It's Always Something (7 page)

The pain in my legs was still keeping me from sleeping at night. Then something went wrong in my bowels and I couldn’t go to the bathroom. My stomach started to blow up like a balloon. I looked like a malnourished African baby—skinny arms and legs with a protruding belly. Someone gave me the name of a doctor of holistic medicine so I started to go to a center of holistic medicine where the doctor used a technique developed in Germany. He placed some metal device on pulse points in my body, and it was hooked to something else that showed what I might be allergic to or which vitamins or minerals were missing in my body. He prescribed all this stuff to help me sleep and to help my bowels to move—herbs and roots and things. The German pulse-point system showed some dysfunction in my liver, and he felt I should have more protein in my diet, so he wanted me to take protein supplements. I would painfully drag myself from this holistic medicine center to the health food store across the street to get protein concoctions. Then he wanted me to give myself coffee enemas. I went from drugstore to drugstore trying to find the right kind of enema bag for coffee enemas. I had what seemed like hundreds of little pills and bottles, holistic drops and bags of seeds and leaves and cans of food supplements, all accompanied by rigorous schedules of when to take and do what. But this holistic doctor was paying attention to me. He called me every day and asked how I felt, and what’s going on, and is this working, and let’s change this. At least he and the acupuncturist were taking me seriously.

Gene felt helpless. We didn’t go out. He did all the grocery shopping and the cooking. I vaguely remember watching the World Series on TV that October, doubled up in pain on the couch.

On October 13 the acupuncturist stuck needles in my swollen stomach and gave me a special abdominal massage. Two days later, the holistic doctor suggested I have a colonic to clean out the bowel. I insisted that would be too weird for me. The next day, I saw my internist. He did blood work again—I was running a low-grade fever. He gave me a gamma globulin shot, which was working on some patients with this Epstein-Barr virus. He felt my stomach and told me I was literally “full of shit,” and gave me a prescription for laxatives. He said to come back in a week.

Suddenly I began to wonder how to please so many people. Do I take the magnesium citrate? What about the coffee enema? Do I do both? Do I do the abdominal massage or the colonic? Do I tell the doctors about each other? East meets West in Gilda’s body: Western medicine down my throat, Eastern medicine up my butt.

The holistic doctor was paying the most attention to me, so on October 17 I went to get a professional colonic. I had reached a point where the pain and the discomfort, including not being able to get my pants done up, had gone too far. I went to someone in Beverly Hills who gives colonics. I was so ill at this point that the holistic doctor’s assistant drove me there. I remember this like a foggy dream. She took me to the office and waited like my mother in the waiting room. It’s a weird procedure, like a big enema—water pours into you while your stomach is massaged. You lie on a table with a clear tube alongside you. You can see water flowing in and out, so any material that is removed from the bowel passes by. I will never forget looking past my swollen stomach at the tube, and the only thing that floated by was a bean sprout. Just a single bean sprout went by. I guess they’re difficult to digest.

M
y health continued to deteriorate. I managed to go to the post office and wait in line with my bloated belly and skinny arms to buy a hundred aerograms so I could write to Gene every day in France. He was scheduled to leave to make his movie on October 30. His clothes had been shipped ahead. A friend was coming to live in our guest cottage so I wouldn’t be alone. On Monday, October 20, 1986, in the late afternoon, I had just come home from my psychiatrist’s appointment. I was in a lot of pain, but I was still driving and trying to keep up with life. The phone rang; it was the internist. He said my blood work from the previous week showed an irregularity in my liver function tests.

“What does that mean?” I screeched into the phone.

“It can mean something—or nothing. It’s only slight and we’ll recheck you Thursday when you come in.”

“But what does it mean?” I persisted.

“Relax, Gilda. We’ll recheck it. It’s probably nothing.”

“If it’s nothing, why did you call?”

“Well, we have to recheck it.”

I was petrified that night. Gene held me, talked to me and finally got me to take something to sleep.

On Tuesday, October 21, I drove to see the holistic doctor. He put me on a special powdered protein diet. I canceled my acupuncture appointment. The next day, I canceled my appointment for another colonic. I was in too much pain even to leave the house. On Thursday, October 23, Gene’s secretary drove me to see the internist. My stomach was inflated like a balloon and I was too weak to drive myself. The internist did a pelvic exam. He checked me into the hospital immediately for tests.

There is a VIP wing at the hospital, six rooms that are luxuriously appointed. My room was carpeted and had upholstered furniture. It was decorated in what I think of as a Jewish-Chinese motif—burgundy and pink sofas and chairs and oriental tchotchkes on the coffee table. It was equipped with a television, a VCR, a radio and a tape player. It could have been a hotel suite if it weren’t for the hospital bed and examining lights occupying one corner. A nurse came in and took my blood pressure and temperature and gave me a hospital gown. I had a slight smile because I thought,
At last, somebody believes me.
I was done with the day-to-day world. I could no longer manage even simple tasks. I had to be taken care of, but I felt,
At last, somebody believes me. Someone will find out what’s wrong.
I put on the little blue print gown. I wanted to get into bed, but they wanted to start their diagnostic procedures right away.

They took me downstairs to the radiation department and began running numerous tests on me. Blood was drawn. I had an ultrasound—to make sure I wasn’t pregnant. I wasn’t. Then came the CAT scan. The internist was there overseeing everything. I had never had a CAT scan or anything like it in my life. The closest I ever came was when I saw the Woody Allen movie
Hannah and Her Sisters.
That movie did so much for me because I saw it right in the middle of all my weird illness and it confirmed the results of neurosis for me. I thought about how Woody created his brain tumor. Good old Woody, he hit right on what’s happening in my life, too, that this whole thing could be me just being neurotic. Except this wasn’t a movie. It was really happening. It was my body going through the round eye of the CAT-scan machine. I became like a child. I put myself in other people’s hands.

Gene was in my room when I got back. He was calm and reassuring. “Now we’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said. At this point we were both exhausted from trying to figure out why I felt so ill. Our daily life had become painful. We needed help.

The first night I had a private nurse named Bonnie. She was single and my age exactly. She kept track of my vital signs and gave me enemas every half hour. I was hooked up to an intravenous line for feeding—nothing by mouth. After Gene had gone home, Bonnie and I put on the television and there was a rerun of “Saturday Night Live.” Bonnie had never seen me on television before. She told me she preferred the night shift in the hospital, working a twelve-hour shift from 7:00
P.M
. to 7:00
A.M
. When she wasn’t working, she liked dancing at clubs. She loved movies and music, but television wasn’t very important to her. She had only a small black-and-white set at home. Now, there she was—giving enemas to this person who was on color television at the same time. We laughed about it. Bonnie gave me a sleeping medication. I didn’t even ask what it was. I felt strangely content—I was being taken care of.

Friday morning, fluid was extracted from my swollen belly. I was taken downstairs again for more tests—chest X-rays and a mammogram. Gene was in the room again when I got back. My psychiatrist paid a visit. We all thought this was probably some kind of infection. I remember feeling calm, which isn’t like me, so I must’ve been sedated.

In the late afternoon or early evening on Friday, the internist came into the room. I was lying in the bed and Gene was sitting on the left side of my bed. We had been talking, absently watching television, waiting for the reports to come in. We both looked up into this doctor’s eyes as he said, very calmly, “We’ve discovered there is a malignancy.” A flush went through my body, and out of my mouth came a sound like a guttural animal cry. Gene said he did the same thing, but silently. He still remembers the sound I made because it was so primitive, so emotional, like somebody stabbing a knife into me. What about Epstein-Barr virus and neurosis and Woody Allen and my imagination? I think the internist went on to say that the malignancy was confirmed by the CAT scan and the analysis of the fluid from my belly. Surgery would have to be done as soon as possible. When he left the room, I grabbed Gene’s face in my hands and sobbed.

“No more bad news, no more bad news, please! I just don’t want any more bad news.”

I can’t remember much after that. I don’t remember being horrified or dwelling on it—whether it was because they were medicating me at that point, I don’t know. Everything happened quickly from that Friday night until they operated on me Sunday morning. Saturday I was prepped for surgery and Gene says I met the anesthesiologist and the gynecologist who was to perform the operation. I don’t remember anything. I was probably filled with medication that dripped through my intravenous line. I do remember that nobody said the word
cancer.

After the surgery I woke up, I was in the intensive care unit and Gene was right there. My eyes opened and his face was right there. He said, “They got it all. They got everything they could see. They got you clean.”

“Oh, my husband—my dear, sweet husband,” I said.

We held onto each other.

But I developed a fever that night as high as 104 degrees. I also developed pneumonia. I was kept in the intensive care unit for five days. I have only a vague memory of those days, in and out of sleep with nurses’ arms and faces around me in what I refer to as “the bin,” a grown-up crib for the very ill. The fever finally went down. Unknown to me, Gene was facing another battle at the same time, one that illustrates the darker side of being a celebrity.

From the minute I checked into the hospital certain segments of the press were trying to find out what was going on. Journalists were calling and asking what room Gilda Radner was in. Gene had to change my name on all the medical records. I became Lily Herman. I had always wanted to name our first girl Lily, and my father’s name was Herman. The
Enquirer
found out my new name and published it, so calls started to come in for Lily Herman. The
Enquirer
had chosen me for their cover Story:
GILDA RADNER IN LIFE-DEATH STRUGGLE.
In their Story, I was dying and Gene was supposed to do a movie in France, and the question was, would he go or would he stay? They found an old photo of me looking frightened from a “Saturday Night Live” sketch and blew that up to make the point. What they did probably sold newspapers, but it had a devastating effect on my family and my friends. It forced Gene to compose a press release to respond. He said that I had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, had had surgery and my prognosis was good.

The
Enquirer
doesn’t like good news, so the Gilda story stopped running. A hospital coordinator changed our names to Lorna and Stanley Blake. Every morning the man who took my blood greeted me with “Good morning, Lorna.”

My surgery involved a total hysterectomy. I would never have a baby. Everything had happened so fast. I hadn’t even realized before the operation that it would probably involve the removal of my reproductive organs. When they told me afterward, I understood the issue was to save my life. There was nothing to say. No more biological time clock to worry about. The important thing was that I was alive.

Immediately after the surgery an oncologist told us I would have to have nine courses of chemotherapy, one every three weeks, and he would give me the first treatment before I left the hospital once I was strong enough. I decided to call him “the Alchemist” because he decided which chemicals or drugs to administer, and in what doses, to treat the cancer. He also insisted that I have some kind of relaxation therapy. He knew that an important part of cancer treatment was the mental attitude of the patient and the patient’s ability to accept the treatment and to relax during it. I already had a psychiatrist, but he suggested I meet with a woman named Joanna Bull, a psychotherapist who worked primarily with cancer patients and was skilled in relaxation therapies. Within the first ten days of my recuperation I had an appointment to see her. She would come to the hospital to meet me. The Alchemist understood that he was treating the mind as well as the body.

I had private nurses around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. Not only did I need them medically, but I needed the protection within the hospital—like a guard. That made it easier on Gene and everybody else, knowing that somebody was there with me. And there were other doctors who entered the case. One was a doctor who decided what went into the feeding bag that dripped into my veins. I would wake up in the morning and he would be the first one I would see, standing there fixing my feed bag, deciding what balance of nutrients I needed.

The doctors decided that the veins in my arms were not easily accessible, which wouldn’t be good for my chemotherapy. They would have to put the chemicals in my veins, but it would be difficult to keep finding a vein to put an IV in. Fortunately there is an amazing new invention called a Port-A-Cath. It’s like a small plastic bottle with a long wire neck that runs into a vein. It is put under your skin surgically like a pacemaker, usually in the chest area. Once it is in place, to give you an IV they just stick the needle into the Port-A-Cath, which hurts much less than sticking the vein. You can do anything with it, even go swimming with it. At first, Port-A-Caths were open and you would have to clean them all the time, but now they are covered over with skin and very safe and less likely to get infected. I have mine to this day, above my right breast. So eleven days after my initial operation, I had to go back down to surgery to have the Port-A-Cath inserted.