Not an exact analogy to cancer, I grant you, but not altogether off the mark either.
To prepare for the chemo, Dr. Farber scheduled me for an information session where I would learn all the ins and outs associated with kicking the crap out of my cancer. He recommended that I have someone accompany me to this session because, as he put it, “it’s good to have a second pair of ears.” It was hard for me to tell with Dr. Farber, given that his beard covered most of his face, whether this was standard procedure and all his patients were poor listeners or whether he had doubts about me in particular. If the latter, he would not have been wrong. Despite my job as a technical writer (which is a misnomer anyway), I am not good with facts. One of the reasons I majored in English was because there wasn’t very much in the way of concrete information that I had to learn; I could say anything and it wouldn’t be wrong. But start loading me down with lots of facts in a very short time and my mind is going to wander—and that’s without cancer. With it, there’s no telling how flaky I would become.
Fortunately, Eleanor agreed to accompany me to the information session. Eleanor happens to be good with facts, which is one of the reasons why we found each other in the fourth grade: she did the research for the report on the Westward Movement, and I wrote all the flowery stuff about the hardships of the pioneer women and drew the picture of the wagon train for the cover.
So Eleanor and I went to Dr. Farber’s office, where he introduced us to his nurse practitioner, Abigail Wu, whose job, he said, was to do the explaining. A nurse practitioner, from what I can make out, is someone who knows more or less the same stuff as the doctor but has more patience for explaining it. It was clear at once that Abigail Wu, a small woman in an Eileen Fisher shift dress, was perfect for this job. She was one of those unflappable, quietly rational people to whom you might not pay much attention under ordinary circumstances but who really comes in handy when you have cancer. Had I, for example, suddenly decided to strip off my clothes and run around the room screaming hysterically “Why me? Why me?” Abigail Wu would have waited for me to calm down and continued where she left off.
Abigail Wu led us to a special room that had been fitted out with pictures of sandy beaches and botanical prints. Everyone knows that sandy beaches and botanical prints are supposed to be calming, which, if you’re embarking on chemotherapy, can have the opposite effect by making you aware that someone wants you to be calm. A more subtle oncologist might have had pictures of insects and clowns to give the impression that there was nothing to worry about. But you can’t expect someone who’s spent half his life studying things like the lymphatic system or the growth of solid tumors to understand the subtleties of reverse psychology.
After we had settled into the cluster of cushy chairs that had been arranged in feng shui fashion in the corner and Abigail had served us the prerequisite herbal tea, she handed me a “welcome packet” containing “information about my breast cancer and the many products and services associated with it.” I can’t say I was thrilled to get the welcome packet. I know firsthand through my work at I-ACE that welcome packets are usually a waste of everyone’s time. They tend to contain lots of brochures and fact sheets on overpriced paper that eventually just clutter up your apartment. There’s usually one telephone number in some remote corner of one of the brochures that is actually useful but that you can’t find when you need it anyway. Eleanor must have known that I was thinking negatively about the welcome packet, because she took it from me and put it into her Kate Spade handbag (purchased, if I may digress for a moment, as a consolation gift for herself soon after she learned of the unseemly goings on of the sociopathic Ronnie). I have to say that the placement of the welcome packet in the Kate Spade handbag had a soothing effect on me—don’t ask me why.
Abigail went on to explain the fine points of my regimen, which would consist of four treatments of two toxic chemicals every two weeks, followed by twelve treatments of another toxic chemical once a week, followed by six weeks of toxic radiation on a daily basis. Toxicity here, it goes without saying, was to be directed at the cancer and not at me, though obviously some spillover was to be expected, which was why I would also start on a half dozen other drugs intended to combat the toxicity of said spillover. The names of these other drugs were batted around, but I couldn’t tell you what they were because I’d stopped paying attention. Eleanor was furiously jotting everything into her Kate Spade personal planner bought, along with her Kate Spade wallet, Kate Spade change purse, and Kate Spade key chain, at the same time that she laid out 2 G’s for the Kate Spade handbag. The thought of all that Kate Spade got me daydreaming about the Prada knock-off that I should have bought before the vendor, who used to elude the police in the East 50s, finally got snagged and deported back to Nigeria. I was regretting the loss of that bag in particular and the crackdown on knock-off vendors in general while Abigail Wu moved on to a discussion of the side effects of the drugs to prevent side effects, and what drugs I could take to prevent those side effects. Chemo drugs and designer names were getting pretty mixed up in my head at this point, but from the little I could make out, the information session boiled down to a very long list of unpleasant things that could happen, though hopefully wouldn’t, but which, after all, make sense to think about when a truckload of chemicals are being pumped into your system in order to kill something that’s out to kill you.
I was trying to remember the hardware on the knock-off Prada that had slipped through my fingers while Abigail covered such unlikely eventualities as bladder bleeding, mouth sores, acne, and diarrhea, and I had just imagined myself jetting off to Nigeria to peruse the stash of knock-offs that the deported vendor was no doubt keeping in storage in his native village, when we arrived at the concluding topic of the information session: wigs. Wigs were the mecca to which the information session had been wending its way. Wigs were something a cancer patient could look forward to. Sure, to get there you had to lose your hair (“in clumps,” as Abigail pointed out, “which can be disturbing”), but wigs were the silver lining. They inserted a little liveliness into these otherwise macabre proceedings. Eleanor and Abigail now discussed the subject with relieved animation, segueing into issues like human hair versus synthetic, and whether short or long would frame my face better. There was also much give-and-take on the merits of Wig-a-Little in the Village, which would accept the discount coupon in my welcome packet, and the more upscale Henri Pierre Human Hair Boutique on the Upper East Side, which wouldn’t. I, however, was not involved in this discussion. I had forgotten all about the Prada knock-off and the Nigerian vendor, and was staring at the woman in a head scarf smiling out at me from the welcome packet sticking out of Eleanor’s Kate Spade bag.
The next day, I revisited the wild-eyed surgeon for the insertion of the Infuse-a-Port, a plastic doodad placed under the skin near my right clavicle into which the chemo would be pumped. The Infuse-a-Port gave me a cyborgian look in my tighter sweaters and balanced the dent on my left side where the wild-eyed surgeon had perhaps gotten a little carried away with the lumpectomy. Any aspirations I may have harbored to become Playmate of the Month were out the window, but Eleanor, who can always find a bright side, noted that guys like gadgets, and the Infuse-a-Port would make a good conversation piece.
WHEN YOU GO for chemo, you get to take comparative thinking to a new level. I mean here I was with my pretty good cancer thrown in with people whose cancer wasn’t so good and some whose cancer wasn’t good at all. We all sat there in the chemo chairs and chatted about this and that—some-times our cancers and sometimes things like problems with our health insurance, the pros and cons of different anti-nausea medicines, and what had really killed Michael Jackson.
I got to know these people fairly well even though under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have said two words to them, which opens the world up a bit, as you can imagine. I had already had a taste of this sort of thing with my “giving back” to the old Jews, but this was a whole new level of expanding my horizo
ns. The old Jews were in their way familiar—they were sort of like people in my family, especially the Kaplan side, where there are some real doozies, as my mother likes to say. The people here, however, weren’t like anyone in my family. One of the regulars, for example, was a Viet Nam vet named Flanagan with lung cancer, whose principal complaint was that he couldn’t smoke. He voiced this complaint continuously and with good humor, although he had only half a voice box with which to do so. We even got into the habit of asking him, “Flanagan, do you want a cigarette?” to which his scripted response was, “I’m dying for one”—which made us all practically roll on the floor with laughter. Really, you had to be there.
Another regular on my schedule was Mrs. Dryer, an elderly African-American woman with ovarian cancer whose husband, until the onset of his wife’s illness, didn’t know how to turn on the oven but had since become a domestic paragon, cooking meals from scratch and hovering over his wife with cups of tea and snacks. It was such a case of devotion that we all watched with awe—no one had ever seen a man like that; he even sat patiently beside her as she watched her favorite soap opera. Eleanor, who accompanied me to some of my treatments, said that Mr. Dryer had renewed her faith in men, though she suspected that he was a one of a kind model or, given his advanced age, a model that had been retired years ago.
And then there was Ellen Pontillo. You would have had to have a heart of stone not to be wrung out by this forty-six-year-old mother of three, with a third recurrence of breast cancer that had metastasized to her liver—which was as good as saying that she’d be dead in four months, or so I gleaned in an Internet search that I trust Ellen Pontillo had not done. Still, she knew what the score was. You could tell by the way she looked at her kids. This wasn’t just looking at them— which, believe me, I’ve seen Pauline and Karen and Iris do practically all the time—this was looking at them because you don’t know how much longer you’re going to be able to see them. She also cried softly on occasion, and her husband, a big burly guy who was a fireman or possibly a plumber, patted her hand. Still, overall, she was cheerful and, with Mrs. Dryer, was a big fan of Days of Our Lives, which the two of them could talk about earnestly for hours. It was a wonder that someone whose life was a soap opera could get so engrossed in a soap opera, but there you are.
It’s hard to explain how, with all this death and dying, the atmosphere in Dr. Farber’s chemo room wasn’t depressing, but I have to say that it wasn’t. It helped that Mary Lou and Aidah, Dr. Farber’s oncology nurses, were so upbeat, not only in the face of their patients’ condition but in the face of their own lives, which I became pretty well versed in and which weren’t exactly a bed of roses. Mary Lou was a chunky blond from Mississippi, and Aidah a small, wiry black woman from the West Indies. Both had abysmal love lives, which they recounted to us in an admirably coordinated fashion. One would be accessing the Infuse-a-Port and starting the chemo, while the other would be deep into the latest saga of egregious wrongdoing on the part of some ne’er-do-well man who had attached himself unaccountably to her. Mary Lou had been in a series of bad relationships that dated from childhood. Her father was an alcoholic with a vicious temper from whom she had run away with a local boy who turned out to be an alcoholic with a vicious temper. She had left him for a dentist from New Jersey who, after a year, had shown himself, too, to be an alcoholic with a vicious temper. She was now living with a man in Brooklyn who managed to have a vicious temper without the assistance of alcohol.
As for Aidah, her difficulty involved getting the men who fastened onto her to get off her couch. “I don’t know what it is about me,” she said, “but these men, they sleep a lot.” Initially, she explained, they at least gave her a good time in bed, but soon they didn’t even do that, complaining that they were too tired.
“Why he so tired?” Aidah asked in her Jamaican lilt, with regard to her latest ne’er-do-well boyfriend, looking around at us, attached to our IVs, as though we might supply her with the answer. “You people, you got cancer; you not so tired. What he do to be so tired? And why my couch he have to be so tired on?”
These were rhetorical questions, but ones we were nonetheless pleased to contemplate. It was a mystery why Mary Lou and Aidah could not, as they put it, find themselves a good man.
“I’m not looking for a Mr. Dryer,” Mary Lou explained, motioning to this saintly creature stationed next to his wife, holding her pocketbook. “I’m realistic. I just want someone who won’t give me a black eye.”
Aidah and Mary Lou were, as they themselves would admit, conditioned into taking care of abusive and deadbeat men, so that coming to work, where they took care of genuinely sick people, was a liberating and invigorating activity. This gave them a pleasant, upbeat demeanor. And since there was always a new episode in their sagas, there was always something to look forward to when I went for chemo. For the last two sessions, for example, Mary Lou had been discussing the male nurse she had met a few weeks ago, with whom she had felt some definite chemistry.
“A male nurse! They the only good men out there,” exclaimed Aidah when this subject was raised. “Except Mr. Dryer,” she qualified, nodding to this individual, who was unwrapping the tinfoil from his wife’s vanilla wafers. “You got to be kind and caring to be a nurse. Mary Lou and me, we kind and caring—but with low self-esteem. But a male nurse, he got to have high self-esteem, what with the brothers all on him about it. I say you get yourself one of those, you set for life.”
I heard a lot about Mary Lou’s male nurse because I spent a lot of time in Dr. Farber’s office, even between chemo treatments. For example, there were the times I would get queasy and stop eating (which normally I would have embraced as a good thing, but when you have cancer, you want to eat) and had to go in for an extra infusion of anti-nausea meds and some cans of those power drinks to beef me up. Or I’d need some expert advice on constipation and have to consult Aidah and Mary Lou about stool softeners (the old Jews were also helpful on this topic and had strong opinions on the flavors of Metamucil). Or I’d fall behind with the gallons of Gatorade I was supposed to drink and have to come in for IV fluids. In short, the meds to prevent side effects were not altogether effective, side effects managing to creep in anyway, and Dr. Farber’s office became like the local Starbucks, where you drop in for a cappuccino (or in this case, an IV infusion) and hang out for a while with the locals.
Most of my time, however, was spent in my apartment, sleeping. I mean I’d sleep for twelve hours and then wake up and need a nap. Eleanor said that I was making up for all the years I’d been a chronic insomniac, and, given that I’d probably be a chronic insomniac again, this was money in the bank. I have to say that it struck me as paradoxical that just when I’d started to get out of my pajamas and get a life, I was now being roped back into staying in my pajamas and sleeping most of the day. Still, I knew there was a difference between this sort of sleep, the product of toxic chemicals meant to discourage my cancer and hence save my life, and the other sort of sleep that I used to do, which was the product of depression and inertia. Yes, I was tired, but oddly, I wasn’t depressed or inert. I knew that life was out there waiting for me and that I needed to get well so I could live it.
EVENTUALLY, OF COURSE, the inevitable happened: my mother returned from her cruise through the Greek Isles and called. Along with telling me about the beauties of ancient Greek culture and how much it had inspired her, she also asked me how I was.
This in itself was not unusual. My mother calls and asks me how I am practically all the time. If the phone rings at 6:30 in the morning when I have finally fallen asleep after spending half the night watching infomercials, it’s my mother asking how I am. And if the phone rings at 11:30 at night when I happen to collapse into a few hours of fitful slumber before waking up at 2 A.M. to finish the Häagen Dazs and Google people I didn’t like in junior high school, it is my mother asking how I am. She calls at these sorts of hours in order to be sure to get me, since if she does not get me, this puts her “i
nto a state”—i.e., a state of hysteria wondering what I’m doing that could possibly prevent me from answering the phone. This is rather odd, since the reason she usually calls is to find out if I’ve gotten my life started— which should mean doing something of which answering her phone calls would get in the way. I’ve tried to explain that she can call my cell phone, but she refuses to do this because 1) she doesn’t believe that cell phones are real phones; and 2) she doesn’t want to interrupt me if I happen to be chatting up the pharmacist in the Duane Reade or making eyes at the Orthodox Jew in the electronics store—these being the sorts of things I imagine she thinks I should be doing.
But I have not been telling you about my mother’s calls for the reason that, though they are frequent, they don’t last very long, with my end usually going something like this:
“Yes, Mom, I’m fine. Yes, work is going well. Yes, I’m dating. No, no one in particular. Yes, I’ll keep you posted. Yes, I’d be glad to have Sylvia’s son’s nephew’s friend call if he’s in town.”
I try to keep my responses short and positive because if I don’t, my mother will be incited to get involved and, in the process, drive me crazy. I know this, having seen what she did to my father, who though patient up to a point, could only take so much and would end up screaming at the top of his lungs. This made for an extremely fraught environment in which to grow up, as Dr. Chitturi has pointed out on numerous occasions. “You grew up in a war zone, Suzanne,” she tells me, “which was very hard for someone with your sensitive nature. But it has given you excellent survival skills that will serve you well once we get the post-traumatic stress out of the way.” As you see, Dr. Chitturi manages to acknowledge what I went through while deriving something positive from it—which is why I go to her even though my insurance only pays 20 percent of her fee.
Suzanne Davis gets a life Page 13