I had my first adventure at Whole Foods while Scott and Terry went swimming today. Being a bit of a Whole Foods neophyte I have the verve of the newly initiated. The worst thing about Whole Foods in the Haight is that they have a tiny parking lot, and lots of Audis that wish to park there. There's a confluence of Panhandle, Hippie, Stoner and Self-Important traffic that mashes against one another at this corner of Stanyan and Haight. The potential accidents involve several strata of socio-economics and enough marijuana to excite the entire state of Indiana. To say that one could have a contact high by strolling around here is to put it mildly.
I was actually trolling that store with the idea that I'd find some brownies, of which they are masters--but no brownies today. I have found that one can mash and smash and then blend some brownies, cut them with enough milk, to make a rich type of chocolate milk suitable for a tube. The fact that such a mix probably has 600 calories in it is not a problem. Today, clothes on, wallet in my pocket, shoes on my feet, I weighed 145. This is starting to unnerve me and I'm ready to gain.
I've been trying--I've done lots of milk shakes and lots of nutren and anything I can think of that will fit in the tube I've tried, but it's not enough. Much as I'd like to gain ten pounds before chemo, there's no way that will happen, unless I walk in with stones in my pockets.
Tomorrow at 2 I have my first appointment with the oncologist--and I'm not nervous but excited. I'm ready for him to look at me and say--great, let's start making you glow! Roger Ebert, my sister's insidious decline, these things are, to me, signs from the universe: get it going or end up like this. It was only after surgery and after a fair couple of weeks of recovery that my surgeons said--we want you to get the chemo/radiation going, your cancer was particularly aggressive. Perhaps it was good for me not to know that, but somehow given how fast it grew, I think I had that idea firmly planted in my subconscious. Some part of me understood this wasn't some pansy tumor that skipped by and decided to decline in my commodious mouth.
I wonder if out of the gazillions of cells that were excised along with my lymph nodes and tongue, and the uncountable numbers that died when they lifted my jaw/their home out of my body, there weren't a million or so that managed to escape and are even now quietly building a condo in the upper palate instead of destroying the floor or the mouth. It's not out of the realm of possibility, so I would like to introduce them to streams of radiation and baths of sickeningly strong medications. Stuff that has the whiff of the future in it, and likely to evoke the torture of the recent past upon my cancer cells.
I'm truly grateful for this experience in many ways. I've learned a great deal, factually and emotionally, about other people, and about myself. I've been challenged to accept a vastly changed appearance, I've been asked to rise above smaller concerns that run other people's lives, like pec size, and bicep curve--and so far, i'm doing ok. I found out I truly am tough in ways that are better and more relevant than a UFC Cage Fight. But please do not mistake any moment of gratitude for these lessons with a scintilla of gratitude for this grotesque cancer that forced them upon me.
I could have continued to be happy on lazy Sundays, eating what I wanted, kissing when I thought it right, lazing about or jogging, whatever struck my fancy. Having a cupcake, which sounds awesome to me right now.
Instead on this Sunday, my shower took 15 minutes, but it took 45 minutes to change my bandages and clean my wounds which yet need to heal in various places. It took--instead of 5 minutes, 20 minutes to walk down the hill to Casto with Scott, deliberate paces all the way. I needed to hold my feeding tube with one hand and try to scrub my face with the other; I had to carefully clean around what was a nascent bed sore on my rump to keep it from re-infection.
I had to shave sort of around the skin that has been pulled up to replace what was taken. I had to hear that the cut made across my neck is healing well and will likely not scar--imagine that, neck cut, dissected like a freshmen's frog in Biology class, and I'm alive...but I'm not a bit grateful to this disgusting cancer for that.
No, friends, the fight is on. I understand where my gratitude lies. It remembers warm mornings with cupcakes and coffee, and has nothing but fondness for who I used to be. My gratitude likes who I am now, a lot. The fact that it hates the path it took to get here is no more strange than the fact that your dog may love to ride in the car and hate to end up at the vet....it's just an inverse of the order in my life.
Should you wake on Monday and find yourself without cancer, I'd like to urge you to have one truly wonderful, truly different, and utterly non-nutritional thing for breakfast. Do it for me. Cupcake, pecan roll, cookie, pancake, waffle-you name it. I hope it brings you the type of joy I'm chasing out here, brownie milk, soupy chemicals, flows of radiation and all.
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