When I first had surgery to remove my left testicle, I was in the hospital the day before and spent another three days recovering. And the cut was about three or four inches and looked like a vagina with staples in it (Not exactly what you want to see just above your groin, and on top of that, if I wanted to use it, I couldn’t possibly reach it. Twenty-eight years later, when they removed my right testicle, I go into the hospital at 11:30 and I’m heading home in a car at 4pm the same day, and the cut looks like a three-inch melted plastic smile above my groin, so I have a happy face on me.
There are so many moments where I’ve been orbiting different moments from my life. That’s all I have. The only tools in my belt. The only bullets in my gun to fight the Big C. Cancer is the only world where if you’re a survivor you realize the only person who can truly rescue you is yourself. For the rest of my life in various increments, every moment will be decided by what numbers come out of the lottery ball on my check-ups. Will I be a winner? How many tears have streaked down my face, but they are defiant and challenging streams. Why? Because eyes water to get rid of something in the eye. That’s just a biological function. But these different and new and replenishing tears have no function, they are a reaction to the soul trying to rid of cancer from my vision.
So I vow to walk toward the rising sun of tomorrows, head bowed as I dance my Don Quixote two-step to the Beach Boy’s singing “I’m Thinking About This Whole World”, carrying my love like a surfboard, and my surfboard is like a broken lance I plunged into a gray dreamless creature of hopeless yesterdays I speared and defeated, but is somehow the Big C is always lurking to slay me, but I’m armed with tears of joy that streak like sweat down my face and I laugh as the warmth of today hits my skin in triumph and I take a firm step forward on the tentative soil of the future ready to do battle against the nothingness with a smile of style.
I shout at the vastness that tries to overwhelm only gives me strength, “You cannot take me! You cannot take me!”
Bitten by the Cancer Creature
Recovering from surgery. Sometimes I look back at the gauntlet of medical care I’ve experienced the last six months and feel I’ve been stripped. How many hits can a person take. The surgical gash sometimes resembles a bite from a Cancer Creature that wanted to eat me. There’s more pinching soreness in the area today. And my legs feel heavier and my feet still feel tingly and half asleep, a result of chemo. I also think it hurt my hearing, and I’m hoping it gets better. And with my last testicle gone, iot feels like I have an empty paper bag between my legs.
I don’t see myself as a victim but as a survivoir. But a survivor who is clinging to a inflatable raft of hope in a dark sea as cancer in the form of sharks circle around and sometimes rub their backs along the bottom of the raft. I remain still and reflective, hoping the tumor inside me is just a burnt-out cinder of scar tissue, not a growing sequel. And if it is growing back? What damage will it do to my body? Back in the day, they put leeches on people to bleed them to a cure, and I wonder if my treatment years from now will look like that. Of course now the medical profession still uses leeches, but only to make people pay their medical bills.
People forget. Most survivors to truly live have to be rescued.
Fred For Your Head: Insult For The Day
Here’s your insult for the day.
Either you’re buffed, or wearing a men’s push-up bra.
For more info on how you can get a my books Insult and Live! which identifies every loser in the world and show you how to improve the quality of your life through insults: Visit:http://www.fredforyourhead.com/Insults.html
Chemo flashbacks
I was lying in bed and flash to sitting in the lounge on the first floor of the Stanford Cancer Center. I had just finished my chemo for the day and I was waiting for my ride. I saw a child in a wheelchair who clearly was being treated for cancer. And I just hunched over and started crying. The poor kid, all he knew in his childhood was the pain I was feeling and not being able to taste food and being too weak to have his life back. A friend of mine lost his son to leukemia. I felt a deeper pain for his loss today. I did a eulogy for his son because I experience the loss of a brother to a crib death. I remember how my friend left the church, limp and grief stricken, as if his entire body was on a wire clothes hanger. Then I flashed to a brother I lost to a crib death, Matthew, who would be 40 today if he had made it past his three months, when he died the first day I started high school. I remember my mother waking me up and telling me, “Matthew died.” I threw the covers over my head and said, “I don’t want to go downstairs and see him.” My Mom said, “He’s not here. He’s gone.” I’ll never forget his small coffin. It was white and looked like something you would put flowers in. WHen we got back for the service a neighbor took apart his crib and brought it back to Britts Department store and said to them, “It’s brand-new. Their baby died.” The neighbors removed all the baby things, but they missed something. Later, when my Mom took clothes out of the dryer, she found his baby clothes. I remember once telling this story to a comedian, who interrupted me and said, “I don’t want to hear it.” He had a baby and was more concerned about how the story would affect him than my feelings, as well as missing the point I was trying to warn him so it might not happen to his child. Then I flashed to years ago when I girl I knew got an abortion and it could have been mine. She got around so she wasn’t sure. But all I could think about was when we were in the act and I peaked I heard the sound of a baby crying and thought that shot made it past the goalie.
That’s one thing about going through the long day of chemo, all these parts of my life come toward me. I checked the time on my cell phone. It was quarter past usual.
Fred and the Amazing Technicolor Crotch
Waking up in my own bed after surgery is like surviving a knife fight. The incision looks like a smile of melted plastic. And the bruise spreads. The blood has nowhere to go, so the shaft of my penis widens, and when I walk it actually bangs against the sides of my legs (It makes me feel like a gorilla on the prowl.). My luck, instead of length I get width. And the shaft is purple. So it’s like having your penis replaced my an eggplant. I guess you can say I’ve gone organic.
Someone mentioned they were looking forward to a weekend. Since I was diagnosed with cancer and went through the tests and the biopsies and the scans and the blood draws and the chemo and the white blood cell shots and the blood transfusions and the medications, my life has just been one long day. There are no Tuesdays, Fridays. Just one long day. The only number I see is 25. That’s the day in June when I get a scan to determine is the tumor is alive and growing again or dead. Then it’s just another long day for the next clearance day. The good thing is it’s a long day with a lot of sunrises and sunsets.
Sometimes I get out of the shower and I don’t want to look at the mirror. It’s like being wounded by the unknown. A creature that scratched me. Other times I feel a little noirish and look at myself. The head with a pepper sprinkle of hair, the slight bump above my collar bone where the medical port was implanted, and the cut above my bruised groin. And I think, man, what a journey. Who’d ever think this was part of my luggage on the trip? I groan a little and sigh and get dressed. In the kitchen are the cats, and I reach down and pet them, imagining each pet is also reducing my tumor. All I can do is infuse my life into the tumor to kill it. I go outside and see the vines I planted, they are all reaching up toward the sun. The ones near the shade have twisted themselves out from the darkness in the direction of the sun. I smile and think that’s what I have to keep doing thorough out this long day: never give in to the shade and go for an even tan of survival.
Carved
The second day after surgery. There’s a smug slash of a three-inch smile in my crotch that flashes out an occasional sharp pain. I feel like I survived a knife fight. I wonder if doctors grasp that even though they have done numerous surgeries how traumatic it is for the patient to wake up the next morning feeling carved out because a blade reached into them and extracted an organ? The purplish bruise along my crotch and down the shaft of my penis. It’s like being wounded by an unseen assailant.
I accept not doing much of anything for at least three days to seal up. I plow through a variety of books: Chekhov short stories, The Big Miss (about Tiger), Arnie and Jack, and A Taste of My Own Medicine (the book the film The Doctor was based on), and watch a couple movies and work on another novel. All these are sit-down moves.
Meanwhile, I wait until June 25 to find out if the tumor inside me is dead or growing. It’s like having a time bomb inside me. I don’t know if it’s a dud or going to explode. The doctors look at case studies. I look at the gash in my crotch and my shaved head. But I do feel that any act of kindness I do will weaken it. Even when I pet our cats and dog, I feel each act is helping me fight the tumor, weakening it. Cancer doesn’t have the capacity to be generous. I went through all my books. I decided the one I haven’t read I was never going to read, and the ones I read, I would share or keep for re-reads. I donated a bunch of books to the library, and gave some to friends, and sold the rest. I was just stripping stuff away to harvest myself.
Fred For Your Head: Insult Of The Day
Here’s your insult for the day.
Nice muscle tone, I guess that’s the advantage of having a weight room in prison.
For more info on how you can get a my books Insult and Live! which identifies every loser in the world and show you how to improve the quality of your life through insults: Visit:http://www.fredforyourhead.com/Insults.html
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