpse the black hole of your own death. Suddenly every remaining moment becomes a jewel.
If I could start again, I’d play less solitaire and do the jitterbug more!

Zipidee do daa, zippity aay. My, oh my! What a.....

A dark forest with no mossy rest

2006-06-16T19:08:00.000-04:00

June 16, 2006 (10th treatment) Dark forest with small mosquito

2006-06-16T19:02:00.000-04:00

Last night I had an unwet dream. Without putting too fine a line on it, I was frolicking in the dark woods with a beautifully willing woman. But the forest was filled with marauding zombies and I kept looking over my shoulder with an eye for danger… we kept searching for some small patch of mossy solitude but none was to be found. I couldn’t lay down with her long enough to get it up… and she was increasingly disdainful of my lack of courageous, sexual enthusiasm.

So what was my unwet dream all about? Shirley says all the people in our dreams are aspects of our selves. So in dreamtime, I was both an anxiety-ridden man and an impatient woman… and an army of long-armed, coal-eyed, zombie boogiemen splashing through the mud toward us.

What’s a good erection worth? Google lists 863,000,000 sites for the search word, “Viagra” and 715,000,000 sites for “Cialis”. Add those together and it’s a billion and a half! If you don’t think erections are important to men, stay after school and write Viagra on the chalkboard a billion times. Better yet, phone your broker, forget Apple, sell your dusty shreds of Enron at any cost and invest your retirement fund in Pfizer and Eli Lilly… because baby boomer men are not going down easily.

When I first started discussing my cancer with friends, I was surprised at the reactions of a few women friends (especially older ones) who scoffed at my fear of impotence. “No big deal.” was their reaction. My men friends, however, immediately shrank and groaned and said they’d be willing to trade an arm, two good legs, one eyeball and maybe their favorite yellow Lamborghini to preserve their ability to get hard.

To keep the record straight, I’m not experiencing any sexual side effects from either the cancer or the radiation…yet… but there are high odds that sexual dysfunction will be a consequence of treatment… a 50% chance with surgery… 30% with radiation. I’ll never have enough of a poker face to say that those odds don’t really piss me off.

I have developed a newfound admiration for the optimism of amputees. One good arm, one good eyeball, a compassionate woman and a prescription to Viagra… those are the minimum necessities of a good life. I never thought I’d stoop so low as to be posting crap like this, but a good nightmare needs to be stared down. And now that I’ve mentioned Viagra four times, Google can find my nightmare, too.

But I must confess that I’ve felt very little physical discomfort through all this. Most of my bitching is the just the wimpy indulgence of my neurotic imagination. But I seen no reason to pull a Liddy and hold my hand in the fire just to prove my bravado. Writing this blog is more like standing in a hot shower and watching the day’s grime trickle away.

After today’s treatment, I tied my shoes next to short, well-fed, Italian man. He was waiting for his first treatment and he was nervous. I’m not a novice anymore so I told him about the toreador with the white veil and the masterpiece on the ceiling and the buzzy sounds. We poked at each other and talked about it all… even the biopsy part last winter where it felt like a staple gun up the ass. “Pinches.” I said. “Like a bee sting.” He shrugged. “Like a mosquito.” We laughed. Then they called his name.

Life is rich. Ten down, twenty eight to go.

Puzzled and waiting

2006-06-15T23:26:00.000-04:00

June 15, 2006 (9th treatment) Jigsaw puzzles.

2006-06-15T22:35:00.000-04:00

In a cruel twist of nature, Shirley got sick a few days ago, too and I got really worried. After my treatment yesterday, I took her and her feverish pallor to the emergency room at another hospital. She had chest pains, shortness of breath and high temperature… and there I was, in another waiting room, sitting beside her. She nods off. I buy her ginger ale. After nine hours of x-rays, blood tests and electrocardiograms, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. A midnight visit to a pharmacy across town and a small jar of antibiotics has made her better… but, as I write this, my mother, brother and nephew are traveling practically half way across the continent by car to check up on me. I’m relieved that Shirley’s a lot better today but her slow recuperation will complicate the hospitality we had planned. Being sick wastes a lot of time.

Today, my waiting room has a table with maybe fifteen jigsaw puzzles boxes on it. Like the knitting baskets and magazines on other tables, these are intended to give us some distraction from the worry. But I really think most of us would much rather worry. Never tell someone not to worry… at least not until they've worried out loud a little bit.

Imagine fifteen boxes on a single table and a few hundred random puzzle solvers barely caring to solve them during a few absent-minded minutes each day. Some of the pieces will wind up in the wrong boxes. Others will get kicked under a chair and might be swept into the trash at five in the morning. But that doesn’t really phase me. It’s like yesterday. I saw a 1982 Equinox magazine in the waiting room. This antique was from the twilight time just before personal computers changed everything. But nostalgia was not enough to distract me, either. I’m just waiting my turn on the machine and thinking about the spot of blood I found this morning on a fold of swan-soft, four ply.

Contrary to new age wisdom, worry and anger are very useful emotions… useful because they peel back the smiley-button mask of unfettered optimism. Nothing in a fully-aware adult life is quite as perfectly perfect as unfettered optimism, except maybe a fluffy white kitten tangled in a ball of pink yarn… and who needs wallpaper and matching bed sheets like that?

I absolutely do not want to have cancer any more!… not even a little bit of it!… and if I could run that scummy pig right off the road, I’d do it without a blink... and then I’d laugh at his sad, sour, squashed ass in my rear view mirror… maybe throw my Echo into reverse just to flatten his slimy, smirk, real flat… and do it again and again until nothing's left behind but some dirty, rubbery bits like the dust of a soft, pink eraser... that and a bad memory fading fast.

But now, the only thing I can do is politely sit in this waiting room…waiting politely.

Today I am directed to a different vault with a different machine. Almost everything is the same except that the painting on the ceiling is an abstraction of clouds… and amid familiar whirring and beeping, there’s soft rock singer crooning, “Baby, Baby, Baby.”

If you know someone living with a life-threatening disease, please let them get pissed off once in a while. Kitten wallpaper is good only in very, very small doses.

Not my pillow.

2006-06-15T01:21:00.000-04:00

June 14, 2006 (8th treatment) Routines and variations

2006-06-15T00:35:00.000-04:00

The face in the morning mirror is never quite the same. Some days it is rested and confident; other days gruff and crusty. We’re probably all like that secretly. It would be boring to wake up the same every day.

I’m feeling much better now that my treatments are routine. With novelty past, it feels like the warm-up leg of this marathon is behind me. There is a certain ritual I share with the therapists but now I am beginning to see variations. I do not always have the same therapist and I’m embarrassed to admit that their names have slipped my mind. It’s important that I write them down.

Each day that I meet a new one, he or she asks my birthday. (May 6, 1947) I think they are double checking to make sure they blast the right bad nugget out of the right guy. But once in a while when they ask my birthday, I think they are checking to make sure that I’m not a kinky imposter sneaking in for a freebee zap. Great plot for a movie; hypochondriac imposter seeks intimate attention in all the right places. Maybe not Oscar material…hmmm.

But today I met a new therapist and she asked for my phone number instead. And things were different inside the vault too. Usually the routine is simple. Pants to my knees. Appointed toreador flags my genitals with a white serviette. I lay down. Palette moves me upward like a slow elevator. Laser beams seek out my ellipsis tattoos. Therapists measure a few places and call out numbers to each other. Someone gently moves my ankles. Oh, and I did notice last week, that my right foot comes to rest at a wider angle than my left. Then someone reaches to hold my hips and twists me very gently into position all the time calling out directions to the therapist eyeing the laser and tattoo on the other side. Then they retouch the tattoo targets to better show up on remote video. The room lights come back on. Then out of the corner of my eye I see them (all three of them) silently move through the vault door, white lab coats flowing behind. The last one out hits a button near the door and a beep starts. I count maybe twelve beeps. I assume it is the door closing. For the next few moments I'm in a private room.

Then a series of whirrs and hums and ticks begins… and one funny sound like thin water gurgling… but more metallic… about three seconds worth. I am beginning to associate mechanical events to these sounds but I don’t know if I am right. One represents the linear accelerator rotating around me… another represents the aperture adjusting … then the buzz lasting about ten seconds is the beam being generated. (I think that’s it).

I always get four exposures from four directions. Bottom, then left, right and top. I don't know why they don't do the top before the right... it's clockwise... maybe a different aperture?... I'll get back to you on that. The four beams cross at the prostate while surrounding tissue gets only a quarter dose. Then the three white coats float in again. They lower the palette, lift my genital veil (they avert their eyes while doing this) and I sit up and zip up. They disinfect the palette while I am tying my shoes and they begin to read the next patient’s chart… pretty banal, really…but probably strange to imagine if you’ve never been here.

Today however, the new therapist spent a long time measuring me. They all left. The door closed and beeped twelve times. But then it opened again,beeping again, and they returned to check their aim again. No further adjustments. They left again. But after the first zap, they all came in yet again, to check my alignment...again. Laser sightlines were still right on their targets. I had remained in perfect register. After the second zap they returned once again to see if I had moved. There’s a zen issue at stake here. Was I being still enough? Perfectly zen still?… or was I doing a prohibited jitterbug when they had their backs turned? I had not moved. Keeping my target very still is the only job I have here… the most important job I have all day. “OK…” she says “you’re still aligned… don’t move.” But after the third zap they again returned floating through the vault door to check on my stillness. I had been very, very, very still. Zen still. OK still. Finally the fourth zap came and I was finished.

I'm not telling this because I was annoyed... I wasn't... it's notable only because it was a variation on the routine.

So what’s the lesson here? Banality? Tedium? No. There are variations between the personal discipline of one person and the next…. One is confident, the next obsessively careful. Even while these treatments have a scientific precision, personal styles emerge.

And what has the silent watcher observed about me? I can make my body very still but cannot quiet my curiosity. Strange thing… how the mind watches while the body submits. Eight down, thirty to go.

The linear accelerator hovers inches above my crotch.

2006-06-13T17:47:00.000-04:00

June 13, 2006 (7th treatment) I am too many cooks.

2006-06-13T17:42:00.000-04:00

In the last episode, Liz and Dick outdid each other in a shameful argument over treatment options. When the smoke finally cleared, Dick and Liz agreed to do both… orthodox AND natural medicine. What could be better? Peace in the valley and two kicks at the can.

It’s been a long weekend since my last treatment. Yesterday the therapists had a “Union Holiday”. Summer is short. We all need an extra day in the sun. I pulled weeds in the garden… threw down some manure too. Is that what this double approach to cancer treatment is? … weeding and feeding?

Today was my weekly meeting with Nurse Grace. Her questions about urinary comfort are difficult to answer because I’m now sensitized to the issue. I offered that I had been taking lots of vitamins and supplements. Nurse Grace immediately began to shake her head in warning. “The radiation kills the cancer cells through oxidation. Taking antioxidants counteracts the therapy. Wait until after the treatments to take antioxidants.”

Ouch.

Good news and bad news. First the good… Orthodox medicine recognizes the value of at least some nutritional supplements. Bad news is that these natural remedies might also be keeping the cancer cells healthy enough to survive the radiation. Maybe I’ll do something bad tonight.

Always let the right hand know what the left is doing. To everything there is a season… weed, weed, weed.

My target profile

2006-06-09T20:13:00.000-04:00

June 9, 2006 (6th treatment) Imagine Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in Virginia Woolf.

2006-06-09T19:38:00.000-04:00

If the hospital is an architecture of membranes, so are personal relationships around the cancer patient. Friends, relations, lovers and ex lovers, still willing to live on the same planet, all rally to the cause. Add strangers, Mother Theresa and a flock of snake oil vendors and the arena can get pretty noisy. Membranes between humans are semi permeable and osmotic. Some things get through; other things don’t. Good advice, for example, comes from so many directions that it must be filtered.

In times where so much is at stake, the debate about strategy takes on enormous importance. So here’s the thing in a nutshell. Doubters characterize orthodox medicine as just another, irritatingly rational, authoritarian, mechanistic, profit-driven, mostly-male-minded, military campaign. Alternative therapies spring from Mother Earth and the wisdom of ancient goddesses… sweet berries and fragrant flowers instead of chainsaws and dynamite. Forgive my characterization… I’m exaggerating just to keep the story short.

Sometimes I feel like I’m carrying a stack of textbooks as tall as a top hat and the important pages keep blowing away in the wind. I really appreciate all the advice. It represents the affection of friends. But it also drives me crazy, especially when the voices get dogmatic and insistent.

I’m not a man insensitive to Nature. I spent my youth in forests and find my most sublime peace there. On my 100th birthday, please give me a wee glass of Bushmills and if I don’t survive the sip, scatter my ashes at Splatter Lake.

Before the multinational drug companies pitched camp on Wall Street, people all over the world used jungles, forests, fields and oceans as their most trusted pharmacies. And some of it worked very well. I do believe in the potency of herbs. I am a child of the sixties after all, and I did follow Don Juan part way down his path. I also understand the logic of paying close attention to nutrition. Since the moment of my birth, everything that my body has become has come to me through my mouth. From Mother’s milk to truffles and tofu hotdogs, I am what I’ve eaten. (Did I mention carcinogenic red jelly beans?)

I do agree that both orthodox medicine and traditional remedies have value… It’s just that I long for the texture and detail that rigorous rationality brings to any discourse. Nothing deserves a blank cheque.

The curtain goes up. Imagine Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This scene (cut from the original) has them trying to cure Dick’s cancer while dining with wide-eyed, medical students.

Dick and Liz shout… spit and sparks fly everywhere.

Liz: Stop whining! Eat your bowl of devil root capsules right now or I’ll feed it to the dog! He deserves the goddam cure more than you any day! Cynical load of bull….
Dick: Eye of toad, tongue of newt! Prove that it works!
Liz: Don’t be a stubborn, self-defeating, sub-standard moron!
Dick: Just because you’ve swallowed the fairy tale doesn’t mean that I will! It’s just more consumer fluff packaged by hucksters at the Touchy-Feely Franchise!
Liz: No wonder your Kindergarten Teacher hated you!
Dick: Don’t go there! That’s my business! Just prove your magic powder works!
Liz: Three billion Chinamen can’t be wrong!
Dick: And another three billion superstitious, believers claim that JC waltzed across the Sea of Galilee! Do you believe that’s the literal truth, too? They believe it! Does that make it true for you too?
Liz: Oi vey! Illegal Blow! Illegal Blow! Herbs are real…
Dick: Real witchcraft unless you test it. Just show me your statistics!
Liz: Numbers Shmumbers! Go ahead! Lay ALL your bets on the death ray. See if I care!
Dick: A good double blind study would help. Why are you afraid of that?
Liz: Logic isn’t everything, Mr. Spock!! You got silicon for brains or what!? Trust in something for a change! Trust in culture!
Dick: If you really believe feel good remedies will save my soul, maybe you could give me a nice foot rub.
Liz sneers: I’ll check my agenda… Wednesday’s out… ask me nice on Saturday.
Dick sneers back: Saturday?… Not good for me. I’ll be out shooting whooping cranes with the Boys!

The med students put down their Chardonnay and make a quiet move for the door.

Liz and Dick are both right. There’s as much power in the heart as the brain. Living should not be an either/or proposition.

So, I buy some herbs and give Shirley the job of keeping me on schedule. She needs something proactive to do because this disease is hurting her too. I’ll swallow my dumb pride with a few roots and berries. It will make the eight glasses of water taste a bit sweeter.

2006-06-09T00:31:00.000-04:00

June 8, 2006 (5th treatment) An architecture of membranes.

2006-06-09T00:12:00.000-04:00

Doors, curtains and sheets.

The boundary between public and private is complex territory. One could study the hospital as an architecture of membranes. Yesterday, I noted three in particular. The first is a simple curtain separating the inner waiting room from the technician’s station. On one side, gray-haired men wait in a few chairs. The man next to me has a belly like a Chinese plum. I ask about his treatment. He had surgery last winter. Couldn’t get out of bed after it. We exchange diagnosis stats. His has spread. So he’s doing radiation as a follow up. Now he has only six doses to go. He'd be happy just to keep going fishing for the next fifteen years.

Some very old home-making magazines loiter on the side table. I can’t imagine many men reading these cheery albums. Glossy optimism is fine but these magazines are not the distraction I need. I browse a National Geographic about Alaska. Nice picture of the polar bear looking so statuesque, turned just right to catch the light. You can probably imagine. But I can’t pay much attention to reading. I am thinking too much about the conversation I just had. My stomach churns.

On the other side of the curtain, technicians in white lab coats stare into the soft blue glow of computer monitors. The curtain separates those who know from those who don’t. Knowing is like shining a flash light into a dark place. I want to know what they know on the other side of the curtain.

The second boundary is much more formidable. It’s a large, very thick, steel and lead door between the control station and the radiation machine. Nobody stays in the room with me during the treatment and I imagine that the door closes although I can’t see it. This door is like a bank vault door, but built for safety. The entire room is encased in thick lead. So on one side of the door, the sick are being cured and on the other side, the healthy are kept safe from the dangers of the cure. Here is the root of popular fear. How can radiation be both safe and dangerous? This vault door resolves the physical divide but not the linguistic one. Time to do some research…shine my flashlight into the dark place….

http://www.radiologyinfo.org/content/therapy/linear_accelerator.htm

So I learn that the radiation is high intensity x-ray and not the emission of a radioactive isotope glowing someplace deep inside… it's not glowing like a red coal in a furnace. It only makes x-rays when it is turned on. I also know that there’s an aperture inside the machine which only allows a very narrow beam out… and only when all safety and targeting conditions are satisfied.

The third boundary is a much more delicate one. I do not have to wear a hospital gown for my treatments. Street clothes are just fine. I simply pull my pants down to my knees and climb onto the table. But there’s always someone there with a small, disposable, paper sheet to cover my… privates. It’s quite like the graceful movement of a toreador. (I wonder if it is a designated task in a routine performed forty times a day) Even though the target tattoo is nested very low in my pubic hair, everything else is covered… a small bit of darkness, where darkness is appropriate.

But the private solitude inside the vault is a strange one filled with beeps, buzzing and whirring... and the reappearance of therapists after my treatment is a welcome sign that today’s task is behind us. Five down… thirty three to go.

Curtain

2006-06-08T17:27:00.000-04:00

2006-06-07T20:01:00.000-04:00

June 7, 2006 (4th treatment)

2006-06-07T19:56:00.000-04:00

Time, it seems, either moves too fast or too slowly. No traffic jam today and in spite of a long waiting list for treatment, I was in and out in record time. It’s getting to be routine… and now the faces of staff are familiar, too. Soon I’ll recognize repeating patients. I first thought of this therapy as my summer job. Now I appreciate that it is also a full-time job for all the doctors, nurses, technicians, maintenance staff… and the women running the snack bar. This should be no surprise but I’ve never had a long-running awareness of hospital society except maybe while watching MASH… not a good frame of reference.

Today I began to understand the hospital as a kind of factory… but not in the pejorative sense. But it is certainly run with assembly line precision. Shift workers keep patients moving through predictable processes. Inventories of materials are well monitored. The patient population is another kind of inventory requiring even more careful record keeping. But if this is a factory, what is it producing? It produces more life.

Today, I saw a man on a gurney being wheeled down a corridor, his eyes tired but open. Why was this man here? He was asking for help to grab a bit more life… gambling on technology for a few added moments of consciousness. And that’s what this factory produces… added moments of magical consciousness.

Yesterday, I feared getting too acquainted with the perforations in the acoustic tile over my head on the radiation table. I wasn’t quite truthful. The folks here have anticipated my ennui. They’ve solicited artists to paint paintings on the overhead tiles… to give patients something to focus on during radiation.

I won’t give a professional critique of the ceiling painting. It’s best to just let it be. I once visited the Louvre and stood across from DaVinci’s Mona Lisa for only a few moments and then I moved on. The painting above the linear accelerator (radiation machine) is not a masterpiece by any measure but if I’m going to be staring at it for the next two months, I ought to give it some respect. So here it is… an eyes wide-open photo of the radiation room ceiling painting from my point of view. Much thanks to the unknown artist for helping fill otherwise troubling consciousness. This painting has made time pass a bit more swiftly just when I needed it to. Four down... thirty four to go.

2006-06-07T19:54:00.000-04:00

Yarns

2006-06-06T20:15:00.000-04:00

June 6, 2006 (Third treatment.)

2006-06-06T19:28:00.000-04:00

Did I say traffic jam? Road rage? After a postponed treatment yesterday, I woke up nightmarish and a little edgy. And then this afternoon, I got a late start to the Hospital. But after a few minutes into my trip, I was stopped by a traffic jam… my wheels feeling as if they were made of thick glue and the road was wet Portland quicksand. So after I take twenty minutes to move just two very short blocks, an angry cabby (from the equally crowded oncoming lane) tries to insert himself into a six-inch space between me and the car in front. He wants to make a U turn. I will not have it! He shouts at me for not letting him in! I yell back, “I’m late for a fucking cancer treatment!” We repeat ourselves maybe five more times (each time with more intensity) and then we just glare at each other inches apart; both clad in automotive armour glued to the pavement.

He’s just trying to make a living! (knot) I’m just trying to drive my own ambulance! (not). He makes the U turn behind me, swings around and somehow blocks the lane, five cars ahead of me. He makes it to the escape route three entire, full minutes before I do. I’ve gained nothing. And he’ll probably spend the wee hours of tomorrow morning in an empty cab outside a donut shop.

The short lesson here is that urgency is frequently irrational. Two grown men yelling at each other in a cloud of blue exhaust will never make the journey easier.

But I AM late for my appointment. And even so, I have to wait in the waiting room because everyone else is running behind schedule, too. On a coffee table in front of me is a communal basket of knitting supplies… balls of coloured yarn and various needles. It has been placed in the waiting room to occupy the time of impatient patients. The nurse finally calls me in for my weekly interview… twenty questions, mostly about my recent bathroom experiences… Pissing too often? Burning? Farting too much? Bleeding yet?… OK so far.

Treatment #3 progresses per routine. I lie there hoping that I will never learn to name the individual perforations in the ceiling tile above me. The small hole north of the two big ones is called… forget it.

Today’s lesson. I ought to take up knitting… maybe start a knitting club… and invite a lot of cabbies… serve tea.

June 5-6, 2006, (Third treatment postponed)

2006-06-06T11:06:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, my session was cancelled. The Hospital phoned in the afternoon saying that there were technical problems. Even machines get sick, sometimes. My magic extractor machine (Linear Accelerator) was down for repair. I’ll have to ask for details. I was most surprised, though, to feel disappointment. Surprised, perhaps, because a few weeks ago I was depressed and angry and dreading having any treatment at all…. Now I was a bit annoyed at having been stood up. Buddhists have a meditation technique called, “the silent watcher” in which the goal is to become aware of the flowing of our thoughts. This was a good example. I was angry at the prospect of a treatment one day; and a few days later, annoyed that the treatment was postponed.

This morning, I awoke from a nightmare. A doctor was rudely trying to punch a fiber optic scope into my abdomen. I squirmed in protest and he said to just grow up and behave myself. I continued to resist. He said, “OK, OK, I’ll disinfect first. Stop squirming!” And, in dream drama he tried to pour a cold, thin, umber coloured fluid onto my belly. I squirmed again and he missed his aim. Now cold fluid dribbled down my left hip. “Stop squirming!” he said and, as he poked and someone else tried to hold me down, I awoke…. A convenient escape to reality.

So the silent watcher observes that my fears are still at work beneath this glib veneer. Max (my friend and shrink) says it’s important to feel all the feelings. So, joking aside, some part of me is terrified.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center has an on-line calculator to calculate odds for survival of various cancers using various treatments. For prostate cancer I went to... http://www.mskcc.org/mskcc/html/10088.cfm . After typing in my stats, I see that there’s a roughly 90% chance of curing this cancer using the method I have chosen. And my treatment has less troubling side effects. So 90% odds are pretty attractive at the poker table.

OK, so rationality counters my fear by posting a neat set of statistics. But the nightmare still festers someplace darkly beneath mathematics and logic. Perhaps all human history can be measured by this duality… reason verses blind terror. That statistical dark10% is a slimy, drooling, smoldering, demon.

So, I must say here that all the real doctors and therapists I’ve encountered are gentle and compassionate. I truly believe that, if this is poker, they are dealing me all the best cards.

As it happens, our basement plumbing sprung a leak so a postponed treatment appointment didn’t produce a vacuum in the ocean of time. Swap the word “Hardware Store” for “Hospital”. There’s always something important waiting for out attention.

2006-06-02T23:51:00.000-04:00

2006-06-02T23:49:00.000-04:00

June 2, 2006 (2nd treatment)

Time flies… Two radiation treatments down and thirty six to go. I sit in the waiting room with a man who has only six treatments left. He grins like a Miami golf pro. This ordeal I’ve braced myself for might not be as rough as I imagined. The hospital is full of seriously damaged people and this well-tanned grin sitting next to me certainly isn’t one of them. “Hallelujah!” he says… and I understand immediately that he’s referring to the imminent end of his tedious routine.

I think, “I’m a rank amateur at this. But I only have thirty six treatments to go…seventy two more traffic jams and I’ll be back to my real life!”

Odd thing…. I have spent my life on a balance beam between delicious self indulgence and careful healthful living. I expect we all do… and we each fudge the balance to our own taste. After a month of sugar free granola, a Big Mac can be a healthy act of defiance. There’s probably a huge, baby boomer market for a good, certified, organic, single-malt scotch… a whiff of peat smoke… a beige label. (I want royalties)

These are some of the things I have suspected caused my cancer. Red jelly beans. Evil politicians. Not enough sex. (that’s probably wishful thinking). Too much sex. (That’s probably Catholic-school guilt). Mysterious crabgrass spray. (My father worked on the Agent Orange project during the Viet Nam War and was always testing potions on the lawn where I wrestled with my brother.) I suspect the mosquito spraying trucks that so magically dispensed the evening fog when I was seven. Maybe it was the fluoroscope at Sears we used for fitting shoes. I also suspect the vile darkroom chemicals I used while making holograms in the 1970’s. But my cancer could have been caused by the pseudo estrogens leaching from those plastic bottles filled with designer spring water I keep drinking. I’ve also read that there’s some evidence that prostate cancer is caused by a rare rodent virus… and I did roll around naked in a farmhouse bed a few times on an old mattress stained perhaps with a bit of mouse. So I don’t know where this came from… and they don’t know… and you don’t know either.

Maybe it’s magnetism or heat from this laptop computer. I think I’ll give up red jelly beans… and evil politicians.

From the moment we’re born, we’re in deep danger of dying and it’s a sure bet that living will kill us all in the end, no matter what we do. In the meantime, I’ll try not to step on kittens… That’s bad form in anyone’s book.

I wrote yesterday about passing through a portal… the shock of receiving a diagnosis. I find it amusing now, when I hear people's strategies for avoiding cancer... not because they aren't worthwhile... the floatation devices under your seat is always worth taking seriously. But I suddenly find prevention strategies amusing because cancer snuck up on me so stealthily that I am no longer in a position to "avoid it". I will definitely give up bottled spring water, now… or maybe I should save it for my yearly Big Mac.

During the antiwar protests in Columbus, Ohio in the 1960's, my campus was locked down under martial law. I stepped onto the front porch to watch the action down at the corner. Suddenly Fred, our hippie neighbor across the street shouted. "Look OUT! They're ON YOUR ROOF!"... The Swat Team was on our roof! They were right over our heads watching all of our exits!! And then they shot a tear gas grenade directly at Fred to shut him up.

So that's what passing through this diagnosis portal is like. Abrupt, urgent and rude… and most of all hellishly disorienting. Now, I hear people on TV chiding us to do this or that to lower our risk of cancer. And I just want to shout, "It's too late! They're already on the roof!"

But I have only thirty two more sessions under the beam. Shirley says that I should imagine the radiation as an army of little cowboys shooting the bad guys one by one. I tried that yesterday but laughing isn’t allowed while under the beam. If I move, I could lose a testicle. Damn cowboys.

I learned today that it’s called a linear accelerator… but I think I’ll call it the “extractor beam” for now. The sessions remind me of Sick Bay on Star Trek with those funny little electronic sounds. Bones, the Doctor, looks serious while performing invisible mending with a widget that hums and whistles.

So I have only seventy two traffic jams to go and I’ll be out of here. Back to a normal life. “Hallelujah!” Some things really are worth celebrating!

2006-06-02T19:41:00.000-04:00

Beginning

2006-06-02T19:33:00.000-04:00

June 1, 2006

About six weeks ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I was 58 years old at the time of diagnosis and a few days later, I spent my 59th birthday watching birds at Point Pelee, indulging myself with campfire marshmallows and the stories of eccentric, bird-whistling friends. Life is sweet. I only know the names of a few birds and I can’t really whistle very well. My French needs a lot of work, too. Life is short.

Where does this tale start? Symptoms, tests, diagnosis... (a puzzle with a seemingly logical solution)... but somehow these fascinating nuggets of medical science diminish in importance after the fact.

"Bad news and good news. We found something." One of those science fiction portals opens in front of me and abruptly vanishes behind me. Life is scary. Through the sudden fog, he says, "We caught it early." But the fog…oooooooooooooooo.

So Shirley and I drive away to a distant horticultural nursery. I stop at a few stoplights and sob... I curse at others. We buy a red flowering Chinese dogwood tree to plant in the front yard where a black walnut used to stand. It rains... or it doesn't. I don't quite remember. Two other guys plant the tree.

Friends and colleagues give me space... But most miraculously, the URGENCY we fill our lives with has become blatantly petty… They give me time… time to do things where deadlines once shouted at me. I think this world would be a better place if we all forgave each other our trumped up urgencies... I mean forgive, as in "to forgive a loan". Most urgency is just a narcissistic ploy to steal time from each other. Time is really the only thing we have. False urgency fuels road rage and intractable war…

Apart from space and time, a few other, quite unexpected, gifts have arrived. My sister, Karen, sent an introductory pulp paperback of sudoko puzzles. There goes my time. And then Berenicci showed up and unwrapped a small snow globe containing a polychrome plastic bust of Nelson Mandela. I brought this souvenir back with me from Jo'burg, maybe five years ago and gave it to her. Berenicci is now loaning it back to me. Nelson spent twenty eight years in prison and finally soars free only to be reincarnated as a souvenir snow globe. Life is unpredictable.

A few weeks ago I had a preparatory pelvic CAT scan to locate my prostate. The therapist placed a small button on each of my hips and another on my pubic bone. After the scan they carefully removed the buttons gave me three small tattoos. These are the tiny, period-shaped dots they will use as registration marks for aligning the radiation beam. Taken together the three dots comprise an ellipsis; my favorite punctuation mark. It looks like this...

I take the ellipsis to mean a meditative pause... shorthand for the phrase, "to be continued." I've always wanted a tattoo but never found a design I could live with. Chance has given me the exact tattoo I needed. Life is ironic, dot, dot, dot.

Eight hours ago I got my first hit of radiation... the first of thirty eight. As I stared at the perforations in the acoustic tile above me, the Chinese dogwood was urgently blooming. On the eighth day, the Cosmos made half-burnt marshmallows.
Life is corny