It's Always Something (12 page)

The steroids masked the side effects of the chemotherapy. As long as I was on them, I was able to watch television, do needlepoint, and be fairly peaceful. But eating was very unpleasant. I craved salty things because I could taste them. I ate what I ordinarily wouldn’t eat. I wanted cheeseburgers, cheese and pickles. Lettuce and vegetables tasted like plastic. The highly salty, tasty things were good, but bland foods tasted like something they weren’t, and that was too strange. It was too weird when a carrot tasted like a ceramic kitchen magnet.

Then, when I couldn’t take the steroids anymore, I woke up nauseous and depressed. The nausea was low grade, like what I heard other women say it was like to be pregnant. The depression was due to steroid withdrawal. The nausea lasted Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then miraculously it was gone. But those four days were the longest days on earth.

A few mornings later, I woke up and the first thing my eyes focused on was hairs all over my pillowcase. I reached into my punk haircut and a bunch of strands came out in my hand. Looking down onto the bathtub floor while I was shampooing, I saw it was covered with hair swirling toward the drain—my hair. I was devastated. It was like the scene from
Psycho
when Janet Leigh is in the shower—I screamed. I became hysterical the way people do in the movies. Gene and Grace ran in. I felt so vulnerable because I was naked, too. They both said the right thing, “Gilda, it means that the chemo is working. It’s not important.” My wonderful husband always made me feel that there was nothing unattractive about it or nothing that frightened him even for a second about it. It really was just a few days when it drastically fell out. It happened so fast and it was so messy—thank God for Grace with the Dustbuster on the pillowcase. I’d get up to go to the bathroom and she would come in and get those hairs before I even saw them.

The next night we went out to dinner at a friend’s house and a clump of my hair fell in my plate at dinner. It looked disgusting. I was trying to get it out of the plate before the hostess noticed, but it wasn’t like one hair, it was a little clump of hair in the poached salmon with the special Dijon sauce. It seemed like an event only Roseanne Roseannadanna could make up—me trying to get this hair off the plate and then trying to figure out what to do with the hair. I didn’t want to eat it even though it was my own hair. And my hair is dark so it wasn’t hidable, it was just right out there.

So for about five days my hair was falling everywhere. I had just begun to think I looked like Audrey Hepburn when I started to look like Zero Mostel. There were some strands of hair that oddly held on—you know how Zero would comb a huge clump of hair from the side over the top? Well, this miraculous thing happened to me where some hair stayed in the back, some stayed in the front and in between were huge patches of baldness. It wasn’t like Yul Brynner. It wasn’t clean, it was messy. Why some hair held on like that, I don’t know. Once Gene couldn’t resist reaching in and pulling out a clump for himself. He just reached into my head because it was so intriguing to think that hair could come out in chunks when you grabbed it.

The most difficult part of the whole chemotherapy for me was losing my hair. The doctors always tell you that you might not lose your hair because some people don’t. But I did. Everything that I always thought I would be strong about made me just the biggest weakling in the world. I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t stop feeling ugly. I always said the reason I am so funny is that I am not vain. But I was filled with hatred. I hated everyone on television. I hated all the people on TV commercials who shook their heads and looked great. I hated all our friends. I didn’t want to go out of the house; I didn’t want to go to any dinners or any parties. My eyebrows stayed, but my eyelashes thinned. Within days, I had no body hair, including no pubic hair. It seemed so unfair, not only to have to go through chemotherapy, but to feel marked with baldness like the mark on a house that was quarantined when someone had scarlet fever in the old days.

Gene and I had a woman come in to design a wig for me in this little punk cut, made with real hair. It cost an extraordinary amount of money. When I tried it on I despised it. I wouldn’t put it on. I thought it looked like a wig. I was so angry that this was happening to me. Someone came and went shopping for wigs for me. I tried on all these wigs, brown curly ones, blond with bangs, wild Tina Turner styles. I belligerently settled on this little Peter Pan-looking thing—in fact, it was called “the Peter Pan” and it cost five dollars and fifty cents. It was very dopey, and when I wore it out in the light it looked fake and vinyl. I should have left on the tag that proudly screamed, “It’s a wig!” It was completely unbelievable. It was a color that no one’s hair could be. When I had to go out to my weekly doctors’ appointments, Gene or Jodi would drive me, and I’d slump down in the car with a hat or scarf on my head. I’d peer out the window at Los Angeles—at traffic and joggers. I’d feel left out of the world.

Just like I did on “Saturday Night Live,” I began to lie in bed before I would go to sleep and try to think up characters. Who could I be to get through this? Friends invited us to a dinner party and I wouldn’t go because I couldn’t think of who to go as. Let’s face it, there aren’t many women with no hair. I thought that maybe I could put on a turban and go as Winnie Mandela. Or maybe go as the female Telly Savalas. I worked on it every night lying in bed—then all day long. But if people came to the door, I would hide in the house, ashamed and angry.

At my original surgery there was a nurse who talked to me about how I might lose my hair from chemo. She gave me some paper surgical caps that nurses wear over their hair in surgery. I liked them. I put one on and I thought that it looked kind of cute. So after weeks of me parading around with that almost naked Zero Mostel head, Grace went out and bought fabric. She used the surgical hat as a pattern and made me a whole bunch of caps in different colors. For a while, that is what I wore.

A bit later I began to do a lot of shopping in a store called Laise Adzer in Beverly Hills. It has Moroccan-style women’s clothing—lots of cotton with fringe. It also has scarves you can wrap around your head, and turbans are shown with all the clothes. I realized that if I just bought clothes like that and dressed that way, I could wear scarves around my head. That would hide my baldness. I bought a whole bunch of scarves and a couple of outfits that I could wear if I got invited somewhere. I wore the caps Grace had made me and wrapped the long, narrow Laise Adzer scarves around them. The happier I was, the more I piled on my head. I dressed like a harem girl. At last I had found a character in which I could come back into the social world.

I remember the first night we went out to dinner. I had a Laise Adzer coat that looked like Joseph’s coat of many colors. My head was piled with colorful scarves. I’d lost lots of eyelashes because of the chemo treatments, so I, who never wore mascara because I hated taking it off, suddenly had to use makeup. Joanna said you have to try harder when you have cancer. It helps to wear makeup because you lose eyelashes and the medications alter your face. I went out and bought makeup and started lining my eyes and putting mascara on the five or six eyelashes I had left on each eye. I looked nice and nobody stared at me like I was weird because I had a whole look, this Laise Adzer look. I was even in style.

Still, even after a lovely dinner, I came home in my new clothes and felt depressed. When I took off my outfit, there was my bald head. I was still a cancer patient. I was different.

•  •  •

Chemo three was scheduled right before Christmas. I had a cold or virus, and I had been having horrible gas pains in my stomach. I went to the Alchemist for the examination before my treatment. He felt my stomach. It was as hard as a rock so he sent me to another office to have X-rays taken. The X-rays showed that I had a partial bowel obstruction, which can happen after extensive surgery. It meant they couldn’t do the chemotherapy. The bowel obstruction had to be treated. I was put in the hospital immediately—same room, new procedure.

To treat a partial bowel obstruction without surgery, the doctors tie a rubber bag with mercury in it (because mercury is heavy) to the end of a long, narrow plastic tube. They put the tube and bag through your digestive tract, weighted by the mercury. Over a period of hours, it drops through your whole bowel and opens up the obstruction. This may not be a precise medical explanation of the procedure. All I could think about was getting a bag and tube shoved down my nose. The gynecological oncologist came to the hospital to do the job because he is not only an oncologist but also a surgeon. During my months of chemotherapy he took charge of my pelvic exams and any necessary surgical procedures while the Alchemist did my blood work and took care of my general health.

You can imagine the assault on the body from this tubing weighted with a bag of mercury. It was one thing getting past the nose and the throat, but then suddenly you feel it and your whole body is screaming “Get this out of here!” Your stomach reacts by starting to produce lots of acid. Instead of getting my third chemo, I lay in the hospital bed with this tube in my nose. Here I was—a bald woman with a tube in her nose. I lay in the bed and cried that whole night. I stayed in the hospital three days, not allowed to eat or drink anything. I was fed intravenously. It hurt to swallow, and I had a sinus infection at the same time, so I was sneezing and blowing my nose with the tube in it. Suddenly, my whole life consisted of trying to go as long as I could without swallowing because it hurt so much. How I made it through those days I don’t even know. The amazing thing about the human spirit is that when you feel well again, you don’t remember those awful things.

Gene came every day. We did everything we could to make time go by—played Scrabble, watched television. I remember sitting in that room blowing my nose and wanting to go home for Christmas. But there was nothing I could do except wait for the bowel obstruction to clear. Then they kept taking X-rays to see if it was clear.

From the beginning of my illness, I fought everyone around me about having X-rays. “Do I really need them?” “Do I have to have two?” “Don’t you have my X-ray from the last time?” I was still trying to
not
get cancer in the middle of having it. Then a technician told me that the amount of radiation you get in an X-ray is less than you get flying from New York to Los Angeles. Since Gene and I live on both coasts and fly back and forth, I began to think of my X-rays as flying to New York and back. It eased my mind as they clicked away on the X-ray machine.

On Christmas Eve, Gene and Grace came to the hospital and brought me one of my presents. It was from Gene, a fragile diamond bracelet set in gold. He put it on my wrist and closed the clasp. What a lucky, bald-headed, tube-nosed girl!

By Christmas morning the bowel had cleared. The gynecological oncologist came and started to take the tube out slowly. He had to do it a little bit at a time because it hurt my nose so much. It was so painful bringing the tube up, it was the single worst experience I can remember of the whole illness—the cancer, the operation, even the chemo. He pulled a few inches at a time because the intestine is huge and winding and there was a lot of hose in there. The nurse took over, then the gynecologist came back and he started doing it faster. I was crying. It was horrible. I didn’t want to live. Finally it was so painful they gave me a shot of painkillers, which made me nauseous immediately so they had to give me an injection of antinausea medicine right away. I became so drugged that the doctor could pull the last foot of tube all the way out really fast, like quickly pulling a Band-Aid off. Lo and behold, the mercury bag was not at the end of the tube.

It was a little rubber bag, like a condom, filled with mercury. They quickly took another X-ray and they saw that it was in the lower bowel. The bag was inside me. The gynecological oncologist said, “There is no problem.”

I said, “Has this happened before?”

But I was so stoned I really didn’t care; I was so relieved the pain was over.

“There is no danger, and you’ll be fine,” said the doctor. He went on to say that I would pass it normally, eventually. He let me go home.

Home was wonderful. There were Christmas presents waiting to be opened. And glory of glories, I could drink clear liquids. Then the next day, full liquids (custard and soups), and then solid food. The cancer patient was overindulged by family and friends. I got too many gifts. After I had opened everything, I had fifteen stuffed bears lining my mantel and one clown doll with a tube in its nose from my hospital nurse, Bonnie.

The next morning, I was lying in bed and I had a little gas. When I got out of bed, there was a ball of mercury on the bed. A silver ball of mercury lying on the sheets. Very Christmasy.

Have you ever seen mercury out of a thermometer? It rolls and it breaks. Kids used to play with it until doctors found out it was toxic if it got in the bloodsteam. When I tried to pick up this ball of mercury, it split into a million little molecules of mercury, and then fell onto the shag rug on the floor. I was worried about being in the same room with it. I was worried about Sparkle. I called the gynecological oncologist. He started laughing because he couldn’t believe this had happened, and then he told me there was nothing to worry about. The next time I had a bowel movement, mercury came out in the toilet. It was so heavy it wouldn’t flush down. Then later, out came more mercury. I had gone to two different toilets in the house, so there was mercury in two toilets in the house, and there was mercury in the shag rug. Every time I tried to pick it up, it split into thousands of pieces. I was worried about Sparkle, so I called the poison control number.

I said to the lady at the poison control center, “We broke a thermometer and it’s in the shag rug—is it dangerous?”

“No.”

“How can you pick it up?”

“Use Scotch tape,” she said.

Grace and I spent the next seven hours on the floor, trying to pick up the mercury in the shag rug. Every time I would go through the shag rug I would find more balls of mercury. I tried to get it into one big ball and then finally scoop it onto a piece of Scotch tape and take it to the toilet. Then, we couldn’t flush it down the toilet. It was too heavy. Finally Grace and I had to rig up this thing with a paper cup and scooper to scoop the mercury out of the toilet. It was lying right in the bottom of the toilet so we scooped it into the cup. But it would split and we would have to keep doing it again and again. Finally we got it and put it in the garbage bag and threw it away. Later, when I had another bowel movement, the rubber bag came out in my stool with little mercury balls in it. It was quintessential Roseanne Roseannadanna. A wise nurse at the hospital told me later, “Never let a gynecologist put anything in your nose.”