It's Always Something (23 page)

I had never seen anybody die. I’d never seen a car accident up close or been in the emergency room of a hospital, but I had called fighting cancer a “war” and now I knew the pain of the casualties. Linda and I were in this war against cancer, and in her case the cancer won. But even though it shortened her life, it never robbed her of her joy.

I had a dream that a very thin and hollow-eyed man in a hospital gown stood on our bed with a hammer ready to bludgeon Gene and Sparkle to death. I ran in and jumped on the bed to stop him. He turned and viciously threw the hammer at me. With great dexterity and finesse, I caught the hammer in my hand. Then I woke up.

Before leaving L.A., I had all my blood work done as well as a saline wash of the peritoneal cavity to check for cancer cells. Everything came back tip-top. I would have to be tested every three to four weeks and the Alchemist gave me the names of two oncologists in Connecticut who could do my follow-up work. Life was zooming. I wasn’t tied down to the regimentation of treatments. I loved being back in Connecticut and found myself connecting with other cancer patients and talking about starting a Wellness Community on the East Coast. I continued to work on my book and to think of ideas for my television show. Gene joined me in Connecticut and life was normal—actually the kind of better-than-normal that comes after a hard fight.

Wherever I went, especially in New York, people were always coming up to me. They’d take me aside and say, “I had cancer, I had such-and-such cancer twenty years ago.” They all wanted to tell me their stories. The
Life
magazine article had been heavily publicized in New York. There were posters of me at every newsstand and even plastered on the sides of buses—my cover photo, with a caption saying, “A brave Gilda Radner laughs at cancer.” I got a little cocky. I always had a twinkle in my eye as though I’d touched the face of God, because that’s what I felt like I’d done. I was plenty full of myself. I’d go to bed at night bursting with plans, and I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning.

After about three weeks I looked at the names of Connecticut oncologists and called one because he was convenient to get to. I knew I had to get my blood work done. The major blood test for ovarian cancer is called a CA-125. It registers a certain chemical that everyone has but that increases in your blood if you have tumor activity. Any reading of less than 35 is normal. It takes a week to get the test results. They took my blood at the office and the doctor examined me. If I complained of any pain or discomfort, this Connecticut oncologist would mention that it
could
be the cancer. I didn’t like him: he was gruff and impatient. I felt like his meter was running while I was talking to him—maybe because I was Gilda Radner I made him nervous. He was about my age. I knew my case backward and forward and told him everything I’d been through and where I was at, and then I told him about the bowel problems. He said that there was a nutritionist he’d like me to see. He said that he could do the diagnostic peritoneal washes right in his office, and he cleaned my Port-A-Caths because they need to be flushed every three weeks.

So I made my cancer pit stop, which is an absolute necessity for all cancer patients. Once you’ve had this disease, it goes on your whole life. You have to keep getting checked. Then I forgot all about it as April turned into my favorite month, May. I’ve always liked May because of the lilacs blooming and the beautiful flowers everywhere. I’ve just always loved it. My neighbor makes ceramic jewelry and she was having a ladies’ luncheon to show her work. It was Tuesday, May 3. I was going over around lunchtime. At eleven o’clock I was upstairs taking a bath and washing my hair when the phone rang. Grace yelled up to me, “Gilda, it’s for you.” It was the Connecticut oncologist. I picked up the phone and he said, “Gilda, I’d like you to come into the office.”

“Why?”

“We’ll talk when you come to the office.”

“I’m not coming to the office, tell me over the phone.”

“Well, I prefer you come in.”

“Well, I want to tell you something—I didn’t enjoy meeting you.” I just blurted it out. I said, “I didn’t like the way you talked about cancer. You scared me unnecessarily.”

He said, “Oh, I apologize for that. Maybe I did speak out of turn.”

I said, “It made me very angry and uncomfortable.”

“At any rate, Gilda, I would like to see you.”

I said impatiently, “Just tell me over the phone.”

He said, “Well, your CA-125 has gone up.”

“What?”

“Your CA-125 is at 90.”

“That’s impossible. I just had blood work done in California three weeks ago and it was absolutely normal. There must be something wrong with the test.”

It was one of those moments when my heart jumped into my throat. I know the blood must have drained from my face. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I continued to fight him.

He said, “I’d like you to meet me at the hospital, and we’ll do a CAT scan and some X-rays, and we’ll see where it’s at.”

I said, “I
know
my CA-125 was normal three weeks ago.”

He said, “Well, we’re not so sure of that.”

I screamed, “What are you talking about?”

His voice was emphatic. “Gilda, will you
please
just come down to the hospital?”

“All right.”

I hung up the phone and came running down the stairs, and I was screaming for Gene. Bloodcurdling screams. By the time I got to Gene’s office, it was like
The Snake Pit
when the woman has gone mad. I was limp with fear and hysterical.

“My CA-125 went up.”

“What?”

I saw Gene’s face whiten. Grace became paralyzed. Once you have cancer you live on a tightrope, you live from day to day. You talk about how something could happen, something could go wrong. Here on May 3 at eleven o’clock in the morning, my whole world collapsed again. My happy, positive, Wellness Community world fell apart with this doctor that I couldn’t stand. I was shaking and crying, and Gene was being very rational, saying, “We don’t have enough facts yet. We don’t have all the information. You have to get the CAT scan. There could be a mistake.” He was looking for every positive thing. Grace was getting ready to drive me to the hospital. Gene is too recognizable so it was best that just Grace and I go. I went upstairs to get dressed, but I was in a trance. It was unbelievable to me that this could be happening.

In the car, Grace was making small talk, but my brain was frozen in the moment when I heard that my CA-125 had gone up. Stuck there, I was just staring. When I got to the hospital, the Connecticut oncologist was waiting there. His presence made me as feisty as a bulldog.

“All right, what do I have to do? What do I have to do?”

He said that he wanted to run a heart test on me.

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “If we have to give you Adriamycin, it could do damage to the heart muscle. We want to make sure your heart is in good condition.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to have to have treatment.”

“Listen, my CA-125 was normal three weeks ago.”

Then he said, “It wasn’t.”

“What do you mean it wasn’t?”

“I’ve spoken to your doctors in California and the computer misread your CA-125 as normal. When it was looked up again yesterday, it showed it was already rising three weeks ago in April.”

My CA-125 readings had been around 7 or 8. But in my April checkup in California it had risen to 40 or 45. Now it was 90. The computer had messed up and with all my precious medical care I had become the victim of a computer. My feistiness was melting and Grace just sat there with me, both our mouths hanging open. I went in and I had the heart test. My heart was normal. Then I had a chest X-ray, two sides. Next I drank the barium that you have to drink for the CAT scan. I thought, instead of going to the ceramic jewelry tea party, I’m drinking barium. They gave me the CAT scan. I lay there in the machine trying to do my visualization, my positive thinking.
I’m clean, I’m clear, I’m pink
—I was visualizing the inside of my body as I’d done every day, religiously, for twenty minutes to a half hour once or twice a day. I took my body and from head to toe scraped out any possible cancer cells that were there. I imagined battles going on with armored horsemen killing the cancer cells. My body was clean, I was cancer-free; all the organs were just happy and pink and clean.

As I lay there in the CAT scan machine with the technician saying, “Breathe, don’t breathe, breathe, don’t breathe,” I thought to myself,
I can will this away, I can visualize this away. I will make the pictures be clear, I can control this.
I tried to put all my might and all my power into it. I wanted the results right away. I wasn’t going to wait. The Connecticut oncologist said, “Yes, you’ll know.”

Grace sat in the lobby of the hospital and I paced through the parking lot until I heard the Connecticut oncologist motioning for me to come back in. He took me and Grace into a small waiting room, and he said, “I’ve gone over your CAT scan and your X-rays with the radiologist. He says you have two nodules of cancer in your upper abdomen on your left side, you have cells on your liver, and you have a shadow on your lung.”

I screeched at him, “You mean I’m going to die?”

He said, “No, no”—but in a very uncertain voice. “What you have is treatable. It’s not microscopic, but it’s treatable.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

And he said, “Well, you have time. You have years. I know a woman, you know, she’s three years now being treated.”

I saw him close the door on my life in his eyes. I said, “I want you to call my doctors in California.”

He said, “I’ll be glad to.”

He went over to the phone. Meanwhile Grace looked like she had had a lobotomy. I got on the phone with my California gynecological oncologist. He was the person I trusted the most, the “belt and suspenders” doctor, the one who put me on the radiation.

I said, “What am I going to do?”

He said, “What did the doctors there say to do?”

Then the Connecticut oncologist called the Alchemist and told him the results of the CAT scan. Without even holding the receiver, I could hear his response through the phone. All he said was, “Shit.”

Grace brought me home. I don’t even remember that ride. It was like I stopped existing. When I got out of the car, I threw up the barium all over the driveway and went into the house and continued to throw up. I just wanted to get into my bed and go to sleep. Gene was asking, “What happened, what happened?” All I could report to him was the most horrific things that could possibly be.

The phone was ringing. Gene had to tell people what had happened. My life had been so active. My manager was calling about the plans for the TV show, and my editor was calling about my book. Half the time when the phone rang it was for me, but now everything stopped. My life faded to black. I didn’t talk to anybody. I remember feeling sick from the barium, then nauseous with fear, thinking of my friend Linda dying, and thinking that suddenly I was a terminal cancer patient.

I still held out hope that in California they would help me, that somehow something would turn around. If I just could talk to Jodi, who was out of town. Maybe the new doctor wasn’t reading the CAT scan properly. The next day I went back to get the CAT scan to send to California. My gynecological oncologist there had said, “Let me read it.” When I went to pick it up the radiologist who had read it was there, and he handed it to me. He had a glum look on his face. He said, “You know, attitude is the most important thing in these cases.”

I looked at him and my anger rose to the surface. I said, “Well, that’s all I have, buddy!”

“C
arboplatin,” said the Connecticut oncologist.

“Carboplatin is a new derivative of cisplatin. It’s supposed to not have the same side effects. It doesn’t make you as sick. It’s just a different form of the same drug. It hasn’t been approved by the FDA yet and it’s difficult to get but I can try to get it because I know someone at the drug company who could get it through what is called ‘compassionate need.’ ”

“Compassionate need”—in other words, my life was in danger. When I later spoke to the California gynecological oncologist, he didn’t even know how to get carboplatin.

He said, “We can’t get it here in California.”

I said, “Well, this guy here can get it.”

He said, “Oh, well then good, stay there and get it.”

When I spoke to the Alchemist, he told me there were a couple of things I should check out myself, including calling a top specialist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. I called him.

“Definitely go with carboplatin if you can get it.”

I said, “Yes, I can get it here in Connecticut.”

He said, “There’s a ten- to fifteen-percent chance that it will work to retard the cancer, and I won’t say that there aren’t a few cases where it has completely arrested the cancer.”

He advised using the carboplatin with Cytoxan and warned me that my numbness could increase with this treatment. “Good luck.”

The doctors agreed, carboplatin was the way to go. So I put my life in the hands of the Connecticut oncologist who kept giving me assignments like “pee in this jar” and “get this blood test” and “be at this office before ten
A.M.
on Tuesday” and saying “I got the carboplatin” with an attitude like “look what I did for you!” But I vacillated between feistiness and utter despair, utter hopelessness.

The day before my first carboplatin chemo I went to a local hair salon and had my hair cut as short and close to the head as you can imagine. I thought,
If I’m going to lose it, I don’t want to have long hairs all over the place.
My hair was getting long and I had a long tail in the back. I left the tail, but I had the rest chopped off close to my head, almost like a crew cut.

The girl said, “Are you sure you want it this short?”

And I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m doing a
Star Wars
movie.”