Hard to believe but it's been 14 months since I had my big surgery in Indianapolis and jump started my slide down Function Mountain, past Lose Your Voice Bend and Never Eat Again Gulch. I've failed basic tests like jealousy of other cancers--seriously, did I have to get the one that is only gaining in popularity thus doesn't have good treatment options?--and the sorry for myself traps that turn 1am into a never ending dark night of the soul. It happens.
This period, though, feels like Midterms of Sophomore year--my scan results should be available to me tomorrow, but I've heard about other blood tests I did a bit earlier, and the picture is mixed. My immune system is crashing, but that's not unheard of with the sort of continual astringencies that are dripped into me weekly. Still, I wish it wasn't, because I want an unequivocal excellent written across this evaluation period.
I want the fact that I mowed the front yard, badly, to count; the gardening that I'm crowing about every 5 seconds on Facebook, I want that to count more too than the fact of how many T cells I no longer have. I want my attitude to overcome the two new antibiotics I'm being put on until more testing shows I bounce back, that I still can. My attitude is normally pretty decent these days, though last night at--yes--1am I did wonder if I needed to watch that episode of The Good Wife in order to sleep (Alicia does it for me, what can I say?), or if my late night episode was another way to admit I'm worried without admitting it out loud. Of course I am...
Skidding down Function Mountain I can only say is harrowing--what next? What part of me dissipates into thin air so fast I hardly know what happened? You see 14 months ago I thought surgery was how things got better. I hadn't been in a hospital at that point since my bout of pneumonia at 6; I had managed 46 years without anything cut up or out, with only the small losses one expects to encounter between 6 and 46--a mellower sort of energy that powers the body along, less of a taste for Cap'n Crunch, a disdain for tree climbing.
The chimera of 1am is the monster that my lone bedroom light fights away--why won't it simply be defeated? Why, at 12:45, can't I experience a burst of self satisfaction? What comes in the night is, probably, what I push away during the day. As in all physics, the energy of the negative that I suppress in my daily truck with existence is not lost, it converts to another form. As my quiet life grows deaf-quiet in the AM, so does my ability to fear grow, and my imagination inflate negatively, and often then I see myself dying, alone in a room, with no ability to alert anyone else.
I do, as the well oiled rails of my cancer careen down Function Mountain, repeat good things to myself--I have survived, I show a determination to thrive, I accomplished A or B or C or X, I felt this pang or that twinge of empathy beyond my own problems, I saw good in how I reacted.
Recently I was told that indeed I've deserved everything that has happened to me--the hows and whys of reading that and why I received it is beside the point--I actively wonder if dharma has brought karma to my doorstep. Look, I know I've broken nearly every commandment of good behavior at least once in my life (no murder though--in fact nothing in the stratosphere of serious crime), but those things that should have been easy for me not to do: I've lied, I've cheated, I've stole the liftable items and the perfect moments that were never mine to claim. At 10am, I forgive myself and note that I'm not unique amongst the population; at 1am, such false equivalency is just an arrow to the heart of deviancy from a boy who was never good at archery.
Sometimes you go into a Midterm with confidence and vigor. In my sophomore year at IU I aced Shakespeare by just crazy reading, my formerly excellent memory, my love of the pull quotes from each play. At 10am, I get off on As You Like It; at 1am, I commit to The Tempest. I've had classes where I finished the test first and walked out knowing I aced--and I remember not so much the classes as the way it felt to walk under the trees in Dunn Woods and go buy a slice of pizza to celebrate.
In the first part of my Midterms, I didn't really fail anything. Other parts of the tests they ran show my system isn't infected, even if my immune system is looking tattered: for a guy with a hole in my throat, a trach tube, an unworkable mouth--all great pathways to stray infections--I've succumbed to none. There is a steel in me that is flexible enough to not be apparent and not be absent at the same time. Some of the luck with which I went on a 40 year hospital-less run in my life is still around. The fact that my family is a genetic nightmare of inherited weaknesses, one of which is apparently oral cancer, isn't my fault. I'm not being paid back for being an asshole, I just at the ass end of a peculiar X meeting a peculiar Y which has resulted in some of my siblings having a weak heart, some prone to weight, a couple of us as I am now skidding on something that doesn't feel controlled down a very steep incline.
I simply want it all. I want to arrest my slide in one elegant lifting of the runners off the ice of a twisting, turning, looping path. I simply want an answer that is unequivocal--Mark, you are getting better, here's all the proof you need. I want to drift off at, say, 11pm, maybe 11:30pm, and sleep until 6 or so.
When I turn around, I'd like it to be 1995, when I was 35 and living in Brooklyn Heights, and I felt occasionally good looking, even desirable on off weekends. I want to dance again as I did when going to the bar for Drag Night Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, was how one could survive the boredom of being a bit too fabulous for Bloomington, circa '84 or '85. Those times, as close to unequivocal as I've ever been.
Tomorrow, I'll hear about part II of Midterms--the scan. I'll tune in her to tell you if my lungs are crowding with tumors or if the sled is taking a sideways turn, a busman's holiday through the tree line where there's more to see at a lesser speed toward dysfunctionality. It will be chemo day this week, too--something that in spite of the needle sticks and the hardening of this vein or that, I've come to enjoy for its zen and promise: You will pass this test, Mark, and even if you don't ace it, you have the rest of the semester to get the "A." You have a life in which to use this experience. The luge you can now ride like a professional, in a gold medal way, that once at the mountain's bottom, my friend, you have a ride to the top again.
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