Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life

by Robert Schimmel

“This. Your left ball is weird.”

  “Oh. Okay, you know what? It’s not real.”

  “It’s not real?”

  “Yeah, see this one’s real, this one isn’t. I lost that ball. I didn’t lose it per se. They had to take it out. So I had a fake one put in. See, I didn’t want just one ball. I’m insecure enough. Hey, why are you getting dressed?”

  Maybe some guys wouldn’t mention it at all. I just feel compelled to bring it up. Full disclosure. I think it’s best to get it over with early, before foreplay, somewhere between the hot and heavy kissing and the tearing off of the clothes.

  “Look, I gotta tell you, before we go any further, I have a fake ball.”

  It sounds so bad. Feels like it’s gonna put a damper on the whole evening, ruin the romance. I’m probably paranoid. Because, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman talk about balls. Either in real life or in a porno movie. I’ve never heard, “Hey, Greg’s got some really nice balls.”

  You don’t hear that much. The only time women talk about balls is when a guy has only one, a fake one, or three.

  I’m also a little worried about my reputation. Women talk. Word gets around. I can see myself walking into a party and everybody whispering and pointing, buzz-buzz-buzz, “Look, it’s Johnny One-Ball,” “Hey, Bob, you wanna play ball?” “Hey, you didn’t see a ball around here, did you?”

  Who needs that?

  I consider all of this, but finally I decide to go for it. Then right before the operation, Dr. Stern drops another bombshell.

  “The material the prosthetic testicle is made from has a kind of thermos bottle quality to it. You follow?”

  “I think so. My fake ball is like a lunch pail. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Sort of. What I’m saying is that it will adapt to outside temperatures.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Dr. Stern scratches the top of his head. “Let’s say you’re outside in the snow, sledding, or skiing, or something.”

  “Sledding? Do I look Swedish?”

  “Just go with me. When you come inside, into a warm house, your body temperature will increase, but your artificial testicle will remain the temperature it is outside.”

  “Wow. And the other way around, too, right? So if I come out of a hot bath and get into bed with a woman, she’s gonna say, ‘This is weird. Your body is cool but your left ball is hot.’”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yeah. Quite a conversation piece, this fake ball. Dr. Stern, I don’t know about this.”

  “Robert, it’s no big deal.”

  “Not for you.”

  Dr. Stern grins and then jabs me in the arm with a needle, injecting me with a little something to take the edge off. Otherwise, if I spend one more second thinking about what is about to happen in my very precious lower region, if I contemplate that Dr. Stern is about to remove my left testicle and replace it with a heat-and-cold-attracting circular piece of flesh-colored plastic rubber fake ball, I just might back out.

  Within seconds I’m floating, gonzo, feeling no pain, stoned, giddy, all my anxiety evaporated, except for one last tiny remnant, an image of a gorgeous nurse tonguing into my ear, “I’ve always found you so sexy, Robert. Unfortunately, I only go for guys with two balls.”

  And then I’m blinking into the blinding overhead lights of the operating room, and through a squint see Dr. Stern, round-faced, barely tall enough to perform the operation without a ladder, smiling up at me.

  “You want to see it before we put it in?” he says.

  “Yeah. I would.”

  “Okay.” He turns to a nurse a few feet behind him. “Give me one of those prosthetic testicles, would you?”

  “Here you go,” she says and tosses it to him. My future fake left ball arcs toward Dr. Stern, hits him right in the hands, and pops out.

  “Lost it in the lights,” he says, stooping down and scooping it off the floor. He looks at it, frowns. “This one’s too big.”

  The nurse shrugs. “It’s the smallest one they make.” “You know what?” I say. “Fuck you guys.”

  By now, Dr. Stern, the nurse, and the rest of the blue-scrubbed operating support staff are roaring.

  “A little pre-op humor,” Dr. Stern says, catching his breath. “Come on, Robert. We’d only do this with you.”

  “That’s great. You really had me going. You guys have a lot of fun in here, don’t you?”

  “Oh yeah,” Dr. Stern says. “We have a ball.”

  He holds for a second, then they all burst out laughing again. Ha-ha-ha-ha. I feel like I’m in an SNL take-off of a medical show, the unfortunate guest star about to go under the knife.

  The good news is that I don’t have testicular cancer. As for my fake ball, Dr. Stern is right on the money. Nobody notices that I have one regular ball and one made of Silly Putty. The question never comes up.

  Except years later when I go in for an MRI.

  I’m about to lay down inside the torpedo-shaped, claustrophobic capsule, which I’m actually looking forward to because it’s the only place I can get any peace and quiet, when the nurse steps in. What a nurse. She looks like Scarlett Johansson, only hotter.

  “Hi, I’m Lulu.”

  “Nurse Lulu. How you doin’? I’m Patient Robert.”

  “I can’t believe this. I’m such a big fan. Do you think later, maybe, I could—”

  Give you head?

  Wait, did I say that out loud?

  “—have your autograph?”

  “Sure. Absolutely. You bet. Definitely.”

  Man, is she hot.

  “Ohmygod. That is so cool. Thank you so much. Okay, before we begin the scan, I have to ask you a couple of questions. The answer is probably no, but are you wearing dentures or do you have any prosthetic devices?”

  Do I really have to tell her about my fake ball?

  To make matters worse, Nurse Lulu tee-hees in a super-sexy voice.

  I don’t want to tell this hottie who I’m fantasizing about that I have one nut. What a turn-off. That’ll really kill my chances with her. But I don’t want to go inside the MRI tube and have the machine go whirrrr-whirrrr-whirrrr before it blows up, and then have Dr. Stern’s voice come over the loudspeaker like the voice of God, thundering at me, “Bob, you didn’t lie about the ball, did you?”

  I have to tell her. But maybe I can save the day by making up something cool about how I got it. Something exotic. Something that will help me get laid, instead of turning me into a carnival freak.

  For a while I considered having the procedure done in Vietnam so I could tell everyone that I lost my ball in Nam. Think of the edge that’d give me. Women would assume I was a war hero.

  Poor guy. He lost his ball in battle. But he says with a little bit of sex and the occasional good one-ball massage, he has a chance to overcome the memories of war. It’s my patriotic duty to take care of him. Do my part for the vets.

  I couldn’t go through with it. Before I slide into the MRI machine, I tell Nurse Lulu the truth.

  She doesn’t bat an eye. Doesn’t faze her at all.

  Since then, so far, so good. Nobody’s asked about the fake ball during sex. Nobody seems to care. Or maybe during those three minutes of passion, nobody noticed.

  SESSION SIX

  “GIVING UP”

  TWENTY-ONE WEEKS

  In my cancer support group, which consists of a dozen people who are on the brink of facing death, we mainly talk about life. We talk about our families, our passions, and, believe it or not, our futures. One by one we speak about what we have done and not done. We talk about our loves, losses, and regrets. We talk about wishes unfulfilled and plans unmade. We make promises to each other and ourselves, promises that include a tomorrow that sees us living in it. We vow to remove all the bullshit from our lives and to get our priorities in order. We give ourselves permission to live our lives to the fullest, now and forever.

  I believe in all of this for all of us.
It is exactly how we should have been living our lives before we got diagnosed.

  Because you never know. You cannot predict what will happen to you when. We expect our lives to work smoothly, to keep clicking like clockwork. We take so much for granted. We shouldn’t.

  Remember Siegfried and Roy’s show and the trick where Roy stuck his head inside a white tiger’s mouth? They performed the trick a million times without incident. It became routine, almost automatic. But one night, the tiger looked at Roy and said, “This shit stops tonight, motherfucker .” You know the rest. Cancer taught me you can’t take anything for granted.

  It starts with attitude. I honestly said, “Okay, how many treatments do I have? Eight? That’s it? Eight and then I can go back on the road? When do I start?”

  My motivation begins with Derek. I saw what he went through and I saw his attitude. He was a fighter to the end. Part of what motivates me is that I want to beat the thing that took Derek. I want a rematch. This time I’m gonna win.

  It gets harder and harder. As my treatments progress and I get thinner and weaker and sicker, I rely on my will to get me through. At one point I sit at my desk and think about all the things that I want to live for. I take out my index cards and start writing a list. On the first card, I write: I know it’s not over. I know I can still make people laugh. I want to go back on the road. Cancer cannot take that away from me.

  But then I undergo treatment seven, which obliterates everything I just said.

  Treatment seven teaches me perhaps the most important lesson of all:

  I am human.

  One more treatment to go. One more. Just one more. And then—

  I am lying in bed. I’m cold. So cold.

  Suddenly, I can’t breathe. My chest thumps with pain. I’m shaking. I grab the sides of my sweatshirt with both hands to try to keep them steady.

  Where am I?

  At home? In the hospital? I don’t know where I am.

  I am in a room. I’ve never been here before. The room is dark and cold and damp. I shiver.

  I am standing now. I take one step and bump into something hard and solid. I squint and see that I am standing in a sea of boxes. Large rectangular wooden boxes. I rub my hand on the top of one of the boxes. The wood feels smooth and lacquered and smells faintly of cherry.

  I turn around and bump into another box, and another. I am trapped, walled in. There is no escape. I can’t move. What is this place? Then I realize what these boxes are.

  Coffins.

  Two men in suits materialize. One, Mort, sits on the edge of a coffin. He wears a black suit and flashy red tie. He seems very happy. The other man is Otto, my father. He paces between two butterscotch-colored caskets. He rubs the same casket I rubbed moments ago. Mort smiles in approval. “That’s a beauty.”

  “How much?” my father asks.

  “Eleven thousand,” Mort says.

  “Eleven grand?” My father turns to me. “Is he out of his mind?”

  “Who’s it for?” I ask.

  “You, Bob.”

  I nod. Of course.

  “Eleven grand’s a little much for me,” I say. “A little rich for my blood.”

  My dad tips his head toward Mort, whose legs dangle off the side of the casket as if he’s five years old.

  “Eleven grand for a wooden box,” my dad says, shaking his head.

  “That you’re only gonna use once,” I point out.

  “This is, what,” my dad says, massaging the top of the coffin as if he’s polishing it, “about eighty bucks in wood and twenty dollars in hardware?”

  “Dad, they’re not gonna let you go to Home Depot and build your own coffin,” I say.

  My dad eyes Mort. “I have to say, eleven thousand dollars is a little more than I wanted to throw into a hole in the ground.”

  “That’s cheap,” Mort says, suddenly dismounting from the casket. He approaches a gold-handled coffin that’s suspended above the others on a museum-style glass stand. “This one’s sixty-five thousand.”

  “Sixty-five thousand dollars?” my dad says. “You can get buried in a BMW for sixty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Sixty-five grand,” I say. “That’s not for the dead guy. That’s show business. That’s so people can come to the funeral and say, ‘Wow. What a casket. Come on, let’s go, I have a lunch.’”

  My dad nods. “You’re right. They’re only gonna see it for a few minutes and they’re never coming back.”

  “Why not just rent it?” I say. “You can rig it up so that when everybody leaves, you pull a lever, the bottom opens, and I’ll just fall into the hole. Then you can return the casket and get your deposit back.”

  “I don’t want to deal with this anymore,” my dad says to Mort. “We’ll just take the eleven-thousand-dollar one.”

  “Excellent choice,” Mort says.

  “Yeah. Excellent choice,” I say. “It’s like we just ordered the entrée special.”

  “You want a pillow with that?” Mort asks.

  “Does it cost extra?” my dad asks. “Or for eleven grand, do you throw it in?”

  “I have to charge you,” Mort says. “Sorry. There’s my cost, labor, overhead, you know how it goes, Otto.”

  “Man. Everything’s a la carte at the funeral parlor,” I say.

  “He doesn’t need a pillow,” my dad says.

  “Are you sure?” Mort asks.

  “He’s not going to know if there’s a pillow in there. He’s dead. He didn’t ask for a pillow when we dropped him taking him out of the car.”

  “I’m just thinking of the comfort level, that’s all,” Mort says.

  “Maybe he has a point,” I say. “What if I’m stuck in an awkward position for all eternity?”

  Suddenly, I see a beautiful rainbow arching across the sky and I hear a symphony of trumpets, and then Jesus, in all his glory, floats down to earth, and all of the dead people rise.

  Except me.

  Because I can’t get out of the coffin.

  “Come on, Robert, let’s go,” Jesus says.

  “I’m trying to, but my back is out. My father wouldn’t spring for the pillow—”

  I’m cold. So cold.

  Seven treatments. One more. Just one more.

  Vomit rises into my throat, wet, sour, violent. I squeeze my eyes shut to will it away. My head pounds with searing pain. It feels as if someone is crushing my skull between two concrete blocks. The bones in my back and neck burn.

  And yet I am so cold.

  I look down at the lump below me in my bed, my body. It feels detached, freezing, the arms and legs of a distant cadaver. I move one leg slightly and feel the layer of thermal underwear beneath my pajamas pressing against my skin, and then I feel the weight of three blankets on top of me.

  Still I am so cold.

  I start to shiver. My fingers shake with tremors. I need more warmth, a sweater, a jacket, another blanket, but I can’t move. I turn my head slowly and focus on the closet door a few steps away. I have to get there. I lift my right leg one inch. Pain shoots through me. Forget the closet. It might as well be in another state.

  I’m crashing. I want to scream. But no one will hear me. I am alone. Vicki is away, a family emergency. Robert, will you be all right for an hour or two?

  An hour or two.

  I guess I forgot that my life now is defined not by hours but by minutes. An hour or two could be the rest of my life.

  My teeth start to chatter and the vomit rolls into my mouth again. I don’t know what to do. I am freezing . . .

  I hear a car pull up outside. The car door slams. Vicki? The front door of the house opens and closes and footsteps approach. The door to my room opens tentatively.

  “Robert? Hey.”

  Steve. My daughter Jessica’s boyfriend. I twist my head toward him. My teeth are clattering like the plastic ones you buy at Halloween.

  “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “Steve, actually, I’m feeling, pretty, sh
itty.”

  Each word is an ordeal. The sentence nearly does me in. I have to catch my breath before I can speak again.

  “I’m so cold. I need my winter coat. In the closet.”

  “Winter coat? Robert, it’s a hundred and fourteen out. No lie.”

  With every ounce of strength I can find, I force my head up and lean on my elbows. Within seconds, I am doubled over in pain.

  “Steve, I need a big favor. You have to take me to the hospital.”

  I try to move another inch but the pain shooting through my arms and head is too much. I fall back onto my pillow.

  “Steve. Please.”

  “Okay,” Steve says. “I’m gonna lift you out of bed, slowly. Ready?”

  He leans over behind me and cradles me, then with both arms brings me up to a sitting position. I weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and he is barely winded. But the move leaves me gasping. Before I can catch my breath, he lifts me out of bed, places my feet gently onto the floor, swings my arm over his shoulder, and walks me to the closet.

  “Lean on me. We’re going to find your coat.”

  Somehow, some way, Steve locates my down ski jacket, then slips my arms through. He finds a wool ski hat in a pocket and pulls it over my head. Like a wounded soldier, I allow him to virtually carry me to the car. Finally, we are in his Honda, this bizarre couple, the well-muscled young man in tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, and the fifty-year-old wraith in a wool ski hat, winter coat, gloves, and pajamas snug over thermal underwear.

  “Steve,” I say. “Would you turn on the heat?”

  “The heat?”

  “Please. I’m freezing.”

  He glances at me. My entire body is shaking. I am one massive tremor. I peek at him. He is scared, poor kid, even more than I am. And I’m terrified.

  “Sure, Robert,” Steve says. “Anything you want.”

  I nod, clasp my arms around my chest. I’m ice. “Full blast,” I croak.

  Steve flips the temperature dial over to the red line and hits the gas. I jam my hands under my legs to keep them from shaking.

  “Thanks, Steve,” I spit out between tremors.

  “No worries.” With the back of his hand, he swabs the pond of sweat collecting above his eyebrows, his eyes trained on the highway heading through the glimmering Arizona desert to the Mayo Clinic.