It Takes a Worried Man (21 page)

I was feeling bad about the fact that after going through a life-changing trauma, I don’t feel that I have learned anything, so I decided to list everything I’ve learned in the last five months. Here goes:

I eat too much.

I have four alcoholic cousins. The disease carries on, and I need to be very careful in this area.

In a crisis, people will surprise you with their amazing kindness. This is particularly true of people you don’t know especially well and are not related to. I mean, someone I work with who I have had lots of conflicts with(he’s one of the people my smart, trouble-making advisees can’t stop mouthing off to) went and spent two hours donating platelets for Kirsten. What did I ever do to deserve this kindness from him?

In a crisis, people will get on your nerves. I have given numerous examples of this, but it was driven home to me as my mom recounted stories of her and her siblings all biting each other’s heads off around every stupid little detail of their father’s funeral.

Coffee is a wonderful gift from God. Really. Getting coffee when I went to visit Kirsten in the hospital made it semi-festive, and going to get coffee (for me, and a bagel for her) has been a nice excuse for Rowen and I to get out of the house and just be somewhere else. When I saw dying people’s friends and relatives in the bubble ward, they would inevitably be clutching cups of coffee or else sending somebody to go get cups of coffee. It is just a wonderful source of comfort.

I am at my best as a parent when we are out of the house. I don’t know why this is, but Rowen and I have a great time going to the coffee shop, or the grocery store, or wherever. It is effortless fun, whereas if we are stuck in the house on a rainy day or whatever, I have no idea how to entertain her. I am in awe of people like our friend Jen who, given about ten seconds and two glue sticks, can come up with an art or craft project that will entertain a kid for an hour.

Today’s youth don’t, despite what I said earlier, relish the impossibility of today’s video games–they cheat. The games, I have learned, are written with these built-in codes, freely available on the internet, that allow you to have infinite lives, or disable all opponents, or whatever. There’s also an actual device you can buy that will save you from the tedium of figuring out the game and the tedium of looking for cheat codes on the internet and just automatically cheat for you. Maybe they should just make the games easier.

Exile on Main Street
, despite what I said earlier, is as good as everybody says it is.

Though this is counterintuitive, facing a real trauma seems to be a pretty good cure for hypochondria. During this whole ordeal I have been able to serenely ignore a variety of aches and pains that, in the past, would have kept me awake at night. I guess the real crisis was just taking up all the mental energy I usually spend on phantom illnesses.

Music is the closest thing I have found to evidence of God’s existence. While it is important for many Christians to believe that Christ was human and felt our pain, for me it’s important that Hank Williams was human and felt our pain. I don’t mean to suggest that the abusive, substance-abusing elder Mr. Williams was in any way Christlike, but the next time you feel really shitty, go listen to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”  He is singing your story. (Hank left us some great gifts. Of course, he also, however unintentionally, inflicted the music of Hank Williams Junior on the world, so I guess the scales are about even in terms of his legacy. ) Or take the Clash, or Johnny Cash, the Carter Family, whatever–music is the only thing that has really made me feel, in a deep way I can believe, that we are not alone down here.

Hire a professional to do your pest control. I paid through the nose to get some pros to take care of our mice, but they made the traps and poison invisible and I haven’t seen a mouse since, and it was worth every cent to not have to smash the little bastards myself.

Most of all, Kirsten is just my favorite person on earth.

The fact remains that teaching is a really sweet gig, and three weeks after the kids come back from their sojourn in the work world, we all go on vacation for a week. For some reason, schools in New England have a vacation in February and another one in April, instead of one in March, which is what we had growing up in Ohio, and this makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, on the one hand, February is probably the shittiest month of the year, and it is nice to have a break during that time. On the other hand, having a week off in the shittiest month of the year is not so very great if you don’t have the wherewithal to, say, fly to Aruba. Mostly you stay inside.

After work on Friday, I go with some co-workers to a bar near school where many people go after work, and I  really enjoy being with these people. I am reminded again of how lucky I am–in other places where I worked, I was occasionally forced to socialize with my co-workers and usually wanted to run screaming from the room, so this is a nice change.

While we are sitting at the bar, Wham’s “Freedom,”which may be their best work, and which I haven’t heard in years, and which you inexplicably hear much much less often than some of their lesser tunes, comes on, and I begin bobbing my head, and when some of my co-workers begin to mock me and the song, I feel that I have to set them straight and explain that this is an almost perfect pop song.

Vacation begins, and we mostly have a pretty mellow time. Kirsten and I do naughty things like go out for coffee and lunch before getting a medical ok to do such things, and vow to remain silent about these activities when we see Dr. J on Wednesday. I rent
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
to watch with Rowen, and sitting there watching it with her, I just start to cry because I am so happy. It is one of the first movies I ever saw, and one of two movies I remember seeing with just my father, and it just makes me so happy to now be the dad watching this with my little kid that I sit there with tears running down my cheeks as Augustus Gloop goes ass-over-teakettle into the chocolate river.

I go for a walk up to the park and stumble on something really strange and cool–what appear to be abandoned animal enclosures. I am on the other end of the park from where the zoo is now, but there are zoo ruins up here–giant stone enclosures enclosed by the ghosts of metal bars, mostly rusted away. For some reason I don’t understand and therefore can’t explain, this just entrances me–I feel like I am ten years old again, and all I can do is say, “Coooooooooool!” It is cool and eerie in the way that all ruins are, and it is a site for illegal nocturnal partying in the way that all ruined structures in urban areas are, as the crack pipe I find on the ground attests.

I have been feeling like a Zen master again, which probably means I am due for a bout of depression, but I am enjoying it while it lasts. Petey takes me out for a beer the night before Kirsten’s big follow-up appointment with Dr. J and remarks on the fact that I seem really calm and happy, and I tell him I had a wonderful day today. Maybe tomorrow is going to suck, but today didn’t.   Kirsten and I lingered over coffee, I watched this wonderfully demented and emotionally significant movie with Rowen, I found zoo ruins, and here I am having a beer with a friend–it is just about a perfect day. While I wish to God I could feel like this every day, I know that I will get depressed again, and things will piss me off, and whatever, but ultimately I think a day like this here and there is just about all any of us can hope for. I don’t know if it’s denial or if it is just serene living in the moment, and I’m no longer sure that there’s much of a difference. I mean, sure, some terrible fate may be waiting for her, or me, or all of us, but it didn’t happen today. People talk about denial like it’s a bad thing, but I don’t know–what the fuck are we supposed to do, walk around looking like Droopy all day, going, “Woe is me?”  I can never really forget about it, but I also don’t have to think about it all the time–like I said, maybe enjoying today is some kind of denial, because I am not processing my potential grief or my fear or whatever, but I am fucking tired of doing that shit. I just want to have a nice day. And I do! And I think, if I’m lucky, I will have more. And like I said, there are no guarantees, so I think this is just about all any of us can ask out of life.

The next day Kirsten and I drop Rowen off at preschool and go over to see Dr. J, who has returned from her surfin’ safari.  We have a long appointment which does not give us very much actual news but is very comforting. Basically it turns out that my binary, either/or view of this treatment was kind of wrong. Well, actually, it was totally wrong. It seems that there are tons of possible outcomes, and while we did not get the best possible outcome, we probably didn’t get the worst one either.

Kirsten still has palpable lumps in her breast. They are considerably smaller than they initially were, and the fact that they have shrunk so much seems to indicate that the high-dose chemo was, in fact, the way to go, since, as you may recall, the regular-dose chemo basically didn’t do squat against this cancer.

The fact that they are still there does not indicate that we should stick a fork in her either. The hope at this point is that they will do a mastectomy, radiation, and that the PET scan will show that the stuff in her spine is gone. In any case they are starting her on some non-hormonal anti-osteoporosis drug (did I mention that she came out of this treatment menopausal?) which also has been shown to retard cancer growth in bones.

Should her tumor markers start to rise, they will start her on herceptin, which may work as a kind of maintenance thing for years. It’s only been around for four years so far, and some people in situations similar to Kirsten’s have been on it for that long and are still kicking around.

We ask and ask about what if this and what if that, and finally Dr. J says she knows we want the certificate that says, “Certified, this Twenty-first day of February, 2001. Kirsten C Shanks will live disease free for at least ten years!”but they don’t give those out, even to the people who get complete remissions, and the bottom line is that we just don’t know. What we do know is that she can take a breath for a while and relax and not worry about dying right now, and that’s pretty much the best they can do.

It has to be enough, because it’s all they have, but strangely enough, for both of us, it is. Like I said, I am sure I am not done with feeling depressed and angry about this, but I do feel in some important way that I have turned a corner. Maybe now I can get up more days than not and not worry about everybody dying. Maybe I can start keeping my own house clean. Maybe.

After she says that, she also clears Kirsten to do all the stuff she’s been doing anyway, which is a relief.

We go out to lunch, and we stop by the thrift store run by the local AIDS charity, and they are selling vinyl records for a quarter. The fact that this is an AIDS charity–well, let’s just say that there are a
lot 
of Barbra Streisand albums (and what appears to be Dan Fogelberg’s entire catalog. Who knew?) , but I manage to pick up a stack of LP’s from the 80′s that have one or two good songs on them, including Wham’s
Make it Big
, which actually has several, but most notably “Freedom.”  Coincidences like this are almost enough to make me believe in an activist deity.

Another week goes by, and I go back to work, and maintain my good mood and hopeful outlook despite having, on Wednesday, to literally spend two hours trying to untangle a three-way conflict that centered on whether someone did or did not say excuse me when they bumped into someone else. Mostly, though, I get psyched up for Kirsten’s birthday party. A few weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to have a birthday party for Kirsten, since her birthday was going to coincide with the end of her treatment. We have been very low-key about our birthdays for several years, but this year I felt like we needed a celebration that Kirsten has come through her treatment, that she’s still here, that I am happy she was born.

So I called all of our friends, and everybody said yes. Just about the only good side effect of her having cancer is that nobody could, in good conscience, turn down an invitation to this party.

I come home at the end of the day on Friday, which is Kirsten’s actual birthday, and Kirsten’s parents are here, and this proves fortunate, because some dumbasses have, for no apparent reason other than to be assholes, thrown a rock and broken a storm window on the first floor, and with Kirsten’s dad here to help me, we are able to get the offending pane out without too much trouble. I think it says a lot about my new improved mental state that I just take care of this without lamenting my fate or getting so stressed out I feel like I need a nap. We all go out to our new favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant, and I eat myself into a stupor. Appetizers, soup, entrees, what the hell, it’s a party, right?

And I do feel like celebrating. Kirsten is really back. She has been taking Rowen to school this week, has been medically cleared to go where other humans are, has energy, and is feeling as close to normal as a bald woman can feel. We are still riding the wave of hope from last week’s doctor’s appointment, and it looks like we will be able to have periods of normalcy in our lives after all. I guess we have had to redefine what normal is, but that’s okay.

Rowen has also been much better. One of her teachers told us that she had said something about various things that would happen “when my mom comes alive again,” and now, I guess, her mom has come alive again, and she is acting much better than she has in months. I didn’t really notice at the time, but now that Rowen is feeling better, I look back at the time when Kirsten was in and out of the hospital and think that Rowen was unusually quick to tears, petulant and cranky during the whole time. But then, so was I.

Saturday comes and Rowen  says, “I want to help you get the cake! And we have to get balloons and decorations and hats!” I’m glad she said something, because I didn’t even think of decorations, much less hats. As it turns out, we go to three stores and can’t find party hats, but we do get streamers and balloons before picking up the cake, some seltzer and plates, and a six pack of Rolling Rock (which I buy for the first time in ten years despite its vile flavor because it’s Kirsten’s thirty-third birthday and the bottles have the little inexplicable “33” on them) and we come home and start setting up the party.

Everybody shows up, and it starts out slowly in the living room but ends up taking over the living room and the kitchen, and this is pretty spectacular because a lot of weekends when we are going to bed at nine on Saturday night, we feel like we don’t have any friends, and it has been years since we had two rooms’ worth of people in our house.  I run around like crazy and eat way too much, and have two Rolling Rocks over the course of the afternoon and find that they are not as vile as I remembered, and I make sure to point out the little “33” to everybody, and nobody else seems to think it was especially clever of me to buy them. Anyway, we tell people to come any time between 12:00 and 5:00, so most people come at 3:00 and stay till 7:00, and it is a great time.

At various times in the afternoon, people will sort of draw me aside and ask how Kirsten is and what we know about her prognosis, and I strangely do not find this annoying and don’t mind telling them that we know the treatment worked, but we don’t know exactly how well, that she is having a mastectomy in a couple of weeks, and that we hope that’s it, but even if it’s not, we are, as Dr. J told us, entering a new era of how we treat this disease, so there’s a lot of hope and not much data, and that is just fine with both of us.

As Joe and Katy are leaving, Katy says, “You know a lot of really nice people,” and I think it is true. This is not one of those parties where anybody leaves going, “who was that dickhead who wouldn’t shut up?” or something like that. (Unless they were talking about me, but I think I was running around too much to be really annoying).

So now it is Sunday morning after the party, and, as I always do after I have eaten too much, I feel disgusting. I got lots of bread and appetizers from the local Indian restaurant and overindulged in those, and I also had three slabs of the cake, which turned out to be so dense that all matter and light were sucked into it. So I feel disgusting, but most of all, I feel happy.

I am happy because Kirsten is thirty-three, we had a great party, I have friends I love, I can hear Rowen down the hall playing dress-up, and a light snow is falling. I am happy because I thought there was only one outcome to all this that was hopeful, when in fact there were many hopeful outcomes, and we seem to have one of those, and I think I’m not going to take you to the PET scan or the mastectomy, because, well, everything that happens after this is basically postscript. Like I said, I know you want a definitive ending almost as much as I do, but it looks like medical science hasn’t reached the point where we can get that for this kind of cancer. So here is the most important fact: Kirsten is alive today. So am I. So is Rowen. So, if you are reading this, are you. And I guess that has to be enough. Enjoy your day.