It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  Neil Peart’s Blues

  I keep being reminded that making fun of someone makes you become them. No, I haven’t bought Phish tickets or any Ecuadoran knitted goods yet, but I know that the group of people I have probably been harshest on during this whole thing are people who are going through something similar but not as severe. I have written several snide and shitty things about them, and at one point my mom sent me some thing that some guy had written for one of the Sunday insert magazines about how he dealt with his wife’s lumpectomy. Lumpectomy, yet! It talked about how he comforted his wife and assured her that she wouldn’t lose her hair from the chemo, and my reaction at the time was, “Shut the fuck up, you fuckin pussy!” (to get the full effect you have to do it in the Southwestern Ohio rural accent, because that is the accent in which those words were frequently hurled at me as a youth.) “What I wouldn’t give to have Kirsten have a fucking lumpectomy! Don’t talk to me about losing hair, man, we’re worried about her losing her fucking life!”

  Ok. So then yesterday I am reading in the paper about Geddy Lee’s new solo album. Let me say as an aside that I was listening to Rush when we had our marathon appointment with Dr. J. Well, not during the appointment, except when they drew the curtain and felt Kirsten up and I needed to feel like I was somewhere else. I found listening to “Red Barchetta” very comforting because a) it fuckin’ rocks, dude! and b.) it sort of reminds me of middle school. Now you know I’m in the midst of a horrible experience if reminding myself of the hormonal hell that was middle school is comforting by comparison.

  Anyway, so why is Geddy Lee putting out a solo album? Well, it turns out that Rush is kind of on hold because drummer Neal Peart lost his only child in a car wreck and his wife to cancer in the space of like a year. And so that kind of puts me in my place. I mean this in the nicest way, Neal, and I am glad you’re still with us, but I really think I would’ve killed myself. Well, actually I know I am way too cowardly to kill myself, but I look at where I am and where Neal Peart is and all I can think of is him reading this and going, “shut the fuck up, you fuckin’ pussy!”

  Some Good News at Last

  After telling her that her first round of chemo didn’t work, Dr. J schedules her for a second round that involves some kind of speedball of two drugs that have a synergistic effect, or something. I get all this second hand because I don’t go to any of Kirsten’s appointments. Her mom and her friend Olga go with her a lot, and I go to work. It is ok because her mom really wants to go and, as I’ve said, I hate to leave work, and Kirsten doesn’t seem to mind, so everybody’s happy. Well, actually, everybody’s kind of miserable, but you know what I mean.

  Dr. J also tells Kirsten that they want to get two rounds of chemo that work under her belt before she is hospitalized, so her hospitalization will be pushed back by three weeks. This is a big blow to us, because we were starting to make plans and my mom was on the verge of buying a plane ticket, but more importantly, we were just getting psyched to be done with this. Now there is more waiting, which is what so much of this has been. Waiting for test results, waiting to see if the chemo worked, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting in examining rooms, waiting for phone calls.

  Kirsten has her second round of chemo, and once again she tolerates it really well and doesn’t puke at all and is kind of tired all the time but not dishrag-on-the-couch tired, and I have lots of blank days and a few angry days, and eventually it is time for her follow-up appointment, and this is when we will finally find out if this second round worked or not.

  I have been tying myself in knots wondering what would happen if the second round didn’t work. I am sure it would involve switching up medicines and postponing the hospitalization again, but it would be another setback, and, it would suck. Bad news is starting to feel inevitable, because every time there has been a possibility of good news or bad news, we have gotten bad news. I am getting pretty fucking sick of the tiger, and I really want the lady, but the fact that the tiger keeps coming up makes it seem like it will again.

  Kirsten goes for her appointment, and it turns out that Dr. J is overbooked or something, and I didn’t realize that doctors worked like airlines, but apparently they do, except, you know, you never have the hope of getting bumped to first class, or getting a free drink, and you damn sure don’t want a free ticket for next time. They take blood and another doctor examines her, and this is not really helpful because this doctor has never examined her before, so she doesn’t have any baseline, and Kirsten says that she thinks her tumors are shrinking, and the doctor makes some noncommittal noises, so we have to wait for the bloodwork, which takes a couple days.

  At the end of our nice day before Thanksgiving, Marie the oncology nurse calls and says the first tumor marker has come back down a little and that Dr. J wants to see Kirsten next week. We don’t really know what to make of this news. It is certainly good news that it’s down, but Dr. J said she wanted to see the number halved, and Marie just said it’s down slightly. Still, the fact that it’s down at all seems good, and coupled with the fact that Kirsten thinks her tumors are shrinking, this must mean it’s working. Right?

  The night before Kirsten’s appointment with Dr. J, I sleep like absolute shit. I fall into bed exhausted at ten because I was at work late watching my students perform scenes from Romeo and Juliet. And I am bolt awake at 12:30., with snatches of lines from the play going through my mind (“too flattering sweet to be substantial” gets big airplay for some reason) along with snatches of songs and other stupid sounds and thoughts. I am not worrying, I don’t feel nervous. I just can’t sleep. I get up and turn on the TV and watch some ads for some really remarkable and amazing new products, and catch a couple of minutes of Car Wash, which is like this amazing 70′s time capsule with giant-Afroed men, stereotyped black revolutionaries, stereotyped rich kid revolutionaries, and Starsky and Hutch’s Huggy Bear, Antonio Fargas, as the stereotyped, scarf-bedecked gay man, who, in the few minutes I watched, told the angry stereotyped revolutionary: “I’m more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever get!” Meow!

  I finally fall back asleep at 3:30, and I am up again at 5:30. Kirsten’s dad has stayed over and comes out of the bathroom naked and asks me for a towel and I am humbled by the fact that he is 62 and looks way better naked than I do. I go to work and still feel like complete shit, and many cups of tea and some positively sludgy Puerto Rican coffee that one of my colleagues brews up for our department meeting don’t help.

  While I’m practically dead by the time I get home, Kirsten is bouncing off the walls. “How was your appointment?” I ask. Today is the day of another big followup appointment with Dr. J. I didn’t go because we are anticipating that I’m going to need to miss a lot of work, so we are trying to save up my absences for when she is totally incapacitated. This is Kirsten’s idea, but I am all too happy to go along with it.

  “It was really really good,” she says. “First of all, the woman who drew my blood was an artist. I felt nothing. And then Dr. J did the examination, and she said the tumors were definitely shrinking, and one tumor marker is up, but she thinks that’s just because, I dunno, one of the tumors is breaking up, and there might be big pieces floating around in my blood or something gross like that. So then she said, ‘well, since this is working, let’s not wait, let’s get you into the hospital next week.’”

  Kirsten is practically walking on air, and I am too. All my fatigue and worry just completely fall away. I had been ready to fall over, and now I am bouncing off the walls. It’s amazing what comes to pass for good news, but I am ecstatic that they are going to take my wife away for three weeks next week and give her so much deadly medicine that they will completely destroy her immune system and ability to make blood and that I’m going to have to live with some combination of my mother-in-law and my mother during this time. This is fucking fantastic news. At last we’re really doing it. I feel like Sherlock Holmes, shouting, “the game’s afoot!”

  Crushin’

/>   My hormones are out of control. I mean, yes, always, as a rule, but right now especially. This is, I am sure, partly due to the fact that, you know, chemo and sex don’t exactly mix, but I think there is that old fear of death/desire for sex thing, and I have been terribly afraid of losing Kirsten while waiting to find out if the second round of chemo worked, and I am just looking at other women all the time, even more than usual.

  Now, I always have been this way to a degree, and I justify it by imagining that everybody is like this (and an unscientific poll of everyone I know who is married shows this to be true), that being married doesn’t stop you from being attracted to other people, it just (hopefully) stops you from acting on that attraction.

  So I periodically get meaningless crushes, and I know that they are meaningless crushes, and we are secure enough in our relationship at this point that we can joke about our crushes, as long as they are on celebrities, so when I beg to go see Charlie’s Angels, Kirsten says we can go as long as I promise not to drool openly over Drew Barrymore (I manage, but just barely. She’s dreamy! And the movie kicks ass!) And I can tease Kirsten about her frequent trips to the pizza place for an eggplant parm sub and her crush on the guy who works there with the enormous tattooed biceps. Yeah, I know he’s not a celebrity, but he’s not somebody we really know, and he’s probably about as accessible to Kirsten as Drew Barrymore is to me. (She’s so dreamy!)

  We are not yet to the point where we can joke about our crushes on people we actually know, though. When it became obvious several years ago that Kirsten had a crush on some British, motorcycle-riding co-worker with numerous piercings, I got cranky about it, and I never mention my work crushes. Right now I have moderate crushes on three women at work, two of whom are attached and one of whom I think is probably a lesbian. I also have crushes on two moms and one teacher at Rowen’s preschool. All are married or attached. Some woman who used to work at my school and who, I should in fairness after mocking Kirsten’s crush, admit has multiple piercings stops by my classroom to borrow books and we have some kind of interaction that she probably doesn’t think anything of but I think is flirtatious because she smiles at me a lot, and my students tease me and say they’re going to tell my wife, and I say, because I am stressed about their upcoming performances and Kirsten’s upcoming test results and lose sight of propriety, “you don’t have to tell her I’m the mack! She knows that already!”

  But that night when the students are doing their scenes, Kirsten shows up with Rowen, and Rowen is wearing a fancy dress that Kirsten’s parents bought her and Kirsten is wearing her wig, which is called, “The Cory” but which we call “The Velma” because it looks kind of like Velma’s hair from Scooby-Doo. I know this sounds corny and probably unbelievable in light of everything I’ve just said, but it is absolutely true that the whole rest of the room just falls away because my whole life just walked in the door, and I hug and kiss them both.

  The next day we are doing a lesson on adverbs and I ask the kids to add an adverb to the sentence “Diana kissed Dwayne________”and somebody says, “hotly, ” and one of the students says, “Ooo, I saw Mr. Halpin kiss his wife hotly last night,” and I say, because propriety was never my strong suit, and I am sleep deprived, “girl, that wasn’t even hotly,” and this gets a chorus of “Oooooooo,”s and “He means they kiss hotter than that!” s. The bottom line is that I just love her so much and I just want her back and I want her to be cured and live and live and live.

  Me and Rowen Down by the Schoolyard

  Rowen and I have been spending a lot of time together over the last few weeks. We both get up early, while Kirsten likes to sleep late even when she’s not having her body ravaged by chemo, so we hang out and play, or we go grocery shopping, or we go to the playground. One day we go over to the park across the street and I take the video camera that Joe and Katy lent us so I can practice with it, because the plan is to videotape Rowen while Kirsten is in the hospital. My showing up with a video camera has the happy side effect of driving away the guys getting high on the bench behind the swings, but mostly we just have a great time playing.

  Though I never again get to play the accidental crimebuster, Rowen and I have many other fun activities together while Kirsten is feeling kind of shitty. I find it impossible to explain why I have so much fun with her without starting to sound like a precious moments greeting card or something: “DAUGHTER: The time we spend together is so special. I love your laughter and your little smile. I love the fact that you’re my little angel. And I love that you are growing all the while…” OK, not really that pukey, but close enough to make me uncomfortable. So let me just say that she is incredibly funny and I really enjoy her company. One day we go to the Children’s Museum, and in the little kids’ area they have these tables piled high with shaving cream and food coloring, and we spend literally probably an hour there just making little shaving cream mountains, writing in the shaving cream, and laughing our asses off as we gradually get covered with green and yellow foam. It is one of those moments of perfect happiness that I already get misty-eyed when I look back at, and that I will probably talk about when she is sixteen while she rolls her eyes and yanks the car keys out of my hands.

  The two of us have a great time together. But all the while, while I am showing her the revolting jar of lamb’s tongues at the supermarket and saying, “should we get this?” and she knows her part perfectly and acts like she thinks I’m serious and says, “No way!” or while we are picking out treats for Kirsten or while we are enjoying a hot beverage and a baked good, I feel like there are two clouds hanging over us. The first one is the cloud of Kirsten’s impending hospitalization. What is it going to be like when I am the only parent around? Will we still have fun, or will it be horrible, like when I pick her up from school without Kirsten and she spends the entire walk home going, “Mommmm-yyyyyyyyyy….Mommmmmmmm-yyyyyyyyy”?

  Cloud two, of course, is the cloud of us having to do this for the rest of our lives with no Kirsten. What would that be like? Sometimes I feel that we could get through, you know, me and you kid against the world, but then I remember what it was like being the kid in that scenario, and while I certainly feel like my mom and I got through, I also think it kind of fucked up our relationship. I mean–just the two of us together for nine years after my dad died–it was very intense. By the time I was in college, we were driving each other insane. I am sure that’s true of many kids and parents who haven’t endured a tragedy together, so maybe there’s no cause and effect here, but why do I live eight hundred miles from my mom? Why don’t I feel any need to live closer to her? What if that happens with Rowen and me? It would break my heart. I know it hurts my mom.

  The line I use in conversation these days talking about this fear is “I was always so afraid of ending up like my dad that I never bothered to worry about ending up like my mom.” It doesn’t get laughs, except from me, and I’m just laughing nervously to cover my fear.

  Powerpuff

  While we are waiting for Kirsten to go into the hospital, I suddenly become obsessed with the Powerpuff Girls. Rowen is a huge fan, as is every girl at her school. Basically The Powerpuff Girls is a cartoon about three kindergarten-aged superhero girls who kick lots of ass, especially the ass of their unaccountably-Japanese accented nemesis, the evil chimp genius Mojo Jojo. The other girls at Rowen’s school were all very into this and had lots of merchandise, and, fearing that our little angel would become a social leper if she didn’t learn the names of the characters and a few scenarios to act out when they play this on the playground, which is at least twice a day, we went out and bought a couple of videos. The other option was shelling out for more-than-basic cable, and I know this makes me some kind of Luddite crank, but I just feel like a jackass paying somebody fifty bucks a month to deliver me TV with commercials.

  So Rowen likes to watch the videos, and one day we subject our friends Joe and Katy to a viewing which includes my favorite episode, in which Rainbow the Clown is doused in bl
each, becomes Mr. Mime and turns the city black and white until the Powerpuff Girls restore color to the world by playing a really catchy pop tune called “Love Makes the World Go Round”. Blossom transforms Mr. Mime back into Rainbow the Clown with a guitar solo played on what looks like a Gibson Flying V, which is a guitar so stupid looking that only cartoon characters and heavy metal guitarists (I know, I know, same thing) should play it. After they finish the song, which, I remind you, is called, “Love Makes the World Go Round”, Rainbow the clown thanks them for restoring him to his true self, and they beat the shit out of him.

  Anyway, some time after this, Joe sends me a CD of songs “Inspired by the Powerpuff Girls.” (By this time I have put the Carter Family aside for a while and have been alternating between Matthew Sweet’s melancholy pop masterpiece 100% Fun and the first Stooges album, which has the song “No Fun,” which I play over and over for reasons that are probably obvious.) I am immediately put off by the new CD, probably because I have been burned on compilation CDs a number of times. In fact I have been burned so often by tribute CDs that I now avoid them like the plague. A bunch of bands with stupid names who think they’re clever deliver inferior versions of songs by an artist you like. Who needs it? But this is not a tribute to a recording artist, so I pop it in and find that I love it. Yes it does have bands with stupid names, (Bis?? What the hell is Bis? )but for some reason I can’t stop listening to it.