My Cancer Story: Part One - Continued p.4

I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS . . .

       Setting the alarm for 8:45 A.M., which to the rest of the world sounds late, I know, but for someone who is woken up every two hours to take a piss because radiation waves have riled up my bladder tissue till it's as angry as an eighty-four-year-old's who's got a mean case of prostatitis . . . truth is, I don't want to arise at 8:45. I could easily sleep till 10:00, since I haven't enjoyed real REM-type sleep for what seems like a week.

       Waiting for nurse Jerry, all earnest and bearded and careful and responsible-like, to come visit and slip on the rubber gloves and rip a bent needle out of the port that's been surgically implanted in my chest . . . new week, new bag of "dope" for my main man, Abbott. . . . It's all good, I suppose, but I don't enjoy lying flat on my back with anti-splash pads beneath my chest and torso. (Chemo is poison, let's remember; we don't want that shit splashing about the linens, much less our respective skins. . . .)

       Mondays mean a whole week ahead of whomping the bad cells with good X rays and 168 milliliters of 5-fluorouracil cocktail, my chemo drug of choice . . . so by Friday night or Saturday morning, I will almost certainly feel like shit. Which means, they tell me, Mondays should actually be "good" days, because I've had the weekend off from the radiation assault . . . and my body's had a chance to "recover."

       Shit, other than that, Mondays are fine specimens of the week. When you're normal, that is. When you're Cancer Boy, you're just a bit more skeptical about this fine day. . . .

BONDING

       Flipping off a friend, in a good way, a male-bonding way, as I lie on the couch, fatigued and diseased. He's flown twenty-five hundred miles to visit me, my old roommate Todd, and at one point I look over at him in the living room, our eyes meet, and I give him the finger. He understands completely. What men want. A tough way to say, "Thanks for leaving your job and family for a few days to come hang with me as I get chemo'd and radiated." A guy thing. I love the guy. He's here. I'm hurtin'. So "Fuck you." Makes perfect sense, as Paula wonders, maybe, what in the hell I've just done to my friend. She understands, maybe not completely.

CAN CANCER BE EMBARRASSING?

       An East Coast friend, whom I've known since 1980, calls: "So . . . it must be hard having cancer in a place that's embarrassing?"

       I pause, weighing the absurdity of the comment, then respond.

       "I guess so. But I guess I'd rather have colon cancer than brain cancer." Insensitive motherfucker, I am as well, knowing that I disrobe every day in the bowels of UCSF's Long Hospital alongside patients who are being treated radiotherapeutically for cancer in and on their brains.

       That's not so embarrassing? I wonder. And we go on to talk about, believe it or not, the New York Yankees.

SUNBURN WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE

       "It's gonna get worse before it gets better," says Doc Daphne as I hit the home stretch of "Intro to Radiation 101" (six-week course). Sunburnlike burns on my inner buttocks, burned and raw skin where groin meets thigh, and, yes, a scorched penis. Time to learn, from the radiation nurse, how to use and apply the wickedly priced, aloe-based ointment known as: Carrington RadiaCare Gel Hydrogel Wound Dressing. It's soothing, I soon find, as I hitch up my drawers and shuffle off after getting dressed, holding my wife's left hand in my right.

Article first published in Esquire May 2001 | Volume 135 No.5 also availiable on the Esquire website at http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0501-MAY_CANCER_rev_2

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