It's Always Something (20 page)

He paused and continued, “I think it’s the best thing that could have happened—better than not finding anything.”

He said the danger with my type of cancer is that the cells can hide. Most doctors wouldn’t have done as many biopsies as they did, he said. They would have done maybe twenty-five and they might have missed the remaining cells, but the cells still would have been there and then I would have had a recurrence in six months to a year or two years. I would have had a recurrence, but I wouldn’t have known about it until it grew into tumor size. He said they would have tried to convince me to have these washes, prophylactically, in order to prevent that kind of thing happening, but I probably wouldn’t have done it. He was right; I probably wouldn’t have. I would have said, “No, I beat this and it’s gone away.” He said, “Now we can be assured that you’ll have these treatments. It’s better to know what’s there. If there is something else hiding, we’ll get it while it’s in this microscopic stage.”

The truth was that there was nothing remotely like a tumor in there; they would have seen that. Considering what I had had the previous October, my conditon in June was a miracle.

Gene came in shortly after and it was obvious that the doctors had talked to him because he came in filled with joy and spirit and convinced that this was the best thing that could possibly have happened. He said he would so much rather get it now. “Let’s fight it now, honey, not six months down the line or two years or five years from now having to go through this again. Let’s get the whole thing now.”

But there was a pallor over my room, emanating from me. Nobody could cheer me up. I was told I would have the first treatment before I left the hospital, so it was this horrible déjà vu—everything was happening all over again. I thought I would be going home, getting well and going on trips. We had planned to go to Connecticut and then to France and just to get back into life again. My hair was growing back and everything was going to be normal, and suddenly I was given this sentence, another horrible six-month sentence of chemotherapy.

I was totally shattered. All that I had believed was undone. I became terribly depressed. I just wanted to sleep; I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I just couldn’t believe it. I was furious that the cancer was so insidious, that it had tricked me; that this journey wasn’t over. I had to think about mortality again, that I could actually die from this disease. And cancer was controlling me, again. Here it was June and we were talking about more treatments till November. How could I believe that this series would work when I had believed so much that the other treatments would work? My friend with the ovarian cancer called and told me that her second-look surgery showed no sign of cancer. I was so jealous that I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Everyone around me was so positive, saying, “This is the best thing.” I didn’t believe that. I didn’t trust anybody. I didn’t want to hear about it. I hated the world.

Thursday night was the next Lakers-Celtics play-off game and I asked if they could please wait till the end of the game before my treatment. The gynecological oncologist came and ate dinner with Gene. It was Gene’s birthday. At about nine-thirty when the game was over (I don’t even remember who won), Jodi gave me sleeping pills and even an injection, but I just couldn’t fall asleep. I was so tense. Then all of a sudden I lost control of my bowels. I had diarrhea all over the bed. I remember saying, “Jodi, clean me up. Clean me up.”

I asked Gene to leave. I saw panic come onto his face, but I couldn’t help it now. So he left, and took Sparkle, too. Afterward I remember Jodi giving me the steroids, the shot that made my whole body go hot. I remember her face when she gave it to me. She knew she had to give me the chemo. For three days afterward I ran a high fever, and every time I woke up, my mouth filled with warm saliva and I threw up. My eyes would fill with tears. I felt in the middle of some endless horrible experiment.

W
hen
Gilda Live
opened in Boston, in 1979, the morning paper had a review with a headline that said, “Gilda Radner Has No Talent—Zip, Zilch, Zero.” Show business is a gamble. There is no certainty. I was beginning to learn that oncology is the same. When I got home from the hospital a few days after the treatment, I kept running a low-grade fever. I was tremendously depressed. I couldn’t get out of bed. I lost my appetite. I was like everybody’s idea of what a cancer patient is—someone who is losing interest in life. The depression grew and then an even more horrible thing happened—fear entered. In this whole cancer experience up to this point I had managed to avoid fear—the kind that makes you sick to your stomach and pale. Now, a panic set in that cancer was going to kill me. I was going to die. The two microscopic cells became bigger in my mind and more insidious. They were out to get me. They were smarter than me. I was the guy eating a plate of spaghetti in a restaurant and the Mafia hit men stroll in and suddenly he realizes he is going to be killed. I always hated that scene in the movies. The look on the guy’s face when there is no way to get out—that frightened look is the way I felt, even though everybody was telling me differently and the actual facts in my case indicated I wasn’t likely to die.

I had gotten depressed before—horribly depressed about my hair, depressed about my image, depressed about not being able to have a child, depressed about my body—but I had never felt this sense of panic. It was as though now was the first time I really started to deal with cancer. I wanted to get back that feeling of total omnipotent belief that I would win over cancer. I wanted the omnipotent belief back because it made my life bearable. I couldn’t deal with the premise that after you have done everything right, done everything you could possibly do—positive thinking, crystals, visualization, psychotherapy, gotten your head into a wonderful place, everything—suddenly it turns out that perfect behavior might not have worked. I was infuriated.

In discussing it with Joanna Bull, I was like a child, stamping my feet and hating the fact that I didn’t have control of the whole situation. Joanna said one of her main purposes in working with me was always to remind me to leave open the possibility of ambiguity in life; that you just cannot know for sure, you can’t have everything be perfect, and you can’t control everything. You are not responsible for everything that happens nor can you change everything that happens. A child doesn’t want to hear that. Joanna has worked so much with cancer patients and people who are living with cancer that she knows there are no certainties. Everyone has to live with the unknowns.

The more I protested about this ambiguity, the more Joanna pointed out to me that it was both a terrible and wonderful part of life: terrible because you can’t count on anything for sure—like certain good health and no possibility of cancer; wonderful because no human being knows when another is going to die—no doctor can absolutely predict the outcome of a disease. The only thing that is certain is change. Joanna calls all of this “delicious ambiguity.”

“Couldn’t there be comfort and freedom in no one knowing the outcome of anything and all things being possible?” she asked. Was I convinced? Not completely. I still wanted to believe in magic thinking. But I was intrigued.

I decided to cancel my forty-first birthday party. I didn’t want to celebrate. My best girlfriend, Judy, flew in from Toronto to see me. Judy and I grew up in Detroit and have known each other since we were eight years old, although we didn’t become best friends till we were sixteen. Through the years, our lives have intertwined in zillions of memories—school and camp and trips and boys. Now Judy is married and has her own business in Toronto. When Gene would describe me over the phone to her, he would sound so bleak that she wanted to see me in person.

People really don’t know much about cancer if they or someone close to them doesn’t have it. So here came my girlfriend Judy in a panic.

“Did you come here because you think I’m going to die?”

“No, don’t talk stupid,” she said.

Judy and Gene and I went to see the gynecological oncologist. He laid things straight on the line for us. He said that he felt that in my case these peritoneal washes would work. He said statistics on these treatments were minimal because they hadn’t been used long enough for there to be any long-term data on them, but he was confident they would work, especially in cases of microscopic cancer, like mine. As for the increasing numbness in my hands and feet and the potential hearing loss, he said he would moderate all that carefully and make a choice if the side effects became irreversible. Finally he said, “I’ll worry about the cancer, you just worry about getting well.”

Judy was relieved, and she liked the way the gynecological oncologist talked. She had never heard of these peritoneal washes before. But at least she didn’t think I was getting voodoo done to me, and she finally admitted that she
had
come because she had thought I was going to die. I realized that she didn’t know anything about cancer and was as frightened of it as anyone. I realized that I am affected by other people’s fear—like when I see somebody who is really afraid of cancer, I’ll think that person knows something about me that I don’t know, when the truth is, I am the expert, I’m the one going through it. It makes me angry at first, then just sad. All through our lives Judy and I protected each other. If one said to the other that everything was going to be okay, we could believe it. If I was flying somewhere and Judy wasn’t, I’d be sure to tell her so she could worry about me, and I’d do the same for her. We believed that somehow this would protect us. It seems childish, I suppose, but now it’s a shock to me that it doesn’t work. I think all my childhood beliefs and all the child in me have been devastated, just knocked unconscious.

When Judy left she felt better about everything. I didn’t. Even though almost a month had passed, I was still having anxiety and making myself nauseous with fear.

One night, about a week after Judy had gone back to Toronto, I was getting into bed with Gene. Sparkle was curled up at my feet and the lights were on. I pulled the covers up around me and began to whimper.

“Help me—please help me, I’m so scared. I don’t know what to do—I am just petrified, I’m panicked.”

And Gene turned over and said, “I can’t help you—I’m tired of helping you. Why don’t you worry about something besides yourself? Worry about me—worry about the dog. Just get off yourself; I can’t help you anymore. You’re mean and cranky and inconsiderate all day and then at night you get in bed and you get frightened and panic and you want me to make everything be all right and I can’t.”

Tears started to well up in my eyes. I was being rejected. Gene wasn’t going to parent me or soothe me. He was confronting me, and in less than a moment my tears changed to anger. I turned to him and attacked.

“You’re a self-centered, oversensitive bastard.”

I started to get very strong and screamed at him things like, “You don’t know what it’s like to go through this—you bellyache if you have a little pain in your back or a scratch or a cut!”

In my venomous yelling, I thought to myself,
Who cares if he leaves me? If I have to go through this whole thing myself, I’ll go through it by myself
. But at the same time I was thinking,
Where will I move? Can I get him to leave this house while I stay here?
Then another part of me was crying inside—
Oh no, I can’t do it myself
. But I kept saying horrible things to Gene—mean and vengeful. Suddenly it was like our relationship was on the line instead of me being afraid I was going to die from cancer.

“You can leave me—leave me if you want—or are you afraid to leave someone who is dying of cancer?”

I said that out loud, so dramatically that it was still ringing through the air after my mouth was closed; me viciously using my own fear to win an argument. Saying it out loud was like bringing the monster right into the room. Then neither of us said anything. It was quiet in the room and we were just lying there, both tired. Before we went to sleep I reached over and took Gene’s hand and he held my hand back.

In the morning when I woke up, I felt better. I didn’t feel frightened. A couple of times during the morning I tested to see if I was still frightened. I tried to be frightened again, but it wasn’t there. I felt that kind of old omnipotence coming back. I felt cocky and I started to see the cancer cells as really tiny and I thought, I
can get through the treatments and I can wipe them out and they’re not going to get me.
I thought, I
am going to work harder. I am going to meditate twice a day. I am going to be more positive.
I said to Grace that I wanted to go into Westwood and go shopping and see people. My desk had piled up and I had phone messages to return. When I had first come back from the hosptial ten days before, I had had forty-five minutes of messages on my phone machine. At first everyone was calling to say “Congratulations.” Then the same people were calling back to say “Hang in there” after they had heard that I still had microscopic disease and more chemo was in store.

It took Gene a couple of days to recuperate from our fight. How quickly the universe can embrace opposites. I realized I was strong enough to risk my marriage. I almost wanted to be alone—because then maybe I wouldn’t feel so totally dependent. I was tired of that. It was so good that Gene yelled back at me. It made me feel like a person. If Gene thought I could take it, then I wasn’t dying. People whimpering and hovering over me made me feel like I was dying. People yelling at me made me feel alive.

I decided I could handle these next chemos, that they wouldn’t be so bad. My hair was growing back and my face looked more normal. I was lucky. What I had left of this old rotten cancer was treatable, and I was young and fit and could withstand the battle. I started to visualize a huge question mark with me crawling all over it, kissing it, embracing it, loving the unknown. The cancer war would continue and I was right in the middle of the action—but I was armed. I had tremendous will. I had tremendous strength.