It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  Anyway, I call work and get Sydney to cover my advisory, and I end up getting there five minutes late, and it’s just not a big deal at all. So what was I mad about? Besides some dickhead stealing a car and ditching it right across my driveway and the fact that, oh yeah, Kirsten has cancer, and here she goes into the hospital again.

  I teach my classes and come home early, which means I get to miss part two of our personality test seminar. Part one told me I was emotional, disorganized, and messy. Like I need a Myers-Briggs assessment to tell me that. I cry at cartoons and my desk is covered in mountains of crap. I may not be completely self aware, but I did know that much. Oh yeah, and I both hate people and crave their company. Knew that too.

  Anyway, I get home and the car is still there. Kirsten called parking enforcement again, but they quickly promised to tow before she could even guilt them about how we need the car to take her to the hospital today. And then they didn’t come and tow the car. We examine the situation and decide that she can direct me in such a way that I can pull the car out at an angle (now I am glad that we haven’t gotten around to making our disgusting, completely-paved yard into a real yard yet) and over the non-cut part of the curb.

  We manage to do it and only break the fence a little bit, and we head off to the hospital. It is old home week there on the bubble unit, as nurses and cleaners smile and say hi to us and seem sort of glad to see us. One of the nurse’s aides reveals that they actually are glad to see us, because Kirsten doesn’t give them any trouble, so they all like her.

  A very cute nurse I’ve never seen before is in charge of checking us in, and she tells us that they haven’t cleaned her room yet, so we need to go wait in the solarium. This is the room I have been calling a lounge, but apparently it is a solarium. I am not sure exactly how many windows a lounge has to have to make it a solarium. This one has a lot, but I guess I sort of thought a solarium needed a glass roof or at least a skylight. What the hell do I know?

  There is no one watching Hong Kong comedies this time, but there is another guy in there. He looks over at us, but we studiously ignore him. I don’t feel like having the conversation right now.

  Kirsten and I laugh and make jokes, and the cute nurse comes back and tells us that phlebotomy is on their way and that we probably will get dismissed again to get lunch. After she leaves, Kirsten says, “You know, every time they say ‘Phlebotomy’ now, I start singing it to the tune of ‘Teenage Lobotomy’…Phleboto-my! Phleboto-my!”

  The other guy in the lounge is snoozing, but eventually he stirs and forces the issue by saying, “ugh..so lazy. I worked all night.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s tough,” we reply.

  “Came here at 6:00 for my dad. He has Leukemia.” I make some kind of sympathetic noise, and Kirsten says that she is in for breast cancer. He replies, “Yeah, I had two aunts die of breast cancer.”

  It is all I can do not to sarcastically praise him for his smooth conversational salvo. Hey, that’s great, thanks for sharing that information. Ever hear of anyone who got better, Dr. Kevorkian?

  He then busts out with “Are you Catholic?” I can’t imagine where he’s going with this, but I am sure it can’t be good, but before Kirsten can sputter out a reply, the phlebotomist comes in right on cue and draws two vials out of Kirsten’s arm, and we head off to lunch.

  Kirsten, who is in every way a better person than me (except, maybe for her lamentable fondness for that James Taylor Greatest Hits record), says at the elevators, “Oh, he probably was going to offer to pray for me or something.” I suggest that he didn’t need to know if you were Catholic to offer his prayers–I think he was going to recommend some kind of ritual involving either a saint or some holy place or substance.

  As the elevator goes down, we get quiet for a minute, then Kirsten says, “I hope this works.”

  “It will.” I tell her. It had fucking well better.

  We do not go back to the brewpub place, but rather to the same Mexican place Rowen and I went to the night when Kirsten supposedly had heart-stopping levels of potassium in her blood. The food is still excellent, and we trudge back to the hospital and sit in her room for two hours waiting for a surgeon to come put a hose in her. At some point this very attractive resident comes in and gives Kirsten some kind of neural checkup that involves her doing things that look a lot like stuff Moe does to Curly in Three Stooges movies, only without the hitting or that satisfying hollow, “Bonk!” they always use when something hits Curly on the head. It gets so ridiculous that when she asks Kirsten to puff out her cheeks I say, “is there a medical reason for this, or are you just having fun with us?”

  Clearly this woman has no future in the medical profession, because she can actually take a joke, and she laughs and says yes, these are real tests they do to see if the chemo has fried your brain or not. Kirsten’s brain is, happily, unfried.

  I have to leave to pick up Rowen before the surgeon shows up, so I miss the bedside surgery ritual. I go home first. The car is still there. I park on the street and run inside and call parking enforcement again. “Oh, yeah,” the guy says in a bored voice, “well, we’ll try to get somebody out there.” I hold out no hope at all that this car is ever going to get moved. I start thinking that if I ever commit a crime, I will just park my car across someone’s driveway and hide in it, since it seems to be a surefire way to avoid any attention at all from the authorities.

  I pick Rowen up and she immediately starts crying, “I want Mommy…..I want Mommy…” I hug her and say, “Me too.”

  We go out to dinner, back to the same place we went with my mom and Kirsten’s parents the night I frantically called Kirsten from the bathroom, and we have a really wonderful time. She is cheery and we eat our bread, and she tells me awesome four year old knock knock jokes involving items on the table, like “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Noodle.”

  “Noodle who?”

  “Noodle salt shaker!” We laugh uproariously at these and the people next to us look at me like I’m a total moron, or at least an incredibly annoying cutesy parent. Maybe I am. I don’t care.

  We then play this game where she pretends to knock on my door and I say, “Who is it?”

  And she replies, “It’s me, your friend!”

  ”Hi friend! Thanks for coming over! Did you bring any bacon?”

  “Oh yes–here it is,” and she hands me a piece of noodle or a bit of bread. We do this for probably fifteen minutes. I should add that Rowen has never had bacon in her life.

  Our waitress is very cool about us hanging around for a long time and goes out of her way to be nice to Rowen and I end up leaving her a huge tip (well, ok, five bucks, but that seems huge to me on a fifteen dollar check) because I always try to overtip when the servers are nice to Rowen in hopes that it will encourage more of them to be nice to kids, instead of trying halfheartedly to disguise their annoyance when you show up with them.

  The other good thing is that they seem to have finally canned the depressive John Hiatt wannabe, and the piano player is back doing instrumental versions of “Makin’ whoopee” “Aint misbehavin’” and some Beatles numbers, and it makes it very pleasant to hang out there, as opposed to feeling like you are eavesdropping on someone’s therapy appointment.

  We go home, and it is freezing cold and raining, which is probably the most depressing weather there is, but Rowen is cheerful and so am I. When we get home, the car that was blocking our driveway is gone.

  Tumblin’ Dice

  This round of high-dose chemo proves to be a lot easier to take than the first one. Kirsten doesn’t puke at all, and so they don’t have to keep her high as a kite to fight the nausea, so she is just a lot more with it, and this is nice for everybody. Also, for some reason they are allowing her to have her door open and walk down to the solarium this time, and that seems to make a big difference. It’s not really much of a walk or much of a change of scene–just a tiny lounge with other sick people in johnnies�
�but it beats the hell out of the same room for three weeks.

  I go to see her and she doesn’t really seem much worse than when she had those initial doses of regular chemo–a little tired, but also cheerful and not completely worn out like she was before.

  All of this is good news. So why am I so depressed?

  Well, I guess I realize that I now have to shift emotional and mental gears again. Kirsten got her last dose of chemo yesterday. So she still needs to get stem cells again and everything, but in terms of her getting medicine to fight her cancer, we’re done. And I am terrified.

  While this whole treatment has not been easy at all, it has been kind of ok emotionally to be in the thick of the battle and feel like we are really doing all we can to fight it. And now it’s just upsetting to realize that the treatment is over. They have used everything in their arsenal. There’s no more medicine to wait for: first it was, “Well, when they hit it with the big dose, that will really get it,” and then it was, “Well, when we get the second dose, that’s going to be the big left-right combination that sends the cancer to the mat for good,” and now it’s, “Well, we will wait a couple of weeks and see what happens and how well this worked.” And I am really scared. I am just not mentally prepared to have that information yet if it’s anything at all except complete victory.

  I still hope and believe that she is going to beat this, but I am so scared, so scared of losing her. And right now it seems like we have rolled the dice, and we just have to wait and see what comes up.

  This dice metaphor floats around in my head for about thirty seconds before it picks up the Rolling Stones’ “Tumblin’ Dice,” which has been playing nonstop on my mental jukebox for about three days, and I must confess that I’ve never listened very closely to the words, so it may be about something completely different, though from the words I remember it doesn’t seem to be about much of anything, but anyway I don’t even own a copy of Exile on Main Street to go check. I recognize this as a gaping hole in my record collection. It is particularly problematic right now, because when I get a song stuck in my head, actually hearing it is the only way to exorcise it, which is why I bought that Stooges album.

  Exile on Main Street is, if I remember correctly from reading about it and examining Danny’s copy, the album they made where they all holed up in a French chateau for some long period of time and wrote and recorded the album there, and you can just tell from the photo on the sleeve of Mick and Keith laying down vocals and at least one of them has a half-empty bottle of bourbon in his hand that it was probably a debauch of really epic proportions, and of course that leads me to the great cosmic joke of Kirsten being sick while Keith Fucking Richards is this healthy grandfather, but mostly it makes me want to hole up in some French chateau with all my friends and a bunch of booze and groupies, and even if I didn’t end up producing one of the greatest records ever, well, it sure sounds like a hell of a vacation.

  How It Ends

  I have been thinking a lot about how this book ends, and I need to confess to you right now that I think I am going to disappoint you. Because, of course, what you want, if you are at all like me, is a real ending. I always hate movies and books that just stop rather than ending, or that get cutesy with the end. I read Infinite Jest, all eight thousand pages of it or whatever, and then the fucking thing just stops and doesn’t tie up any of the plot lines you’ve been following for 7,999 pages, and you keep reading through to page 8,000 because you care about the characters and the situation, and then he basically spits on you for being chump enough to care about the characters and situations and says, “No no no–view this novel with ironic detachment and appreciate on an intellectual level how clever I am!”

  When I was in college I was persuaded by my pre-Kirsten girlfriend to read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and you can tell I was infatuated and eager to please since I read a postmodern take on a Victorian novel, basically combining my two most hated genres in one book, and, there, same deal, I got all wrapped up in the stupid romance, will he or she marry below his or her station or whatever it always is in these insufferable books, and then it has three different endings. Oooh, that’s deep, man. People still read this book (largely, I think because Meryl Streep looks really fetching in that cloak on the cover) and think it’s great that this guy abdicated the author’s job, which is to pick an ending.

  All of which is to say, I feel your pain. Here are my three possible endings:

  Ending one: Complete Remission.

  This, I guess, is the happy ending. No guarantees, of course, but we can pretty much get on with the business of trying to put our life back together without having to worry, at least for a period of time, about treatments and tests and whatnot. Maybe it comes back, maybe it doesn’t, but we get to relax for a while.

  Ending two: Partial Remission.

  I have no idea if that’s even a real medical term. I guess it must be, since they throw “complete remission” around, that pretty much implies that there exists something less that complete remission, otherwise to call it complete is redundant. Anyway, this ending, I think, bites. Maybe. This ending means more treatments, followed by more treatments, leading up to more treatments…you get the idea. I guess there will still be breathers in there, and I will continue to believe that, you know, she will respond really well to herceptin, or those new tumor-starving drugs will be perfected, and basically that I still get to have Kirsten for a long long time. And I am sure that there will still be happiness and joy in that time, because she makes me happy and I try to do the same for her, and I know Rowen cracks us both up on a daily basis, but I guess we’ll be all about fighting cancer forever.

  Ending three: They all die.

  OK, now I’m getting cute. This is the ending of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the movie anyway, I never read the book, I know, I know, it’s magical and lyrical and I really should read it, but I am trying to read only things with exploding heads and/or lesbian vampires for the time being, but the movie was this three hour snooze fest in which Daniel Day Lewis has hot adulterous sex in the first like 20 mintues and spends the rest of the movie not having enough adulterous sex to make the damn thing interesting, but too much for his wife’s taste, and somewhere in the second hour the Russians roll into Prague, which I guess was some kind of metaphor I was too stupid to get, and then he keeps cheating, and just as you’re wondering if they are ever going to figure their relationship out and whether you are ever going to care, they die in a car crash.

  They all die. That is the ending, really. It’s everybody’s ending, and we are all fooling ourselves if we think it’s not. So whatever we do or do not know about Kirsten’s death, we know it’s inevitable. So is mine. So, I’m sorry to say, is yours.

  My hope is that whatever happens, we can reach some kind of peace with this idea. That we don’t have to have some imaginary guarantee that we get to see our grandchildren get married or whatever, but that we can just get up tomorrow and do our thing and love each other and laugh and have sex and say at the end of the day, like Ice Cube, “It was a good day.”

  Unlike John Fowles, I promise to pick an ending, but what sucks is that I will not be able to tell you, “now we know for sure that she’s beaten it forever,” and I’m sorry, I know that’s a damn good ending that I just can’t provide, but if that sucks for you, believe me that it sucks a whole lot more for me.

  Fat Boys

  I have sold a lot of records at used record stores, and I only have two regrets. One was that in the ninth grade I sold my copy of AC/DC’s Back in Black because I had liked it in the seventh grade and I was so beyond that.

  I bought it again four years later. No harm done, except I was out several bucks on the deal.

  The other one is that I sold the first Fat Boys album with the long song about them going to jail because they broke into the grocery store to steal a midnight snack. Sigh. The album is out of print and probably some kind of collector’s item, and it just can’t be had for love or
money.

  It’s okay, because now I am becoming one of the Fat Boys. Admittedly I have not swelled to Human Beat Box proportions, but I am getting large in the gut and breasts. I can still hide it pretty well under my clothes, and I haven’t had to go over a 34 waist yet, but with my shirt off–well, I have a larger gut than I’d like and quite an impressive rack.

  I guess it’s a healthy sign that I am concerned enough about this to want to do something about it. I mean, part of it is that, you know, it’s winter, and it’s harder to exercise as much, and I basically do a lot of staying inside and eating in the winter, but really it’s all about the sweets.

  See, I am a sweet addict. And I need to go cold turkey. I am only half joking here. I mean, I do go days without sweets, and I have never lied to cover up my sweets habit, and my loved ones have not arranged an intervention, but the bottom line is that it is much much easier for me to have no cookies than one. Now I could not sit down and eat a whole bag of Oreos, but I will eat maybe eight. I will eat them until I feel disgusting or the supply runs out, whichever comes first.

  Brownies, muffins, same deal. It’s really all about the baked goods with me rather than candy. And so in this time of high stress (not to mention four children’s birthday parties in the space of 5 weeks), I have turned back to sweets as a stress reducer.

  It’s not working. Now I’m just stressed out and fat.