It's Always Something (15 page)

“The Wellness Community is not a place to come to learn to cope with having cancer or to die from it. It is a place to learn to participate in your fight for recovery along with your physician. We feel that if you participate in your fight for recovery, you will improve the quality of your life and just may enhance the possibility of your recovery. Your first line of defense against cancer is your own immune system. Scientific studies have shown that depression weakens the immune system—we are here to teach you the tools for the pursuit of happiness so you can be an active participant instead of a hopeless, helpless passive victim. . . .

“Please use us in any way you need and I hope everything turns out exactly as you would want.”

He flaps his arms at us not to applaud, but it is difficult not to be impressed with his ideas and his passion about them.

One of my favorite people at The Wellness Community was a man named Jack. He is eighty-five years old. He says he comes to The Wellness Community every Friday for an “emotional injection.” He has his story down like a vaudeville routine. I adored him immediately because his jokes were right on the money and he always got his laugh. He had spinal cancer at eighty-three and was told he would never walk again. He was on chemotherapy in pill form when I met him. He retaught himself how to walk with a walker, and then threw it away. He had a cane and threw that away. He says the only thing wrong now is he can’t dance like he used to. He said to his doctors, “With the chemotherapy, how come I lost my hair?”

What he didn’t tell his doctors was that he lost it fifty years ago. His wife, Sarah, is there with him. She helps if he forgets any of the jokes.

The first time I had to speak I was so nervous that I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t say my name, I just very quietly told about my cancer; I said that I was in treatment, that I had had some of my treatments already and that it was very difficult. I had a turban on my head. I thought I looked like an exotic African princess, but I was told later I looked more like Yasir Arafat. I was very shy and quiet about myself. But when other people talked and I saw their spirits falling low, I would yell something from across the room. Someone else would be on cisplatin and I would say, “I am on cisplatin, too. The side effects are rough, but six years ago when they didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have had any hope at all. Now we do!”

At the end of the two-hour meeting, which went by like a dream to me, I was just invigorated. I was so excited I couldn’t wait to go back. I saw the beautiful woman stop crying and help someone else. I saw hope come into people’s eyes. I couldn’t shut up about it. I talked to Jodi the whole way home in the car. Gene was so worried that I would get depressed and instead I ended up driving everybody else crazy because I told every story that I heard there and how it inspired me and how I couldn’t wait to go back there again and how I wanted to lead the group and run the whole thing and I knew this was a great thing and I was onto something wonderful. Joanna kept saying, “Just relax. You can’t
run
the thing, you
can’t.
You are working on your own recovery. Just enjoy what you are able to do and how you can be helped by it.”

Every Friday that I felt well I went back to the sharing group. That was my first step. For the first three times I never said my name or anything, and then one day I opened up and said, “My name is Gilda Radner and I am a performer by trade. When I got cancer it appeared on the cover of the
National Enquirer.
They said, ‘Gilda Radner in Life-Death Struggle,’ and ever since then everybody has thought I was dead. Well, I’m not dead—cancer doesn’t have to mean you die.”

Everyone in the room was looking at me a little more closely. It was as though at that moment I became Gilda Radner. I got very funny as I told stories about going to a restaurant and seeing someone back up against the wall because he was so frightened to see me. “I don’t know if he was upset because I was alive or because he didn’t send me a card.”

Suddenly, not only did I have the room laughing, but I felt my thumb going up into the air like Roseanne Roseannadanna. There I was at The Wellness Community, and I was getting laughs about cancer and I was loving it. At the end of the meeting a lot of the women came up to me asking questons like “What kind of chemo are you on?” “What happened when your hair fell out?” And I saw they were looking to me for answers or leadership. I tried to help and say what I felt. Then one of the women also said that she was a comedy writer and she had some material and would I read it—a three-hundred-page screenplay. But another woman who was there said, “Hey, look what she is going through right now—this maybe isn’t the right time to bring that up.”

The woman who wanted to give me the material understood. It was wonderful because this other woman protected me, and I realized you just have to speak up and say, “Don’t cross this boundary.” What happened in subsequent weeks was some kind of strange balance about being funny, being Gilda Radner, and being someone going through cancer. I found a way to tell my cancer story and get laughs from it. They started to use me for balance at the meetings after someone had told something really sad. They’d say, “Gilda, would you like to speak?”

Jack or I would come in to lift the room back up. I love to make people laugh, and at The Wellness Community I’d found my role again. It didn’t matter there that I was Gilda Radner. It wasn’t my reputation. It was who I was and who I always have been—someone who is funny.

You know that joke about the optimist who says, “If the house is full of shit there must be a pony somewhere”? Sometimes when I was wandering around and I was so nauseous I thought,
With all this nausea there must be a baby somewhere.
Then I realized at The Wellness Community that I was the baby who came out of this. Even in this form—no hair, kinda puffed out—this little person gets born again. I got my life again. I decided that I had nausea because I was giving birth to myself.

One Friday I was sitting very anonymously in a chair and there was a young man who got up to speak. From across the room he looked very ill. He looked as if he was going through a lot, but when he spoke his whole demeanor changed. He had a very powerful voice. Sometimes people talk and you can hardly hear them they talk so softly, but his voice resonated through the room.

He had a neck cancer, many tumors in his neck, and he was undergoing radiation therapy. He had lost all his taste buds from the therapy and had other complications, but his spirit was amazing. He said the doctors told him he would have his taste buds back in two months, and when they came back he had thirty-six dinner invitations. As he went on, it became clearer that he was a performer. Then all of a sudden he said, “One time I was working in a show in Los Angeles in a small theater in a shopping mall and that lady across the room”—I saw he was looking at me—“you, Gilda, came backstage and threw your arms around me and said, ‘I have always had a crush on you—I saw you in
West Side Story
and I have had a crush on you my whole life,’ and she made me feel so good.”

Suddenly, I looked at him and realized who he was, because I did see the movie
West Side Story
eight times when I was a kid, and there was one of the Jets, Ice, whom I loved to watch dance. His name was Tucker Smith. I saw him again in a little show of Gershwin songs Gene and I went to. It was a wonderful show, and I did go backstage and hug him and have a crush on him. Now here we were at The Wellness Community sitting across from each other, both battling cancer. There was some balance in the universe in this strange way. When he finished his speech I yelled across the room, “Make that thirty-seven dinner invitations!”

At another meeting we sat together. His spirit was so amazing as he talked about the ways he found to eat to overcome the weight-loss problem, which is a major side effect of radiation therapy because you lose strength. As a dancer Tucker understood that. He found ways to get food down, preparing soups and using a straw. He even found ways of getting noodles through the straw. It was very important to him not to lose weight so he could come through his illness. His will to fight was an inspiration to me.

There was another day when somebody, before he spoke, said “Hi, Gilda” to me. He turned out to be a young man whom I went to camp with when I was fifteen. It was a shock, but this kind of thing caused an overwhelming change in me. I stopped sitting at home saying “Why me?” or being depressed thinking I was the only one. I began to crawl to The Wellness Community like someone in search of an oasis in the desert. My car couldn’t get me there fast enough. I couldn’t walk fast enough from the parking lot. I couldn’t get inside fast enough to be nourished by other cancer patients, and to know I was not alone. I could hire people to be around me, I could pay groups of people to come and go through this with me, but I could never buy what I got there, not ever.

A story that one woman told at The Community had a deep effect on me. She was diagnosed with a particular kind of lymphoma. She immediately went everywhere for every possible cure other than the recognized medical one. She went to Mexico. She went to Europe. She did all the spiritual, mystical cures. She spent thousands and thousands of dollars traveling, looking for an answer. After a year of doing this she had some side effects from experimental treatment that were even worse than her cancer. They drove her back to her medical doctor, and he put her on chemotherapy. She had to take these big pills—some types of chemotherapy involve taking pills. She took these big pills and started to feel better, and her lymphoma was under control. Now she says before she takes the pills each day, she kisses them. She kisses each pill before she swallows it.

When I heard her speak it was a week when I was hating chemotherapy, and she inspired me. She knew chemo was her friend, saving her life, giving her life. My next treatment, when I felt,
Ooh, I hate this, I want to run away, let me get out this,
I just thought of all those faces at The Wellness Community. People who have become friends, all at different stages of cancer, all fighting, all different, some with hair, some with clumps of hair, some with radiation burns—how brave we all are together. I just felt them all around me and it made me be braver. The same way people in gangs can do things that the individual could never do alone, the gang of us fighting cancer makes us all stronger. Sometimes I imagine all their little faces inside my body shaking their fists at the sky, rallying against our common enemy—cancer.

I began to face my treatments and my doctors with a different attitude. I wanted to know more about my disease and my treatment. My doctors learned to sit still for my long list of questions, and I became an expert on my own case. I started to regain control in my life, to take charge and not be a victim of my situation.

I became more confident in the well world, too. I knew that part of my recovery was to reestablish myself in my regular life, too, like going out with girlfriends and going shopping, playing tennis, going to dinner parties with friends. I was so mad at healthy people for so long that I really felt hateful toward them. Part of my recovery was learning to function in the healthy world. The Wellness Community made that easier too. I felt as though I belonged to a private club, with a very steep admission.

Grace had told me, “It’s not
what
happens in life . . . it’s how you handle it.” The Wellness Community gave me the ability to start handling it. I am a fighter and I started to take action. I wanted to inject my recovery—the doctors, the treatments—with the Gilda spirit, with my humor, my silliness.

One of the first problems I tackled was the business of being asleep for thirty-six hours during my chemo while the world was going on. How could I make facing that out-of-control time more bearable? I had an idea. I had Gene make a videotape of me playing tennis on a Sunday. Just me. You don’t see who I am playing with. I keep hitting the ball, and I am not a very good tennis player, but I am running around, jumping around and clicking my heels. We put jokes in it. At one point, instead of a tennis ball, a basketball comes across the net. Sparkle comes out and runs around in a circle and I chase her and then you see all our friends whom we play tennis with applauding me and doing testimonials about how well I am doing. Then I come up to the camera and say, “Through the miracle of chemotherapy, I am able to play tennis as badly now as I did before I had cancer.”

Then I name all the chemicals I am on and say, “Look what they have done for my game.”

And then I go back and hit more balls. I am wearing my turban on my head, showing all this energy. My plan was to play the videotape in my room while I was asleep. The chemicals would drift into my system to cure me of cancer, and at the same time there would be a tape of me playing tennis. Conceptual art! I was so proud of the idea, and it was another way for me to control the situation. It was the first time I looked forward to chemo, knowing my creative self would be involved.

Gene made the tape, but he forgot to put the sound on. It was just as well because it might have woken me up. So, during chemo number seven, Jodi played that tape for everybody who came in—the internist, the gynecological oncologist, every doctor that came in. They couldn’t believe it. It was funny even with no sound. It was Chaplinesque. They really enjoyed it. The Alchemist wanted that tape more than anything. How many times does humor come into the business of oncology and chemotherapy? Every time I went to see him I told him he could have the tape if he would let me out of one chemotherapy. But he wouldn’t, thank God.

I started to make plans for each chemo instead of just waiting and dreading the day. I set out to accomplish things. In the days when I was recuperating, Gene was the best customer at the video store. I made it a point to watch every situation comedy to study the form for my future. I did needlepoints and pastel drawings. I wrote, I swam, I made plans before a chemo that I could look forward to after. The day before I went in for my chemo, I would drop off shoes to be repaired and plan to pick them up after—another way of controlling, saying, “I am still alive, I am still functioning.” My friends planned dinner parties for the first day I felt better. That is one of the premises of The Wellness Community—even though you are being treated for cancer, your life still goes on. You can still have life, and not only life, but a quality life.