Finally, today is the eve of the first radiation and first chemo treatment--I think. Let's say that as of 10am California time, I've received no notices of moved dates, wound failure delays, or mechanical breakdown.
I wish this process could have simply started the day after surgery was over, when I was still pliant, and perhaps half-drugged, and grateful to no longer be in such constant pain. Then they could have pinned me down like an insect specimen and given me 20 minutes of masked hell, and they could have set me in a barcalounger with an IV for 6 hours and what would I have done? Complied, rather like a sheep following a dog's lead. Weakly, I may have objected, but soon enough I'd have been used to it, and done with much of it, by now.
As it is, I have to admit to a growing sense of anxiety, or fear, or just dread. Knowing that radiation will build up, and burn and the likelihood of sores is high, and the possibility of constriction and thicker mucous (how it could get thicker, I don't know) is high, and real.
I did find, though, that during the dry run there was a mantra that helped me through, provided to me by my niece, my sister's eldest daughter: Channel your inner Price.
For anyone who has dealt wth my family, she's referring to our legendary stubbornness and unwillingness to admit minor defeats like fear or flaws in our perceptual processes like overhyping what is to come. The inner Price is, to borrow a phrase from that movie "Fried Green Tomatoes." our inner Towanda.
Invoking it, I stopped worrying about anything but breathing and relaxing, and I closed my eyes while Billie Holiday was croaking out some jacked up version of some song, and the ceiling twinkled at me like a happy idiot. The huge machine revolved around me, lifting here, and there, playing a perverted game of peek-a-boo over the table's edge, and I, inner-Priced, was as still as snow at midnight.
Tomorrow, though, is real. The clown nose horn in my hand has purpose. The machine is on. It has been set to remember where I need to be dosed and how much. It will think of nothing but delivering cargo to loading dock, ray to errant cell. Then chemo, where an indiscriminate fluid will start killing cells and keep doing so long enough to cause concerns that I'll hurl, easily, and a fistful of drugs to control that.
Among those drugs, I found in reviewing them yesterday, is an anti-anxiety medicine--and typically, it's not inner-Price to need those sorts of things. We are tough, native, two-feet-standers, no struts needed. But I plan on taking this at 6am, as I leave to board the bus that takes me to the machine. I plan on finding myself not so resistant and less inclined to hyperventilate as they pin the mask down tightly, and adjust my head 15 times until it's as straight as they want.
I am apprehensive. Not just about the mechanics of the thing, the 32 sessions that will follow tomorrow's radiation, but of what happens afterwards. If it works. If I ever go back to normal.
The first few days after surgery before I saw what I looked like, I thought of normal as a thing that I'd, rubberband that I am, rebound to immediately. That I'd look as I did, with a new jaw, and that swelling went down in days instead of months, that there'd be relatively immediate weight gains.
Now, the longer I am without normal, the more I wonder how to get back to it, as if I'd lost a path by slight miscalculation that has closed behind me. Technically, it has closed. That normal will never be the normal again. The picture that Scott has on his phone of a guy with grey/blonde hair, smiling, after a run in his running clothes--I'll never be that guy again. Even at 52, that guy is way too naive for the life I live now. His body is not achievable.
I may come back to a similar state, but I don't know when and right now I don't know how. And in addition to thinking of the machines, and the inexorable poisonous drip, and the way I may feel tomorrow night, when they pin the mask over my face, I will think of him--the latest ass in a line of them I've managed to love and lose.
If I paint bleakly here, it's because I find it makes reality so much easier to bear. In real terms, the radiation treatment will go fairly quickly, and because I'm new, the people at the infusion center at Dr. Kramer's office will likely be extra helpful. I'll probably have a good time, and with any luck, I'll remember to pick up the book on Lincoln I've been reading to take along, and the Ipad, and the phone, and Scott's noise canceling headphones he insisted I keep here while he travels to Zurich and Germany for this week.
It's hard for him to be away, and hard for him to understand that part of me is glad he is at the moment--if I make it through this as I think I will, then great, I can tell him what a piece of cake it was, or how boring it was, or how it was not at all the trial we believed. If it bothers me, I can fall apart for the five minutes I allot to such things, and without explanation to him, pull my stuffing back in tighter and get on with it as I will.
Ultimately, cancer is a lonely thing. It's too personal a possession to readily share, even with someone dying to share one's very essence. It lives in the smallest crevices of the body and requires that even an army be parsed down single file to go after it in its hiding places. Better me, and my sword, advance against the dark of it, when I find it, and defeat it. Then I can tell you better what this awful journey has actually meant.
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