June, 2010 Archives

Ode To An Egg Salad Sandwich

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June 23rd, 2010

I look at you there, decimated, crusts hanging akimbo. My first solid meal in three days. You were a hero to me and I returned the favor by savagely tearing you apart in a way most maniacal. Like classic theatrical masks, half of you smiles at me, the other frowns. Comedy within the tragedy. While […]

I look at you there, decimated, crusts hanging akimbo. My first solid meal in three days. You were a hero to me and I returned the favor by savagely tearing you apart in a way most maniacal.

Like classic theatrical masks, half of you smiles at me, the other frowns. Comedy within the tragedy.

While life for you ends, you bring new hope and life to my digestive tract, ravaged by fluids so vile we daren’t speak their name. Soft ice cream preceded you, mayhaps Pei Wei will follow.

Ahh, but I cheapen your departure with disrespect. Your taste lingers. Your effect courses through me. The power of your simple concoction thrills me like no sandwich has ever before.

Know this sir, know this as surely as you course through me; you were a friend. And I bow to you even now as your crust and crumbs become one inside me.

Contentment spreads from your essence. Happiness flows from you. Energy, strength and a true willingness to continue are your legacy.

Dear Nephew Colin

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June 22nd, 2010

You are the youngest, newest member of our vast, crazy family and your Great Uncle Rodney has a funny story to tell. Well, by the end of this you may not think of me as great per say; everyone just calls me Uncle Rodney anyway, even if they’re my cousins or not technically even related […]

You are the youngest, newest member of our vast, crazy family and your Great Uncle Rodney has a funny story to tell. Well, by the end of this you may not think of me as great per say; everyone just calls me Uncle Rodney anyway, even if they’re my cousins or not technically even related to me.

I am in the hospital right now with a disease that finds new and highly creative ways each night to kick my butt. Oops, you’re not even a one-year-old yet; I shouldn’t curse. This disease is beating me up. But in the end I am going to win, so the story already has a happy ending.

So Colin, you’re probably still in diapers now right? The wonderful thing about diapers is you can play, play, play all day and when you need to go potty, you just do. Take my advice, my nephew, stay in diapers as long as possible. No, I’m not writing to tell you Uncle Rodney is in diapers, that would be silly. I’m writing to say how I fainted on the potty last night.

You’ve seen potties; Mommy and Daddy have a few of them and they seem so big and bright and white and make noise at the end. Well Colin dear, it’s completely understandable — to me anyway — if you’d like to wait off on what they call toilet training. I thought I was toilet trained until last night at 2:00 a.m. when the whole hospital Code Staff, Emergency Room workers and everyone on my floor was crowded into my room because I lost consciousness while pooing.

Hospitals have emergency cords right next to the toilets. I can’t describe, Colin, exactly how I knew to pull the cord. But when my head was snapping back and forth and I couldn’t focus, apparently I knew I had to pull the ripcord.

There are some wonderful people on this planet. Many of them were in my room last night. I kept hearing my name over and over again until finally I just opened my eyes and looked out to see them all. Somehow they had gotten me to my bed, attached machines all over me and even had those crazy “Clear” paddles you may have seen on one of Mom’s scary night time shows.

I was fine. They gave me all sorts of good things to make me better and last night was just a funny memory.

And really Colin, that’s why I’m writing. I know you’re too young to interpret this and I’m just using a cheap literary device to tell a story, but it’s my story. I can laugh if I want to. So many people today have said, “you must’ve been so scared.”

But I wasn’t and I’m not.

And that’s the thing about growing up in this family. You will be told things all the time about how to be and how to react but little dude, you get to make up your own rules as you go along. You will feel how you feel for no other reason than that’s the way you feel.

I think too, there’s something else lurking in my mind. Let me try and pin it down. Treatment for the disease I have has progressed so far in recent years. Right now, the very best of our medicine says to kill ALL the junk in my bones and let my body grow back the good stuff. I’ll bet … I know that by the time you’re grown up they’ll figure out a way to just destroy the bad stuff in people and leave the good safe and secure. But more importantly, let’s hope for a time where this disease never even starts.

Write your own story, my wonderful nephew. Write it every day with surprises and fun. But know there may be times when you need to pull the ripcord. And when you do, there will be so many of us rushing in to help, it will make your head will spin with the love.

Five Laps

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June 21st, 2010

Five laps around the cancer ward. Five laps takes you past the little girl with eyes too big to see Grandma slyly slipping away. Five laps will exercise your bones just enough to let the chemotherapy keep destroying you. Five laps and you can’t go on because next door, right next door, an old man […]

Five laps around the cancer ward.

Five laps takes you past the little girl with eyes too big to see Grandma slyly slipping away.

Five laps will exercise your bones just enough to let the chemotherapy keep destroying you.

Five laps and you can’t go on because next door, right next door, an old man is talking loudly on his cellphone to his brother about their sister’s last moments.

If you don’t do your laps, you stay in your room and forget.

When you do your laps you see the normal nurses and the Baltic ones ministering to the grieving.

Five laps around the cancer ward where people with eyes wider than yours on your first day stare out silently asking “What The HELL?!

Laptops are plugged in everywhere as if somehow a video conference with eternity will be interrupted by a Governor’s pardon.

I don’t know if people can see me.

I don’t know if I exist as I spook their halls.

Five miles away is ice cream and movies and daughters and, and, and …

Five laps down. Five million more.

Chemo Sabes

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June 18th, 2010

I may be crashing soon. Chemo’s last stand is willfully pumping its final, fatal fluid into my bones and even though I’m still walking my mile laps around the ward, my feet have gotten sloggly — as if for lack of another place to go — the liquid has opted to kill my stride as […]

I may be crashing soon. Chemo’s last stand is willfully pumping its final, fatal fluid into my bones and even though I’m still walking my mile laps around the ward, my feet have gotten sloggly — as if for lack of another place to go — the liquid has opted to kill my stride as well.

Cancer survivors as well as a whole group of you who have experienced similar situations tell me to not feel obligated to anything or anyone but me. I hear over and over again that once this first round drags every muscle fragment and creative impulse into a deep, dark abyss I won’t want to be jolly blogging about Spongebob or jokes I played on my brother. I understand that in my head.

But the other side of that scenario is my extreme need for connection and my almost psychotic need to interact and share. I looked up Sociopath to see if it has an opposite and there really isn’t one. Might as well insert my picture there, then.

I was just told that in the old building where I used to work — in the lobby between the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News — there’s a dry erase idea board that says to send good vibes my way. I thought I’d used up all my happy tears days ago.
   
Another part of this connection equation is my Aunt Roberta with whom I shared the bone marrow report. Suddenly I was a young teen boy again looking up to my amazing, powerful aunt as I wrote, 

“I was gladdened by the results, hopefully not blindly. Everything is good so far, Does that sound hopeful? Please say yes.”

With a large exclamation point she wrote back “Yes!”

She was just jumping on a plane and will have more information for me later but it shows how we thrive on the people bouncing through our lives for a day or a decade. It had been a year since I had any long-term, sit down conversation with Roberta and yet with a few simple words I am carried to a place that’s impossible to go alone.

And while we’re at it, that dry erase board in the newspaper lobby marks, I’m certain, one the last sites I saw as I was gently exited a year ago due to layoff. Now people are using it to send me positive energy. That is an absolutely astounding mandate on the power of connectivity. How in God’s name can I look back at that place with anything but healing?

Here’s just as a little parable to end this; think of what can happen when you believe you’re connected to something but really and truly aren’t. I wish I knew ahead of time that I was on a part cancer/part hospice ward. I think it would’ve explained all the deaths going on around me in a more natural way and I wouldn’t have been so freaked out by the low success rates here if I knew success was being measured in how comfortable the patient’s final stay was and how incredible the nurses were.

Maybe they told me earlier. Maybe I was in no place to listen. I’m not going anywhere for a long time but it was beginning to get me down until I just simply asked.

So take it from the cancer boy in Room 2603. This journey is about the people you collect along the way. I’ll see what more I can write and when I can write it. Heck, this sunrise was beautiful for the first time all week and since it just happens to signify the end of round one, I’ll tip my ice-water glass to all of you. Thank you for wandering with me during this initial round of chemotherapy. I couldn’t have done it without you.

These boots are made of cancer, and I’m just gonna slog through.

____________________________________________________

Chapter 1: The L-Word

Chapter 2: Having Fun With Cancer

Chapter 3: Blue Evening

Chapter 4: Departure Terminal

Chapter 5: No News Is Good News

Chapter 6: A Better Medicine

Chapter 7: (today) Chemo Sabes