Cocktail Hour

Three radiation days down, twenty-seven to go. In at 8:30 am, out in under an hour. The photo in the link from my last post is pretty close to me - but eventually I will ask my new techs to take one in my own Silence-of-the-Lambs-y mask.

As before, they really do screw your head down to the gurney. But the machinery is different - more like the PET scans - a big-ass white donut into and out of which you slide. Noisier than before, and a different noise. A shakey-grindey noise that circles around you - the raygun, blasting away. Does not sound like a gun, though - a lot more like a bartender with his shaker. A mixologist, as they say, orbiting around your head. My version of a Stinger, Mr. Morgan - I make it with gin...

Guest Author

Well, for another take on this process you can go here. It's about the coach of the Denver Nuggets. Good luck George.

Speaking

The challenge here is to be a voice, not just words on a screen. It gets really tricky when you are hoping to be facetious, or sarcastic, or using some other emotion where tone and face convey something different or more than the words. Salinger, my hero (see my post 9/13/08) tried to get part way with italics, and I do too.

These days I see folks using emoticons, which strike me as profoundly creepy. My view isn't right, it's snobbish, the users are trying to improve the truth of their communication... but eew.

There are some things that just don't convey without the tone, or the eye contact, or the pursed lips. Take my response to the many good folks who ask how I am, and know that there may be a complicated answer. I say only, "OK." But kind of slow, with a lift at the end. Ooo-kay. Tired of the process, hopeful, grateful for the well-meaning question, not eager to get into detail, without irony. Can you pack that into two syllables that have no intrinsic meaning? I think so. I hope so.

You Don't Have to Be Jewish

One of the best things about driving or biking to work on Saturday is the sight of Jewish families walking to or from their synagogues. I see them and think, peace and civilization.

Wouldn't it be great if we all had to walk somewhere one day a week. Sidewalks, even in the suburbs, with people. Fewer cars. Less machinery, more conversation.

So, by one's faith. Christians: walk to church! Muslims: walk to mosque! Other believers: walk to your congregation! Agnostics: walk to a bookstore! Atheists: walk to a tavern!

The weekends would come alive.

Tick Tock

We are all waiting for something, or more than one thing. Waiting for children to be born: cool, but kind of scary. Waiting for the demise of a relative who might leave you something: grisly, but we all do it. Waiting for warmer days. Waiting for the Second Coming. Waiting, of course, emphatically, whatever it means, for Godot.

At the top of my personal wait list is this radiation thing. I know pretty well what it will be like, and so it isn't really anxiety-provoking. Mostly it's just that the clock slows down, tick... tick... tick.. come on. Get me from here to there.

I'm sleeping a lot. It's a trick I learned from Tom, the lead guitarist in my band in boarding school. Back then we were all waiting, all the time, for the next vacation, really for graduation, really for what we thought would be freedom. Tom's theory was that the more you sleep, the faster times goes by. Of course it also means that you are reducing the amount of time when you otherwise could be conscious and alive. But we didn't think it much of a life (how wrong we were) and wanted it behind us.

I do want this next stage behind me, in that rear-view mirror and growing smaller, and there's a ways till then. Plus I gave up drinking for Lent. Bad idea.

Masque

Today I went in for the new mask.  The old one won't fit my new less-cherubic face.

The mask is used, as those who have followed this saga will recall, to screw my head down to a table while they pull a VW-sized gizmo over me and blast away.  Starts next week, ends  late April, five days a week.  Starts easy.  Ends crappy, if it's like the last time.

The radiation oncologist raised the possibility of chemotherapy as a kind of cherry on the sundae, and I started to get rebellious.  He opined that it was probably not worth the extra "toxicity".  No kidding.

The old mask is in the garage, awaiting a new function. I am thinking of turning it into a birdhouse.

Badda Bing Badda Boom

OK so I've got to go back for more radiation.

The calculus is kind of interesting.  The numbers are based on what I've heard and read but they are basically made up by me,  because I am quickly becoming a class of  very few on this particular neck cancer:  occult primary, removed nodes from left side, radiated left side, found and removed nodes on right side, radiate right side.  My numbers are:  If no radation, odds of very problematic cancer emerging in the next two years:  1 in 10 to 1 in 50.  So this radiation is 90+ percent likely unnecessary.  If radiation, odds of this neck cancer emerging in the next two years: 1 in 50 to 1 in 1000.  If radiation, odds of some kind of damage to the neck over the next 20 years that will be hard to cure:  who knows.  Probably signficant.  If radiation, other immediate side effects:  more whacks, this time maybe cumulatively worse, to taste and the rest of the things that one takes for granted in a normally-functioning bouche.

What I take from this is how much do I want to be on the planet over the next two years; what am I willing to trade to be sure.  ("Sure", of course, subject to the possibility that I could otherwise be run over by a Zamboni.)  The answer is I want it a lot, I'm willing to trade a lot.

The next two years will include at least the births of two more grandchildren, my son's graduation from college, and who knows what else.  Just not going to miss them.

And there will be much more after, I'm sure.  It'll be great.  Watch me.