Death to Cancer

• New Project Time! RUN AWAY!!!!!!!

  Don’t ask me why or how. These things just happen to me. All of a sudden, I have metal hooks and balls of yarn and printed-out patterns and little plastic stitch markers and scraps of failed attempts trailing me from room to room. The dreaded crafting fever is upon me once again, and nothing will do for it but to feed the demon until something stronger comes along to replace it.

  Once, it was polymer clay beadmaking. Then crocheted “doily” kind of useless things. Then knitting. Then macrame jewelry made with yellowed-with-age pattern books published in the 70’s. Then beadwork with those teeny little “seed” beads that are a major pain to pick up when spilled and worse to separate by color afterwards…

  I’m sure I missed a few items there, but you get the drift. It’s a lifelong condition, alas. In my childhood, I made Christmas ornaments with pearl-headed pins and sequins and ribbons, and candles with ice-chip holes in milk cartons, and dangerous-looking drinking glasses etched on a craft gadget and broken off from the bottom of empty glass bottles (they didn’t use plastic bottles much in the 70’s). And macrame jewelry back when those now-yellowed-with-age pattern books were new. And seed-bead necklace strings with little “daisies” knotted in every inch or so.

  Are you sensing a pattern here?

  Okay, so this compulsion to “create” stuff isn’t anything new. However, I thought that this time, I’d try a new twist: making things for people who are going through the same godawful cancer treatment experiences that I dragged myself limply through back in 2004. Cuz, ya know what? It’s occurred to me that maybe it would be nice to be giving for a change. And, it’s also occurred to me that I might just have to go through that whole better-living-through-poisoning routine again. And there is just NO FREAKIN’ WAY I’m going to EVER wear a wig again. I wore hats whenever I wasn’t at work, because I absolutely hated being “wigged”. On the comfort scale, I’d rate wig-wearing while chemo bald scalp-skin-sensitized somewhere between having your toes strangled all day in holey stockings and being ratcheted open with an ice-cold speculum. Hats, mmmm. The selection was a bit limited, alas, and not exactly cheap. So I had three, plus a Red Wings stocking-knit cap that was so tight it made my brain hurt. Now, here it is, four gloriously hairy years later, and somehow the memory of that experience flirted outrageously with my deep-seated but long-buried craft cravings and omg…the demon was released again, bouncing headfirst among the lilypads going WooHoo! WooHoo! WooHoo! Crocheted chemo caps! Now! In all colors, styles, fibers, patterns, sizes, gimme gimme gimme gimmeee…

  Ehh. I’ve been sneaking into Michaels after work, furtively smuggling plastic bags full of fuzzy and pointy crochet ingredients past my husband and into what he refers to as my “bad areas”. These are places near a well-used chair or a bed where I have to have at least 8 paperbacks, various computer peripherals, a bag of wrapped chocolate candy with two pieces left (untouched for months), dozens of foil candy-wrapper fragments, half-filled drinking glasses, coffee mugs, a stack of bound books (also untouched for months), hair clips, pens, drawing pencils (ack, I knew I missed one - sketching!), partially-used notebooks, and whatever else has caught my attention, however briefly, in the past few weeks. Okay, it’s disgusting. I’m a slob, I admit it freely. But you see, it’s the price you pay for being….CREAAAAATIVE! And having the attention span of a gnat.

  So there we have it. Gentle reader, judge not too harshly. I am, ostensibly at least, making crocheted chemo caps for those less fortunate than myself. For free. Although I make keep a few around, er, just in case. So my living room is starting to resemble a giant furniture-filled spiderweb, what of it? I had to teach myself how to crochet all over again, being too, er, practical to take a class or something. There’s free patterns and stitch instructions all over the internet! I can prove it! I’ve printed out 2,359 pages of them! And, of course, there’s always room for more patterns, or possibly a hint or two why my turning chains are leaving holey seams on one side, or any insight as to why yarn strands will cling to each other so tenaciously that I wind up breaking the yarn before they relinquish their stubborn mutual hold - and with not a knot in sight! It makes ripping out stitches a nightmare. Therefore I do humbly appeal to the crochet community to help me keep my chemo cap project on track. Take pity and drop me a line, offer a word of advice, a link to a great pattern or a great crochet blog (yours?!!?!), anything! Won’t you pleaaaase, please help me, help me, help meeee oooh…

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  17 Mar 2008

• Oncological Hypochondria

  Okay, here’s the news, after a brief hiatus.

  After turning over every rock in town looking for a doctor and/or procedure to explain why I’ve passed blood in my urine periodically, the general consensus is - I’m appallingly healthy and may never know just what caused this mildly alarming symptom. I was cystoscoped (?), ultrasounded, palpated, x-rayed and MRI’d, and they found nothing even remotely life-threatening. So I can put my paranoia back in park, and carry on with my career as cantankerous cancer survivor.

  For the “uninitiated”: one of the myriad of joys that come packaged with cancer survival is that any time you experience any kind of odd oozings, lumps, aches/pains, rashes, digestive issues, etc., you have this soft little voice in your head (well, in my head anyway, and it has lots of company) calmly whispering, “IT MIGHT BE YOUR BLOODY CANCER COMING BACK!!!!!!!!” This is not exactly what you want to hear after going through THAT glorious adventure at least once in your life. But it’s a very effective incentive to make (and keep) doctor’s appointments that you otherwise would’ve blown off indefinitely.

  One thing that did turn up was a mildly painful inflammation of the cartilage connecting my ribs to my sternum. According to my primary physician, this condition is a consolation prize from my 30-odd rounds of radiation therapy back in ‘04. He said it may get worse with time, and suggested OTC pain relievers, heating pads and, if all else fails, physical therapy to lessen the discomfort. The inflammation at this point feels like a bruise, as though I’d been hit square in the chest with a softball a few days ago. It’s only noticeable if I bend a certain way or press against the area. I’m hoping it’ll stay that way. Oh, and he said that moving to Florida would help (warm tropical climate and all that). So to all my darling in-laws currently residing in the Sunshine state: there may be a little cranky-yankee stormcloud littering your horizon one day. P.S. the big kid comes with me

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  7 Mar 2008

• The Joy of Cracking, pt. 1

  Okay. I was in the chemo “twilight zone” again, after my 4th treatment, early February 2004. My leukopenia (low white blood cell count) had subsided according to my latest blood work. However, my gums had become so swollen and inflamed that I couldn’t fully close my mouth without chomping down painfully upon the overgrown, pulsating flesh that had grown up and partially over the tops of my molars. This is when I discovered that I did, indeed, grind my teeth when I slept, as the searing pain caused by this unconscious activity woke me time and time again during the night. Fortunately, in desperation, I had dug the plastic bite guard my dentist had insisted I have made years earlier out of the back of the linen closet and found that wearing it at night did offer adequate protection and comfort to sleep through the night. One problem solved - now what to do about chewing? Eating solid food wearing a bite guard wasn’t an option; I was afraid I’d accidently choke on the silly thing. Frankly, I had enough on my plate, as it were, without that hazard to deal with. Two weeks of a semi-liquid diet was beginning to concern me. I mean, how much nutrition can you get out of strawberry jello, vanilla pudding and canned tomato soup? I’d finally resorted to having my husband run to the drug store for a case of Ensure. Ensure, in case you’re not familiar with it, is kind of Slim-Fast in reverse, generally used to supplement the diets of chewing-challenged elderly folks in danger of vitamin deficiency or outright starvation. It comes in various “wannabe” flavors like dutch chocolate, french vanilla, and pepperoni pizza (just kidding, but hopefully by now they’ve added that to their repertoire). I’m sure the product is much tastier than I remember. However, the multicolored poisons dancing merrily through my circulatory system had worked their toxic magic on my taste buds, converting the carefully-concocted flavors into such novelties as “Graphite Gravy” and “Tin Can Cocoa”. Starving isn’t my style; the healthiest thing about me is and has always been my appetite, no matter what grisly disease and/or condition my body was struggling with. And I was hell-bent on appearing as healthy as possible because, regardless of how wretched and weak I felt, I was NOT going to look like a corpse at work.

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  22 Jan 2008

• The Journey of Rheinfrid / Post-Christmas 2007

  Oddly enough, with all my wretched cynicism of anything humankind has created in the name of, well, a “higher authority”, I find some of the associated writings and works of art strangely appealing at times. And so it was, overfed, well-rested and sated with my usual internet amusements, I went to a favorite web site, www.gutenberg.org, which contains hundreds of literary works from a time before…well, let’s just say you can read for days tales of the Great War with its doomed Archduke, Czar and Kaiser, but a search on the name “Hitler” yields the following message: “No record found. Please retry.”

  With weeks of Christmas carols, hymns and movies subconsciously setting the mood, I decided to peruse this august (in content at least) library for some light reading on the subject of…saints. Now, having been raised in the Protestant faith, such inventions of the Holy Roman Church should be the furthest thing from my mind. But, having had the happy fortune to view various astonishingly allegorical (abject alliteration alert!) and painstakingly-painted canvases that have been treasured and lovingly cared for over decades, centuries, eons, what-have-you for their depiction of the multitude of human beings who came to be revered as saints for their actions before, during and/or after death, I find myself strangely fascinated by their equally multitudinous(?) legends.

  But I digress. Having entered the word “saints” as my search criteria, a lengthy list of book titles appeared. I quickly selected “A Child’s Book of Saints”, authored by one William Canton at the turn of the next-to-last century. As a rule of thumb, I’ve found that, when attempting to read up on a weighty subject on which I have absolutely no background or even less understanding, any title that includes the words “A Child’s Book” or “A Child’s Guide to” is a great starting point. This was back in the days before the currently-popular title “An Idiot’s Guide to…” removed all charm from ignorance. I mean, come on. No one’s an expert in everything anymore, who has the time?

  So, settling back in my leathery loveseat perch, I read through various romantic-if-cautionary tales of Christian saints, laden with archaic vernacular but containing no words as long and cumbersome as the word “vernacular”. And amongst the lepers and the beloved-of-birds and the humbled-before-God, I stumbled upon the journey of Rheinfrid. Saint Rheinfrid? Who knew? Okay, someone Catholic and German most likely, but it was news to me. Rheinfrid was a nobleman (actually a thane, technically meaning a landholder. I think.), dying nobly of the “yellow plague”, abandoned far from the more healthy townsfolk. And there it was, shining like a Christmas star outside the glaring city’s limits, one of the loveliest sentences I’ve ever had the pleasure to know:

  “But in the dead and dark of the third night a beautiful Child, crowned with roses and bearing in his hand a rose, had come to the dying thane and said: “Now mayest thou see that the best the world can give—call it by what name thou wilt and prize it at its utmost worth—is nothing more than these: wind and smoke and a dream and a flower.”

  Now, maybe I’ve inhaled too much incense and peppermints, but this is the sort of holy that says “holy moley” in my book. I’d gladly give assorted god-given body parts to have come up with such a vision of a sentence - knucklebones, one appendix slightly used, two ticklish tonsils (if only these tonsils could speak!), any number of fleshy encumbrances. That such pulchritudinous phrasing should be subject to such obscene obscurity! Bah humbug, indeed.

  This is normally the portion of the show where I insert various insights of dubious value. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I think much too well of my equally dubious writing talent. But I’m not feeling terribly insightful tonight. A sentence like that quoted above robs me of the usual desire for snarky sarcasm, this-reminds-me-of-me narcissism, I-can-top/outwrite-that one-up-authorwomanship. For god’s sake. It’s just beautiful, in all its child-simple truth. And, as the song goes, I am a fool for beauty.

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  29 Dec 2007

• CT Scans and Cancer Wards

  I read a bit of news on the health risks of excessive CT scans this week that produced a shock of recognition. In my late teens or early twenties, I had discovered a book recommendation in some magazine or another, and decided to follow up and read it. The novel wasn’t a new one. It had been written in another language (Russian), so as is common in these cases, the quality of the translation could make an enormous difference in how the reader experiences what the writer is trying to convey (I bought a second translation to overcome this).

  To be honest, at that age, a lot of the subtleties of “Cold War”-era Russian society were lost on me. This was an important part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward”, and the murky relationships of the characters and the words they spoke to one another were that of a chilling and alien culture. These portions of the novel, I admit with embarassment, I initially scanned over quickly in confusion and intellectual laziness.

  The other part of the novel was, of course, the topic of cancer, in the early days of modern oncological procedures. Radiation, that nearly universal cancer diagnostic tool/treatment that focuses its immense and mysterious power directly onto the tumor/lesion site, had already been established for maybe ten years or so. In “Cancer Ward”, written in 1968 but based on the author’s personal cancer experiences in mid-1950’s Russia, the long-term effects of radiation therapy on its initial subjects were just coming to light. “Light” is not a condition found easily in this somber novel, even from memory. Perhaps it is better to say that the concept of ”acceptable risk” in cancer treatment took its first myopic steps at this time. Acceptable risk was a recurring theme in “Cancer Ward”. If the bodies and faces of irradiated infants matured into stunted limbs and grotesque contortions, why, they were alive, weren’t they? And, should an adolescent girl, with the morbid self-consciousness of body associated with the age, develop a malignancy in a young breast destined for “the trash bin” as a result of gross childhood radiation exposure, wasn’t she a lucky young lady to have modern medicine on her side? Modern medicine, that has become ever more “modern” with each new generation of patients personifying “acceptable risk”, how far it has come from those dim, charmingly naive days of the 1950’s! Or so one might think prior to reading this latest bit of news: researchers from the Columbia University Medical Center of New York estimate that CT scans can cause as much as two percent of all cancers in the United States alone, in the next 20 to 30 years.

  Now, health insurance companies will shell out without question for CT scans, of course. Meanwhile, magnetic resonance imaging that won’t add to the accumulation of medically-applied radiation received during your lifetime that is increasingly found to POSITIVELY! CAUSE! CANCER! is “too expensive” an alternative for Big Medicine. I have my own MRI/cancer story, but I’ll save that for another day. Here’s a hint: there are some things that an MRI can ”see” that standard, radiation-based cancer detection methods can’t find.  Remember, there are alternatives to x-rays, be it for cancers or kidney stones. You can only accept so many risks before one morphs into a deep and ugly regret.

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  2 Dec 2007

• Frida and Me

  I was reading my favorite comic book about 20 years ago when I first got turned on to the artistic work of Diego Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera has an enduring connection to Detroit in the form of neck-achingly large and exotic frescoes that cover the walls to the ceiling in a marble courtyard named after him in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Frida was here living with him when he painted these, bringing him lunch in daintily-covered woven baskets in her trademark Tehuana dress with long skirts ending in a wide ruffle to the ground. Anyway. Frida had painted over the years a series of canvases that range from wryly erotic to dreamily surrealistic (a label she emphatically denied) to train-wreck morbid to blatantly self-obsessed, and all of it just as gorgeous and colorful as an armload of fresh-cut flowers. There were certain paintings that focused unblinkingly on injuries sustained from a streetcar accident that left her legs and spine crushed and shattered, resulting in a lifetime of operations and plaster castings. One of her feet was eventually amputated. Despite years of ongoing pain and suffering, she managed to live an extraordinary life, as an active member of the Communist Party, meeting with Picasso and other artistic contemporaries in Paris, selling paintings to the rich and famous (Edward G. Robinson was one buyer). having affair after voracious affair with men (Leon Trotsky?!!) and women alike (the women were often her husband’s lovers). And through it all, she painted…herself, primarily. A common theme was Frida’s tears of suffering upon a defiantly expressionless face, staring out point-blank at the viewer with a beauty that transcended emotional/physical pain, a host of medical horrors and, ultimately, death itself.

  What draws me to Frida’s work? She was, in a sense, a poster child for narcissism and neediness, neither of which particularly appeals to me. But when I look at her paintings, something inside me responds, the demon that prods me with his gentle dagger to want to produce something, something of my own, something that is unique to me and to hell with anyone who doesn’t like it or doesn’t get it or sticks me in a mental gulag with whatever others they find similarly distasteful or extremist. And, Frida, I wish it could have been painting, really I do, but it’s going to have to be a blog. Words are my pigments, web pages my canvases. My eternal thanks for your prodigious powers of inspiration, querida. Rest in peace, and leave the war on suffering to the living.

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  17 Nov 2007

• Mr. E. Symptoms, meet Miss Diagnosed

  “So, how long have you had the bloody discharge from your left nipple?”

  “I noticed it about three weeks ago.”

  “Move in with your shoulder. Keep your right hand on the bar.”

  The technician walked around me into her shielded station and pressed a button, sending x-rays through my pancaked breast with a sharp buzzing noise. She returned and released the apparatus’ tenacious hold on my torso.

  “We’ll call you with the results in a week. In the meantime, make an appointment at the front desk for a consultation with the surgeon.”

  I put my left arm back into the shoulder of the thin, oversized hospital garment, preparing to return to the dressing room where my work clothes hung on a hook inside a skinny metal locker.

  “You know,” said another, male technician who had entered the room unnoticed and perched himself upon a tall stool, ”with bloody discharge from only one side, there’s a 15% chance that it’s cancerous.”

  I looked at his impassive face. “No kidding,” I responded, half-consciously mimicking his blunt, I’ve-seen-it-all-before manner. And, remembering something from a list of procedures I’d researched on the web, I asked, “Aren’t you going to do a smear slide of the discharge?”

  The male technician gave me a faint, condescending smile. “We don’t do those, the results aren’t reliable. You’ll receive a ductogram to show what’s happening inside the breast.”

  With nothing more to say or do for the time being, I headed for the dressing/locker room, idly wondering if my clothes would look as smashed from hanging inside the cramped locker as the left side of my chest still felt.

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  17 Nov 2007

• Memories of my 44th birthday (or, Happy Mastectomy)

  I’m swiftly approaching my 48th birthday in Dec. which also is the 4-year anniversary of my mastectomy. It should have been performed 3 days sooner, but the quack surgeon who  had misdiagnosed me a year earlier had dumped my PPO and I refused to allow her to do the surgery out-of-network, heh. That was a scene: sitting on the bed in pre-op with the young aide who’d brought me the prerequisite paperwork running around the room and telling the staff , “She didn’t sign the release! She didn’t sign the release!”. You should have seen the look on the face of the other surgeon who’d been brought in to insert my chemo port when he found out I wasn’t going to let him operate either. What was the point? I knew that the (2nd choice) surgeon who would ultimately perform the noble deed was at least competent enough to do port insertions on her own. Why have two surgeries/anesthesias/recoveries when I could get away with one? Anyway, the surgery took place on Dec. 5th, they wheeled me out to the curb as soon as I regained consciousness (it was late Friday afternoon and the staff was eager to begin the weekend) and we all went home where my mother duly produced and lit up a birthday cake and the whole family sang “Happy Birthday” to me, with my two fresh wounds and dangling drainage tubes and all…

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  17 Nov 2007

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