Cancer Free Since ’03
For those that don’t follow me on Twitter, you’ll have missed the whole “Shaun had a cancer appointment today” stuff. As it turns out, I remain cancer free, and have done so since the conclusion of chemo in 2003. And that’s good news indeed. So hurray to me. Good news for the holidays and all that jazz. Now back to doing whatever I was doing…oh, right. Stressing out about work!
Adventures in …Cancer?: If Only You’d Been Bad Asthma (Or, Leading to Up to Diagnosis — Part Two)
(You can find the first part here.) Where were we? Oh, right. The last time I talked about my cancer diagnosis, I had covered all the symptoms leading up to my hospitalization and getting over my fear of needles. A fast heart rate, asthma symptoms, and some weird crap in my x-rays pretty much made that mandatory. Here’s the run-down of what happened after hospitalization: Something must be said for the fact that my mother pretty much stuck by my side in the hospital, sleeping in what I can only describe as the most uncomfortable chairs and “beds” the hospital torture division could come up with. She stayed there with me while I proceeded to freak out internally over the fact that things were going terribly wrong. There I was, thinking I had asthma and that some nice drugs and high quality breathing treatments would put it all to rest and I could go back to my silly life. But the x-rays made that impossible, and the subsequent CT scans pretty much confirmed what the doctors must have assumed: there was some really nasty shit in my body. I don’t think the doctors ever said “tumor” directly to me. They might have said as much to my mother. Honestly, I’ve never asked her if there were things she learned from my medical records that she kept from me. I was 19 and not at all ready for the world — immature, still living at home, directionless, jobless, and feeling rather pissed on (losing a job over something that wasn’t your fault and totaling your car in the same year doesn’t help one’s confidence). So it’s likely she learned a lot of scary things that nobody dared say to my face at the time. That’s not to say that I didn’t know what was going on, of course, but being able to watch TV and read lots of Alan Gardner books in the hospital certainly helped me escape just a little. In any case, eventually the doctors had to tell me that they’d found growths around my aorta, trachea, and lungs, each of which were contributing to my various symptoms. They didn’t have to say “it’s cancer,” but I pretty much knew by that point (this after a few days in the hospital, with lots of blood tests, bad food, and medicine). You don’t have to tell a 19-year-old kid that he has cancer for him to figure out that he probably has cancer. And being as immature as I was, I didn’t really know what that meant. Cancer = death. Little did I know… It was at that point that my general practitioner had to tell me that in order to figure out what was eating away at my insides, they might have to do exploratory surgery. In other words: they were going to have to crack my chest, dig around in there, and hopefully pull out a sample while trying not to kill me. And this wasn’t a normal procedure. My doctor more or less indicated that most surgeons wouldn’t even try it. If thinking I might have cancer didn’t scare the shit out of me (it did), then imagining myself as a giant game of Operation did. Up until that point, I hadn’t had anything approaching major surgery. Jumping from “I hate needles” to “I hate them, but you can stick them in me because I don’t want to die” to “holy fuck, you’re going to crack me open and dig around inside me” in a matter of days is understandably terrifying. I remember breaking down at some point and having a total freak-out. You know the type. You just start blubbering and saying things that sound like intelligent words, but really you’re just crying and saying shit that doesn’t make any sense to whoever will listen because you don’t want to die, etc. etc. etc. Somewhere in all this, a male nurse came in and comforted me. I have no idea what he said (probably something like, “be strong, this isn’t the end, you’ll survive, you’re strong, etc. etc. etc.”). All I know is that he did calm me down a bit, which is why I will forever love nurses (and those few male nurses out there — Paul Genesse is the only one I know personally). I’m wandering a bit here. The following day, the surgeon who had agreed to crack me open like a Christmas present came in to check me out and go over the details. In my imagination, he stood seven feet tall with the build of a White Walker, though I suspect he was only a little over six feet and probably pretty average in real life. When he arrived, he started feeling around my chest and neck and discovered that the lymph nodes in my neck had magically grown to the size of golf balls overnight. Relief + terror = conflict. On the one hand, that meant he wouldn’t have to chop into me like a kid dissecting a frog for science class; on the other, that meant whatever was wreaking havoc on my body was moving at a rapid pace, like genetic rabbits in heat. But that meant having a far less dangerous surgery to get some actual material to work with for testing. Of course, I was still terrified out of my freaking mind. Even a less dangerous surgery sounded like a horror film to little 19-year-old me. When the day came to put me under, I probably shook like crazy while my mother sat there telling me it was going to be okay. And then they took me into the room, someone asked me what kind of music I’d like to listen to (I have no idea what I said — probably classical), and then I did that whole countdown thing where they tell you to start from 100, but you know you’re not going to make it further than 96, and so you count anyway because it distracts
Adventures in …Cancer?: If Only You’d Been Bad Asthma (Or, Leading to Up to Diagnosis — Part One)
(You can read my earlier post about the ten year anniversary of my first chemo treatment here.) Thanksgiving. It’s that time of year when we all hang out with family, eat lots of food, and avoid contracting deadly diseases. It’s a time of thanks, too, though nature has this odd tendency to understand “thanks” to mean “how can I make your life difficult today?” Thus begins my long road to discovering the cancerous tumors that at one time riddled my body, trying their hardest to kill me slowly and painfully (excuse me while I say a giant “fuck you” to cancer. You’re dead, suckas). But let’s step back a little first… Darko Suvin and Louis Marin think Disneyland is problematic. I agree, but they’re not going to steal my imaginary childhood from me… 2002 was not a good year for me. Around September or so, I totaled my car in Los Angeles while driving to Disneyland for a weekend of fun. We got sideswiped in an intersection that didn’t have a turn signal, which was something I’d never seen before (we didn’t have such things in my small town, because all our signals were properly marked — if you didn’t have a turn signal, it told you that you had to yield. In this case, the turn lane had a signal, but without the arrow OR a “yield to oncoming traffic” sign. But L.A. is evil, so it was all my fault.). Luckily, nobody was hurt, despite the fact that the other car was moving at close to 40 miles an hour and struck the car a foot or so from my legs, smashing the frame up until the engine block. No broken bones. No pain. Just a lot of hot chocolate everywhere and crying (which is what I do when I’m suffering from shock). Things didn’t improve from there. Maybe a month later, I got fired from my job as night manager of a local fast food restaurant. They blamed me for money that had gone missing in the safe, despite the fact that the general manager and the franchise owner had previously been shown evidence that the office in which the safe was kept was not secure (we had video evidence of an employee adjusting the focus on the camera while out of frame before returning after closing to try to Spider Man his way through the crack above the office door). But I got blamed for it and fired without notice. Literally. Nobody told me I’d been fired. I had to find out about it through a letter sent almost a month later (after I began filing a complaint with the unemployment office). To add to the irony, the general manager was caught siphoning funds from the safe a year later. This is what he thought he was like… This is how he actually looked, minus the wine… After losing my job and my car, I continued on with school, hoping to at least make something of myself through education (that’s a half-truth). About halfway through the semester, I started having asthma attacks. These didn’t surprise me terribly much. I’ve had asthma my whole life; some of the attacks have even sent me to the hospital. But my doctor thought these attacks seemed associated with chronic bronchitis, and he put me on some meds and prescribed asthma treatments (through the respirator of doom) to hopefully curb the illness. I didn’t challenge it because I didn’t have any reason to. All my symptoms said “bronchitis” — night sweats and cold saps, coughing, asthma-like symptoms, etc. All these things didn’t help make the year a particularly pleasant one (a factor which helped lead to severe depression over the next few years). But I made plans to spend Thanksgiving with my mom, her partner, and my brother and sister along the northern coast of California, thinking “yay, rocky beaches and Fort Bragg.” I dragged my respirator of doom along and resolved myself to have as good a time as a sick person can have. Everything seemed fine, and a fun time I had indeed! But 2002 is the only year that hates my guts. I know this because I lived during that year, and I remember the distinct moment when its physical form descended upon my person and accosted me for no reason whatsoever. Its breath smelled suspiciously like old socks… While returning home, I started to have another asthma attack. Once we arrived, I sat down and took another treatment…only it didn’t do anything. I could feel my heart rate surging and my lungs struggling against some unknown constricting force, and I knew “this is the worst asthma attack I’ve had in a long time, and I need to go to the hospital.” This is where the wonders of the U.S. healthcare system come into play. Emergency rooms tend to work from “most serious” to “least serious” based on available information. Someone who comes in complaining of a broken toe, for example, will get passed over for someone with chest pain. But that’s not how it went in my case. When we arrived, there were a number of people already waiting. Most didn’t have severe issues going on, as far as I can remember — some folks had cold symptoms and some had fevers. But we were forced to wait for 6 hours (or something like that) anyway, despite my symptoms — difficulty breathing and an increased heart rate. They even put someone ahead of me who had fallen out of a tree, who seemed to have done little more than hurt his arm (why he was climbing a tree in the middle of the night is beyond me). It’s possible all of these people were actually worse off than myself (or seemed so based on whatever they reported to the orderly), but it didn’t seem so to my 19-year-old-I-can’t-breathe-oh-my-god self. Someone eventually brought us into the emergency room, took my vitals, and raised some concerns about my
10 Years Ago Today: Chemo
There are a lot of things I don’t remember about finding out I had cancer in 2002. But I do remember the day I began treatments: today. That’s right. Two days before Christmas, I had my first round of ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine — a.k.a. four ways to poison yourself in order to get healthy). One of these drugs (vinblastine), as it turns out, is a kind of orange-red, which runs through your system and turns your pee, well, orange. The doctors like to tell you this beforehand, because usually orange or red pee means something has gone seriously wrong with your innards. Ironically, peeing orange after a treatment of vinblastine still means something is going on in your innards, but in a kind of good way (good bad? Grey. We’ll go with that). This was one of the few things I laughed about when I went through the chemo process. After all, it is kind of hilarious, no? In any case, I had my first treatment on Dec. 23rd, 2002 and spent Christmas feeling somewhat like garbage. I’m fortunate in that most of the immediate side effects attributed to ABVD were fairly mild. There was no intense vomiting (though I’d get a little nauseous at times). I did feel like I’d gone to a party the night before, drank enough alcohol to kill a horse, and then woke up the following morning feeling pretty much as you’d expect: extremely exhausted with a side of craptacular. Beyond that, I don’t remember much. I remember that the nurse who worked at the oncologist’s office was an incredibly nice lady with a lovely attitude and that my mom sat with me through most of the treatment (I owe a lot to my mom, if I’m being honest — she took the brunt of all the financial stress, scheduling, and so on while I tried to combat my disease; she’s a hero in my book and a testament to how important it is to have family (however you define it) during times like this). And I remember feeling like crap while the drugs were funneling into my veins. You literally feel them eating away at you, like those overnight effects of a nasty cold where you just know that you’re going to wake up feeling awful. The only good thing about chemo, I guess, is that they give you good pain killers and a lot of excuses to sleep and sleep and sleep. I slept a lot… Oh, and you can pretty much eat whatever you want, so long as you get the necessary nutrients. Why? Because chemo ruins your appetite and tends to eat away at your body mass. Anything to keep your weight from crashing and your body from completely eating itself alive is generally OK. I made a lot of fruit smoothies… So there you have it. I’ll blog about how I was diagnosed in the future. But since today is kind of a milestone — ten years, baby — I thought I’d blog about it. Plus, I recently had my ten year “checkup,” in which my oncologist in Florida basically said “well, it ain’t back, so you’re good to go.” I like such appointments! There’s much more to tell, for sure. I’ll do my best to collect my memories. P.S.: Earlier this year, I was inspired by Jay Lake to blog about my experiences with cancer. Jay has shared many of his experiences on his blog and was kind enough to talk about how terminal cancer affects him as a writer on my podcast. He’s an extraordinary human being. I recommend you check out his books.