Tongue-less Cancericans

Number of Americans newly diagnosed with cancer in 2012: 1.6 million, plus.

I've been trying to get out of my own head this week, a place I'm naturally locked into to pretty tightly. My efforts, while not in vain, are not helped by the fact that it's hard for me to talk, and seemingly not hard for people to inform me quickly that they can't understand what I'm saying. If anyone will lock you into silence and contemplation more quickly than a million "huhs?" I can't think of what it would be.

For some reason, the medical establishment in this world has a delight in trying to call me. Even after they've met me, even after I've begged them not to do so, calling me is like their idea of a late night frat prank. They leave me call back numbers, long, involved messages usually evoking a sense of urgency to their purpose. "We need to know..." or "....so we have to hear from you before we file...". Yet no one finishes any message with, please email us, or emails me, in the first place.

Sometimes, honestly, this makes me so angry I just want to throw something. What part of 85% of tongue missing didn't you get the first damn time? Other times, I feel like I'm being discriminated against, or chosen for a special form of punishment. Try walking up to a receptionist in a crowded waiting room who asks for your name when your name is an impossible thing to properly say.

Among the 1.6 million plus, are likely 1.6 million plus variations of experience. We cancericans are a diverse lot, something I've been learning as I enter and exit the cancer center where I'll be having radiation. We may all have a starting point in common, but where it goes, how it's detected, and the results we manage are startlingly different.

Sitting in the waiting room of the main clinic where I see Joey, or the dude surgeon, the people around me are head and neck cancer patients. Even in this group, so far, I'm a subset. The other day I could hear a conversation amongst a pair of patients waiting who were planning either a Wendy's or IHOP visit after their doctor time was done. Now, admittedly, in pre-cancer life I thought eating at IHOP meant one hated oneself, but what I wouldn't give to go eat some kind of sugar bomb funnel cake with cheap jam and canned whipped cream under a blanket of fake maple syrup...well, at least once.

Even there, the other people around me are engaged in conversation with their partners, or respond freely when the receptionists ask them questions, think of whether a double or a funnel cake would do better for them after the day's work is over.

Thus, there's no way to create an advocacy for them, or for me, that's any greater than the American Cancer Society--no official minority status by which I could invoke the Americans with Disabilities Act and start threatening to sue people who persist in calling me.

Instead, I realize, I'm pushed further into isolation and further into my own head. Sometimes, while I'm watching television with Scott, I want to talk back to a commercial. Pre-cancer, that was one of my favorite things to do--and make commentary about the ridiculous plot line of a show or the muffin top on the Wheel of Fortune contestant, and how the sateen top she's wearing did not heed the warning of the camera's ten pounds, or the unforgiving nature of cheap shiny material and the intensity of klieg lighting.

That's a lot of typing, and the moment passes quickly. Where quickly dispensed with as a bit of ridicule as a camera pans, it becomes a cumbersome description on a keyboard, even with my very decent typing skills.

Some of the things I would have been silent about before cancer are still handled that way. The past couple of weeks, I've been having odd headaches, and occasionally trouble sleeping. As per usual, I start, in my own head, ticking off the worst of the possible reasons why this is happening and examine the evidence to debunk or support why one horror or another might be causing my problems.

This set of problems I think I've finally traced, though: coffee. Pre-cancer, I was a coffee hound, and a slight coffee snob. I had several cups in the morning, at least one at work, and several cups with and after dinner. I've had that habit in my life from the earliest age, sharing a coffee (in my case, half milk), with my Aunt Effie as she babysat me when I was four. My family believed that a meal without coffee was incomplete.

Yet lately, my taste for it, and my system of delivery down the tube, have changed the game--I've been running on one cup a day. So this is my diagnosis--caffeine withdrawal. A 52 year lifetime of coffee whittled to a cup, surely I can expect some fallout--and I honestly think that's it. Not more cancer, not cancer revaunch, not another life-threatner, but a systemic reaction to a former substance abuse problem, coming to rest.

I finally typed that out to Scott today, at 4:30am, as he tried to figure out why I was up, and i did too--this was my breakthrough twice. First that I self-diagnosed and second that I confessed it--via keyboard, but imagine how difficult the preceding couple of paragraphs would be to say.

It is a reminder of what's ahead--or not, just ahead, but here now. The constant battle to pull out of myself when I'm the one person I can converse with freely. To include others in a world that is full of noise and stimulus, so much so that I'm bursting to talk about it, but simply can't do so in a facile manner.

There's so much I see on each bus ride ride I take to and from, up and down Divisadero Street, and then at the Cancer Center, so many people I'm curious about who are always swirling about the lobby, and then there's the texture of the sunlight, the smell of the Vietnamese food, the curious colors of buildings here in San Francisco, the sharpness of the wind, the very fact that food is so central to advertising, and interaction, the sounds that people make when they wait, the way they pull their phones out at the least delay, the clothing, the number of people who are disabled, the competition they make of loading onto the bus, the quiet way I integrate, and watch, and never talk to any of them about any of it.