And then it’s like an episode of ER.
A sea of green—doctors, nurses, attendants—descends on me. I’m slid onto a gurney, then wheeled into a room. Voices bounce off walls, firm, professional, urgent: “White blood count zero point five,” and then another voice (Dr. Mehldau?) adds, “Neutroponic fever” and “Isolation.”
When I’m semicoherent, I will learn that my previously compromised immune system has shut down, clobbered by the chemo, and become essentially nonexistent. I cannot be exposed to any bacteria. The slightest infection can kill me.
I’m brought by elevator to the cancer ward. I wait in the hall while a nurse sterilizes my hospital room with disinfectant. The room is without windowsills, shelves, tables—any surface that can collect dust. I have one connection to the outside world, a large plate glass window through which I can see my children.
Miraculously, they are there now—Jessica, 22, Aliyah, 10, and Jacob, 2. They are my reason to live. When they are not here, I conjure them. I bask in their imaginary faces, the glow of their smiles. I need them to keep me alive.
I try to wave to them, but it takes too much strength. I talk to them silently. I mouth that I love them and pray that they can somehow hear me.
Then they are gone, replaced by a team of doctors and nurses who scrub themselves viciously as if they have lice, and then they wriggle into space suits, and put on gloves, and masks. They look as if they are about to tamper with radiation or take a walk on the moon. Instead, they take my pulse and give me my shots. The nurses cover me with blankets, two, three, and then a fourth, and Nadine lies down on top of me. I’m so sick I’m not even turned on.
And I feel no warmer. I’m still shaking, and now, suddenly, I’m hit with an overall ache, as if I’ve taken repeated body blows from Mike Tyson.
“My kids,” I say in a low moan. “Can I see my kids?”
A pause, then, “Soon,” a reed-thin promise from a distant, disconnected voice.
I’m dead to the world.
While I’m asleep, Dr. Mehldau meets with my parents. He tells them that I will have to be in the hospital for a minimum of ten days. That is, if I live through the night.
I wake up twelve hours later in a different room, hooked up to multiple IVs and monitors. My body feels pummeled and bruised.
I blink at the ceiling and I start thinking about my attitude, about where I am, and about how to go on. Since my diagnosis, I have done everything within my power, everything Dr. Mehldau and the other oncologists have asked. I have entertained at the infusion center and at my support group. I have preached keeping a positive attitude. I have been up the whole time.
And now I have been sucker punched. Never saw it coming. I have been knocked down. Nobody is a bigger fan of having a positive attitude than I am. Yes, you can. You have to believe. You can overcome anything.
Well, yes, you can has at this instant been replaced by no, you can’t. Because sometimes you just can’t. There are practical issues. And there are fantasy and reality. You can’t be fooled into thinking that anything is possible armed with only a positive attitude. That may be the definition of insanity.
I can’t say, If I believe enough, I can go out to the parking lot, flap my wings, and fly home.
Everything is not possible.
Even with a positive attitude, I could die.
If the treatment doesn’t work, you’re dead.
And if the treatment does work, the cancer could come back. I will never be cured. The best I can hope for is remission.
The way I feel right now, this minute, I could die. Right now. I really could.
I think I will die.
I’m beaten.
What was I thinking? Did I really believe this was going to be easy? I get zapped eight times and, then, voila, it’s over, congratulations, cured? Yeah. Piece of cake. Gotta have the right attitude, that’s all. Upbeat. Positive. The life of the party. Hey, did you hear the one about the dick wig salesman, ha-ha-ha, you’re a riot, Robert.
Bullshit. All of it. You can’t beat this disease with attitude. What did I think, I’m a tough New Yorker and cancer’s a rube from Iowa?
I can’t move a muscle. I try to wiggle my fingers and they sting, they sting with pain. I want to scream, but I can’t. My voice is clogged in my throat.
It’s over, folks. Done. I’m fucking done. You want the truth? I give up. I cannot get through one more second of this. I admit it. I can’t help it.
I have lost.
“Robert?”
I blink once.
“Robert?”
My dad. He stands next to my bed, but he looks far away and very small.
“How you doing?”
I swallow. “Shitty, Dad.” My throat feels as if it’s going to tear open. “This is really bad, Dad. Really bad.”
“Bob, you’ve got one more treatment and then that’s it.” His voice is gentle, a soft plea.
“You know what? I don’t care anymore.” My voice sounds hollow, as if it’s being piped into my head through a tinny speaker.
“Bob—”
Again, I say, “This feels really bad, Dad,” and then the words rush out: “I can’t—I can’t—I don’t want to feel like this anymore, Dad. Right now, this moment, I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t see it. This is really, really bad. Everything hurts so much. I feel so weak—”
“One more treatment, Bob, that’s all.” My dad fades even farther away. He seems helpless, out of arguments, out of fight, drifting far, far away.
“Dad, I can’t.” And I start to cry. The tears slide down my cheeks. I sniffle, take as deep a breath as I can, and then I feel weirdly calm.
“If I’m going to die, I want it to be on my terms. Not this way. Not. Like this.” I wait to make sure my father hears me. I can feel his breath dusting my cheek. His eyes are locked into mine. “Dad, I want you to unhook me. I want you to pull out all these needles and plugs.”
He says nothing. I lean closer to him and I whisper, “And then I want you to take me to the window. Because I’m going to jump.”
My dad stammers. “J-Jump? To where?”
“Down to the street.”
“Robert—what—what would that accomplish?”
I sniff. “That way I decide when I’m going to die and how. And if I do it this way, I take the cancer with me. The second I hit the sidewalk, it dies with me. It can’t crawl out of my body and get someone else. I take it with me. I kill my fucking cancer. I want to jump, Dad. Please. Open the window.”
His lips start to quiver. And then my dad suddenly starts to cry. He coughs, wipes his nose with the sleeve of his shirt. He backs up two steps and turns toward the door. I reach for him, grab nothing but air. “Where you going?”
“I’ll be back,” he says.
I close my eyes and I sigh. My chest heaves and fills me with an ache that rattles my teeth. Jesus. God. I’m through. I really am. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.
And then I’m aware of movement at the door. I turn my head slightly and see my dad standing in the doorway with my children, Aliyah and Jacob. He holds their hands. He hesitates half a second, and then he brings them a step closer to me.
“Tell them,” he says, his voice a low hiss.
My bottom lip flutters. I am shaking all over.
“Tell them what you told me,” my father says.
I look at them, my children, my reason—Aliyah, innocent, wide-eyed beauty, and Jacob, a baby, pure, too young to know disappointment and sin, both of them made purely of promise and hope and love, and I can’t speak.
And then, as I look at them, I see Derek in their faces, in their eyes, and I can see his light, and I can feel his fight, and suddenly I hear his laughter, even at the end, and I remember sitting with him on the edge of his bed and telling him stories, among them my version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”—
“So, yeah, the Papa Bear comes down for breakfast and he says to his wife, Mama Bear, ‘I’
m hungry. What’s for breakfast?’”
“And the Mama Bear says, ‘Oatmeal.’”
“And the Papa Bear says, ‘Oatmeal? You gotta be shitting me. How about bacon and eggs, or some sausage, something like that? I don’t want any fucking oatmeal.’”
“And the Mama Bear says, ‘Where the hell am I supposed to get bacon and eggs?’”
“And the Papa Bear says, ‘The same place you got the oatmeal from, you dumb shit.’”
By now Derek is laughing hysterically, practically falling off the bed. What other dad would talk to his eleven-year-old son like that? He knows I’m insane. And he loves it. From that moment on, all I have to do is sit on his bed, put on my Papa Bear voice, and say, “I’m hungry,” and he bursts out laughing.
I look now at Aliyah and Jacob and I understand, finally, completely, that this cancer is not about me. It’s about them. It’s about my children. I have a responsibility. I have to get through this for Jessica and Aliyah and Jacob, and for Derek. We have very few choices in life, and choosing cancer isn’t one of mine. The disease chose me. I can only choose to give in to it or to keep fighting. And I can choose not to kill myself.
I lift my eyes from my children to my father. His eyes are moist and his mouth is trembling slightly. He stares at me silently.
When he was a child, he lost his parents. And now he is facing losing a child. I know what that feels like.
I can’t do that to him or to my mother. They have suffered enough.
And then I remember a story my father once told me, the story of his survival, the story of his life—
In single file, hundreds of Jews march alongside the Nazi soldiers. All of the Jews are skeletons. Most can barely walk. A few give up right there, suddenly breaking from the line. With their last ounce of strength, they streak toward the barbed wire fence and impale themselves on it. Others simply step out of the line and stop. The soldiers respond by shooting them.
Otto Schimmel, 15, moves slowly, almost imperceptibly, baby step by baby step. The Nazis jab their captives, including Otto, with their bayonets and tell them to pick up the pace. A boy Otto’s age drifts out of line, falls to his knees, sobbing, holding his hands above his head in surrender. A Nazi soldier walks over to the boy, draws his pistol, and shoots the boy in the chest.
“Noooo.” A man’s wail, pitched high as an animal’s keen. The man appears. He lowers himself to the ground and cradles his dead son in his arms. The Nazi soldier comes up behind him, raises his pistol, and blows off the father’s head.
The soldier faces the line of Jews. They are frozen, horrified, petrified. The Nazi soldier says simply, “If you want to live, keep moving.”
Years later, my father will repeat those words to me.
“Ironic,” he says. “The best piece of advice I ever got was from a pig of a Nazi soldier.”
Many years later, as I lay in my hospital bed, my father’s words will once again reverberate in my head: “Robert, if you want to live, you have to keep moving.”
“What did you want to tell us, Daddy?”
Aliyah. Her eyes are wide blue moon circles.
I take her in and then I smile. “I just wanted to tell you that I love you very much. That’s all. I don’t feel so great right now. I’m really tired, but I’ll see you later, okay?”
“You mean like in an hour?”
I move my eyes from Aliyah’s to my father’s and I fasten them there. “Yeah. Like in an hour.”
“Let’s go, kids. Let Daddy sleep.” My dad breaks into a little half-jog, one of his hands squeezed around Aliyah’s hand, the other enveloping Jacob’s tiny hand like a catcher’s mitt.
I watch them walk out of my room and then I turn my head toward the window.
The window.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and pray to God for sleep.
SESSION SEVEN
“FIGHTING BACK”
LOVE STORY
After my dad brings Aliyah and Jacob into my room and asks me to tell them that I’ve decided to jump out the window to my death, things start happening fast.
First and foremost, I commit to staying alive.
Which is not easy with cancer-killing poison coursing through my body, my face eternally hovering an inch above the toilet bowl, and my body feeling either as cold as Antarctica or as hot as the surface of the sun.
Not to mention the overall pain. Just picture yourself stepping out into the street and being hit by a car. Wham. And by a Hummer, not by a Mini Cooper.
Nope. It’s not that easy staying alive.
But I’m not going anywhere. That’s a fact. A certainty. I have now morphed into my dad. I am walking on my own miserable march, taking it step by painful step, teeny baby steps, some of them barely noticeable, but I’m always, always moving forward. I am going to make it. I am determined.
Slowly, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, I start to improve. Day three my fever fades and I can stand up unaided for a couple of minutes without keeling over from vertigo. Day four I can take a few steps without clutching my middle to quell the crippling nausea cramps.
By day seven, I’m able to sit up, focus on the TV, channel surf with the remote, and eventually lower myself out of bed and walk to the end of the room. A couple of days after that, my headache settles down to a low thrum, and I am, overall, fairly coherent.
Finally, Dr. Mehldau informs me that I can return home and gear up for my last chemo treatment. At last I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I begin rooting myself on. One more treatment. Just one more. You can do it.
But I have changed. Enormously, deeply, incontrovertibly. The change takes the form of a constant gnawing pain in my gut that now grips me and holds on as if it has claws. The change has me twisted in knots. I know what it is, but I am afraid to speak its name aloud.
I decide to write about it. My support group recently suggested taking a personal inventory of our lives as a way of getting in touch with what really and truly matters. When you’re staring eyeball to eyeball with the Grim Reaper, you’d better feel as if you’ve dealt with the important stuff. What’s the point of going to your doom with a bunch of loose ends or unfulfilled dreams lying around? When else am I going to deal with my change, if not now? What am I waiting for?
One afternoon before I return home, my mother sits in my hospital room knitting a shawl or wall-to-wall carpeting and I sit up in bed, my reporter’s notebook propped open between my knees. I scratch a few random lines across the top of the first page and say to myself, Okay. I’m going to take a personal inventory of all the really important things in my life, listed by priority. What and who is really worth it? Who counts? Which people in my life are indispensable?
Number one. That’s obvious. Family. I carefully print my children’s names, starting with the oldest, Jessica, ending with Jacob, the youngest. Then I write down my parents, Otto and Betty.
And then, without thinking, as if a Ouija board is powering the pen, I spell out: “M-E-L-I-S-S-A.”
Yeah.
Melissa.
Okay, there it is. Right there. In black and white.
Melissa.
The instant after I write her name, I know that she is my number one priority. I have to see her. It’s not important. It’s necessary. I have to see Melissa if I live, or if I’m going to die. Either way. I have to see her.
Because here’s the change within me that I dare not name:
I’m in love with Melissa.
Well, okay, again, full disclosure.
It’s not really a change.
The truth is, Melissa has dominated my thoughts and taken up permanent residence in my heart since the day I broke up with her. I cannot stop seeing her face, hearing her laugh, smelling her perfume, her shampoo . . .
I believe that part of the pain I feel every day is the pain of losing Melissa.
So here is the real change:
I have to see her and tell her how I feel.
See, that’s what
cancer does. It shakes you up, then sifts out all the unimportant crap and leaves you facing only the highest priorities. Sounds eerie, but it’s really not. It’s what we should be doing every day. It’s how we should live our lives. It’s how I vow to live mine from now on.
Okay. Simple. I’m gonna tell Melissa how I feel.
I put down my pen and rub the top of my head. I count two major roadblocks blocking my way.
One. I haven’t spoken to Melissa for six months. She doesn’t know where I am or that I’m sick. She probably has a boyfriend. Or she might even have a husband.
“Holy shit,” I say aloud.
Two. I have cancer. I look like hell. I feel like crap. Forget about a future with Melissa. I might not have a future, period. She’s young. She has her whole life ahead of her. Why would she want to spend it with me?
“What holy shit?” My mom, speaking with a knitting needle in her mouth. I start to climb out of bed. I groan as I lower my legs to the floor. “Robert, where are you going?”
“Ma, you know what I’m thinking?”
“God knows.”
“I’m thinking I want to go for a ride.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. It’s a beautiful day.”
“It’s a hundred and seventeen and it’s noon.”
“Let’s go for a ride. Come on. You can drive.”
“No. Really? You can barely put your shoes on.”
“That’s why you should drive.” I somehow make it to the closet and manage to pull the flimsy plywood doors open. “A hundred seventeen. I guess I could wear shorts.”
My mother rolls up her knitting and stares at me. “Robert, are you all right?”
I turn to her and put my hands on my hips. “Actually, Ma, I’ve changed.”
“Changed? How?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
How long will it take you to drive me to Los Angeles?
I’m buzzed, goofy from the remnants of my medication and my new insane game plan. But that’s what I’m thinking as I start fumbling through the closet, sliding hangers, searching for a shirt that might remotely fit, something that won’t make me look like I’m wearing a tarp.
Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life Page 12