ever-fixed mark

Husband’s friend K. has always been, comme on dit, a very special restaurant customer. Yes, he has questions about the dish; he’d like to substitute risotto for pilaf; he wants the eggs cooked extremely well, but the toast should be more buff than beige; hey, how ’bout we go off-menu here? The last time we dined with K. when the server asked, “How would you like that done?” Husband quipped, “In the most complicated manner possible.” He was not incorrect.

My friend C. is also a difficult diner, but where K. is Baroque, C. is ascetic. She wants it plain, with everything on the side. She can’t eat mushrooms or shellfish and won’t each much else except salmon, beef, or ice cream. She’s lived and traveled around the world so it’s not like she’s ignorant of more varied cuisines; she’s just not interested.

K. and C. are both single, and I’ve often wondered what would happen if they found themselves on a blind date. Can you just imagine the flurry of special requests being relayed to the kitchen, hastening the harried water to an early, medicated retirement? I can see it now: “When Sally Met Sally.”

Last night, K. stopped by on a business trip, and as we walked downtown to grab dinner we ran into C. I realized immediately that this was a rare opportunity to observe two master practitioners of the fussy arts in their native habitat, so I invited her along. I’m disappointed to say that the waitress’s teeth did not fall out from gnashing, nor did the chef quit on the spot, torching the kitchen as he escaped through the side door. You let me down, guys.

The whole family and I are in the car, and Husband and I are having a conversation about religion. One of us ends a sentence with “…people who believe in God.”

Aitch: You know, I believe in God.

Me: You do?

Husband: Which god do you believe in?

Aitch: Thor.

Husband: Well, then, Thursday is your Sabbath day, isn’t it?

Happy Thursday, Thor-shippers.

An old Peace Corps friend, Dave, died suddenly this weekend. A bunch of returned volunteers were weaving in and out of a Facebook thread commenting on one person’s announcement that he was coming to the States in a few days to interview for a job with the Peace Corps, when someone broke in with the news that Dave had succumbed to a brain aneurysm the previous day.

I hoped it was a joke, some kind of inside joke between the two of them that I just wouldn’t get. Dave couldn’t die at 40. Dave had saved two lives in one Thanksgiving!

Fucking Facebook. This is what it’s come to. The medium that everyone else uses to post what they had for lunch and how much they are T’ing G that it’s F is now how everyone will know that you’re dead. When all of us first met, the internet barely existed, and no one had a telephone. If you wanted to deliver a message you had to send it through the Tunisian post, or get up off your ass and go tell them in person, unannounced.

That’s how I first met Dave. Another volunteer brought him and another trainee to my house during a “kick-out,” a week-long period during training. It was meant to be the trainees’ first real experience out and about in the country. I suppose A., the other volunteer, thought his charges should see the bright lights of Tunis, so they ended up at my place.

Dave was young, cocky, and good-looking. I thought that pretty much summed him up, with no need to give him any further consideration, but that weekend he surprised me. He was smart and well-read and really, really charming. The kind of attention that you or I might lavish on a seduction target or someone who might leave us a million dollars was the kind of focus that Dave turned on everyone: pretty girls, ugly girls, middle-aged women, old men, straight men, gay men. At one point during that first weekend he paid me the best compliment I’ve ever received:

“You know, you have a really good vocabulary,” he said.

And that’s how you make a friend for life. He had me at “vocabulary.”

Here’s a photo from that weekend. Doesn’t this make the Peace Corps look like fun?

Dave was the Brobdingnag among Liliputs.

Dave gave me gifts of music, literature, laughter. He turned me on to Joni Mitchell; I had only known “Big Yellow Taxi” but he loaned me cassettes of Blue and Court and Spark, and I was converted. When I taught Wuthering Heights and complained about how dull it was, he borrowed one of my photocopies (university policy; we couldn’t afford or perhaps get our hands on actual books) and schooled me in its genius. Every few months, he tried to get me to read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I never could get past the first few pages. He told me that life was too short to read trash, a view against which I used to protest, but which I’ve now come to espouse. Life is too damn short.

He was nicknamed Haj because of a red fez he wore at some party or another. Hajji is an honorific given to men who wear the fez, denoting that they’ve made the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. It’s inconceivable that Dave’s made his last hajj.

Peace, xuyya.

Can you guess which of the incidents, below, is a real-life local news story, and which is the plot of a scary blockbuster movie?

A. A large, smelly, gelatinous, alien-looking life form terrorizes a small town, sending people screaming into the streets.

B. On the eve of a major holiday week, a fisherman in a tourist town claims to have spotted a great white shark, but no one believes him and the beaches remain open.

Yes! You guessed it! Both are local news stories AND movie plots! To wit:

The Blob

Jaws

Just your average summer in New England.

Two noisy birds have taken up residence in the tree outside our home. While craning my neck to see if I could locate their nest, I realized I was standing there with my mouth agape like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

“That’s funny,” I thought, and tried to close my piehole, to no avail. “Did my mouth always hang open like this when I moved my head back?” Then I remembered: oh, yeah. Surgery.

With this big slot in my neck, and a mouth that yawns open every time my head tilts back, I resemble nothing so much as a Pez dispenser.

Minutes before I was about to be wheeled into the operating room, my surgeon came by to say hello. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m fine but the important thing is how are YOU feeling?” I asked him. After all, how he currently felt would determine how I might feel in the future. Had he slept well? Breakfasted abundantly? Was he satisfied with his long-distance carrier?

“I’m thinking about a change in plan,” he said. Let me assure you, this is not something you want to hear at that juncture.

Basically, when you have this kind of cancer, there is a continuum of options. At one end of the continuum, you could do nothing and hope that you die of old age before the cancer spreads. This might be a perfectly valid option; unfortunately there are no studies giving you your chances. At the other end of the continuum, you can take out the whole thyroid and all the lymph nodes in the neck area, eliminating all the places the cancer is likely to have metastasized in the early going. This increases the chance that you will get all the cancer but you risk cutting unnecessarily; the cancer from the left side of your thyroid might never have gotten to the lymph node under your right jaw anyway.

All along the continuum are other options: Take out half the thyroid; half the thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side; the whole thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side; the whole thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side and center (our original plan). How do you choose a course of action? It seems to be a gut instinct. If a lot of lymph nodes light up on a scan, or if the biomarkers for the cancer are high, you might assume that the cancer has spread, and you need a more aggressive approach, but on the other hand the metastases might be microscopic and won’t show up until you take the nodes out and do a path report, or the biomarker may not be indicative of the size and spread of the tumors.

My surgeon didn’t find much evidence of metastases on the scans, and my biomarkers were relatively low, but my surgeon just saw this as a chance to “cut for a cure.” He proposed changing from the “more aggressive” to the “most aggressive” surgical intervention, which would mean breaking the surgery into two parts: one surgery now, and another in six to eight weeks.

Deep sigh.

So, I’m currently in possession of half my thyroid and neck lymph nodes, which meant I was in surgery for a slightly shorter time than expected (4 hours, instead of the predicted 5). I am still generating thyroid hormone, so I feel relatively normal. It hurts a lot less to have your neck cut open and sewn back together than you would think. On the visual analog scale, my neck pain is barely registering, whereas the place they put the IV is an “oh my God you sadistic nurse how the hell could this STILL hurt a week later?”

But, hey, all in all, it’s a thumbs up. I even went running on Wednesday, one week after the surgery, and banged out three miles without too much trouble, so I guess that means I am All Better. The stitches did feel a bit weird when I was running, like I had been decapitated and had my head stuck back on with masking tape. That is, in fact, what it looks like thanks to the rank-looking steri-strips still closing the wound.

I keep trying NOT to think about the guy with the neck wound in Cold Mountain:

:At the hospital, the doctors looked at him and said there was not much they could do. He might live or he might not. They gave him but a grey rag and a little basin to clean his own wound. Those first few days, when he broke consciousness enough to do it, he wiped at his neck with the rag until the water in the basin was the color of the comb on a turkey-cock. But mainly the wound had wanted to clean itself. Before it started scabbing, it spit out a number of things: a collar button and a piece of wool collar from the shirt he had been wearing when he was hit, a shard of soft grey metal as big as a quarter dollar piece, and, unaccountably, something that closely resembled a peach pit. That last he set on the nightstand and studied for some days. He could never settle his mind on whether it was a part of him or not. He finally threw it out the window but then had troubling dreams that it had taken root and grown, like Jack’s bean, into something monstrous.

I’m curious about what will come out of my neck when the tape finally falls off. Silly Bandz and dog hair, no doubt.

Husband and I talked it over and decided that, of everyone in our social circle, the people most likely to be covert Russian spies are….us. No family in the area, jobs that no one can explain, bizarre social habits…I wonder how long it will take for someone to turn us in?

Last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times about his recent cancer scare and how it improved his outlook on life: “A brush with mortality turns out to be the best way to appreciate how blue the sky is, how sensuous grass feels underfoot, how melodious kids’ voices are.”

This has not been my experience.

Maybe it’s because Kristof’s test turned out negative, whereas I actually have cancer, but I think it’s due more to the fact that I appreciated life sufficiently before my diagnosis, thank you very much. I mean, I’m not a moron; I read books; I have an imagination; I know that even with cancer my life is more privileged than 99.99% of humanity’s. So while Kristof is fondling the grass with his insteps, I’ve just been staggering around, gobsmacked.

I should state up front that this disease, a relatively rare (I prefer “elite”) type of cancer called medullary thyroid cancer, is not immediately life-threatening. There are roughly four types of thyroid cancer. Anaplastic is a death sentence. Papillary and follicular are more or less “cancer vacations”: they are highly curable and, because treatment involves radioiodine, rendering you a biohazard to those around you, sufferers often spend a week in a hotel during recovery, ordering room service and watching round-the-clock pay-per-view.

Medullary is somewhere between the two. It metastasizes quickly to the lymph nodes around the neck, but progresses indolently from there. Thus, surgery is the standard of care, and chemo and radiation are given only in advanced cases. Radioiodine doesn’t work, because technically it’s the C cells, not the thyroid cells, that are affected. There are a few biomarkers that give an indication of how far the disease has progressed. In my case, it does not seem to have progressed very far.

It was discovered during a routine physical by my new primary care physician. I had switched doctors because of a persistent cough that homeopathic guy wasn’t helping to solve, and the new doctor found the nodule the first time she saw me. On Wednesday, I’m having a total thyroidectomy and “modified radical neck dissection” (isn’t “modified radical” an oxymoron? And will they put my neck back together after they dissect it?). After that, there’s little to do but measure the biomarkers in my blood and be on the alert for new metastases which, with any luck, could never occur.

I shared the news only with a few close friends early on. One friend, wanting to inquire discreetly about my health in front of other people who didn’t know the story, asked me, “How’s your little project going?” For some reason, that just cracks me up. My project is doing very well, thanks for asking! We’re on time, under budget, and hitting our quality targets! Just don’t use the term “deadline”!

Since then, that’s how it’s struck me: Not as a goad to more contemplative living, but as an unwanted project draining time and resources while I’m still expected to do all the rest of my work — you know, the kind I get paid for.

Or, to use another analogy: Since I got the initial diagnosis from the endocrinologist (over the phone, during a meeting with my manager and VP, after which I had to give a presentation), I’ve felt like a computer running an extra program. On my desktop are all the usual applications: commute, kids, breakfast, work, lunch, work, commute, kids, dinner, and so on. But in the background the “cancer app” is weighing all the various cancer-specific alternatives to whatever is being discussed in the foreground. Vacation plans: Will I need to reschedule them? An off-site meeting in July: Will I be able to drive by then? A new assignment: Will I be heading into a second surgery by the time it hits?

In the morning, it doesn’t bother me too much. By the time I get into the car at the end of the day, though, I feel like the cancer program has sucked up all my CPU. Every day at sundown, I crash, and I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with this. Physically, I feel wonderful, and I expect to recover quickly. Mentally, I want to stop the world, but it just keeps going ’round in its orbit, and I’m resentful as hell. I don’t know what’s worse: being sick, or being angry at myself for not handling it all better.

You know, as a kid, I was a huge fan of all those terminal illness stories. Remember Eric? Death be Not Proud? A Summer to Die? (If every time you get a nosebleed, you think “cancer,” then you’ve probably read one or more of these books.) I always thought that if I became a tragic heroine, I’d be a lot more heroic.

For the last week, a sandwich board has been sitting out on the green of the next town over, advertising the upcoming Memorial Day festivities. I finally got close enough to read the fine print. It was a series of war re-enactments, distributed over the weekend thusly:

Saturday, May 29th: The Revolutionary War Era
Sunday, May 30th: The Civil War Era
Monday, May 31st: WWI through Afghanistan

Husband: Monday is going to be a busy day.
Me: Should we be re-enacting wars that are STILL GOING ON?

I drove by the green today with some trepidation, but there did not seem to be any IEDs buried on the High Road. I did get a glimpse of the other side of the sandwich board, though: “Live Nativity Tonight 7:15.”

I guess the Civil War buffs need something to enact in the off-season.

On Sunday afternoon, watching Aitch’s t-ball game, I experienced a profound sense of deja vu. One might think it could be explained away by the fact that it was my fourth game that week, but no — it was something else. The easy grounders sailing through the Colossus stances of multiple kids; the entire infield pursuing an errant ball into the outfield; the one skilled kid on the team leaving his position at second base to catch a pop fly headed toward the inattentive first baseman: I had seen it all before, but where? As the strains of “March of the Toreadors” played in my head, it hit me: The Bad News Bears!

As a child, I was no baseball fan, but like the rest of America I was intrigued by the foul-mouthed kids in the trailers, so I saw the movie in the theater, and I loved it. I was exactly the same age as Tatum O’Neal’s character and absolutely coveted her hair, her clothes, and her ride on Kelly Leak’s motorcycle. Husband also had fond memories of the film, so on Sunday night we rented it to see if it stood the test of time. It did, but I found my perception of it had really changed.

First, I had remembered the rivalry between the Bears and the other teams in the league as a kind of class warfare; the Bears, I had thought, came from the other side of the tracks. That wasn’t strictly the case; as a kid, I had missed references to a lawsuit filed by a city councilman as a reaction to the league’s cutting of the poorest athletes. The Bears were so bad, initially, because the team was made up of the worst athletes in the league.

Having missed that, I didn’t really appreciate the change in Walter Matthau’s character: at first he cares too little about winning, then too much. By the end he achieves some kind of equilibrium, but the movie makes you think about where that point is, which is an interesting mental tug-of-war if you’re a parent of a little athlete. If you make your kid practice and attend every game, if you enforce discipline even if your child would rather be picking daisies in the outfield, are you enabling his fullest potential or just being kind of an asshole?

On this viewing, I also appreciated the subtlety of the final playoff between the Bears and the Yankees. (All the teams in the league had mascots; the teams in Aitch’s league are just called by their sponsors’ names, making cheers difficult.) Each team made good plays and errors; each team played dirty; each team showed hustle and had bad luck. Vic Morrow was clearly the bad guy, but even when he lost his temper and beat up his own son (the kid from “Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” another chlldhood favorite of mine — now that I’ve raised that see if you can get the theme song out of your head), it was largely because his kid had intentionally beaned a batter (although it might have been because he gave up a walk with the bases loaded).

As an eleven-year-old, I had been shocked by the racial and ethnic slurs slung by one of the thirty-five tow-headed kids on the team, and by Jackie Earle Haley smoking cigarettes on his Harley. As an adult, I was most horrified by the team riding around town perched on the trunk of Walter Matthau’s convertible. Seven kids and no seatbelts! They could never get that movie greenlighted today.