Garrulous

When the surgeon called me at home for the second time, I was trying to string 50 feet of cable from the living room in Gen’s house to our bedroom – well, her bedroom – and the new television I had just purchased to kill time during recuperation from my forthcoming surgery. I was also recovering from a nasty Vicodin-induced rash.

At the end of our appointment a few weeks earlier, the specialist had scribbled down a prescription for the drug and pressed it into my hand: “For the pain.” I told him there wasn’t any, at least not the sort that warranted anything stronger than the ibuprofen I sometimes popped before meals. He insisted. I took it.

I filled the prescription after he called two days later with the results of the biopsy.

I’d never taken Vicodin, or anything like that, never having sustained an injury or affliction that would make a doctor offer it, and I’d never take any of the pills offered illicitly by friends or acquaintances. This was new territory for me. After taking some, I discovered it wasn’t a particularly exciting territory. I didn’t notice a difference in pain, and I didn’t feel loopy, stoned or in any way high. As near as I could tell, a Vicodin was just an over-sized Tylenol – but one dusted with some serious “Don’t Worry.” Now this I liked.

My year had been nothing but worry. Just a few weeks into it, Gen asked me to move out and for us to seek counseling. Perhaps I should have listened but I didn’t move out then; I moved instead across the hall into the little bedroom that I had just finished converting into an office (we had moved Lilli into the finished room in the basement). I did everything else I could, though, to salvage the relationship: coordinated with co-workers and moved around my work schedule to make more time off together with Gen and Lilli, spent more time on homework with Lilli, took them both to the beach for a weekend, took Gen to a counselor. And when she didn’t like the first counselor, took her to a second. I talked about everything, tried to address every concern and complaint. But it was all too little too late… and all of it exhausting. For much of February, and again for much of March, I seemed to be in the grip of some lingering flu or durable cold, continually tired and achy. Somewhere in the middle of this, Gen relented and let me move from the narrow futon mattress I’d been sleeping on in the office and back into our bedroom – her bedroom. But the flu persisted. And then came the sore throat, and the sores.

And then Gen ended it all. I was asked to move out of the house for good. I moved first back into the office and onto the futon.

I worried about finding a new place to live and what shape my life would take afterwards.

And then I worried about something that immediately shrunk and shamed all the previous worries.

Vicodin, I discovered, provided a nice reprieve from my cares, even the anxiety created by carrying around a malignant tumor. I don’t think I had much pain, but if I did, I didn’t care. Everything elicited a shrug.

I have cancer. Oh well, shit happens, you know?

I remember popping a few pills behind the bar on the Saturday night following my surgical consult and, while waiting for the great wave of evening business to crash down on us, holding court before a circle of concerned co-workers.

“ – and, yeah, they’re gonna have to slice half of my tongue out, here on the right side.”

“Good God!”

“Eh.” I shrugged. “And they might saw my jaw open, right here, and pull it apart to get in there to do the operation.”

“Jesus Christ, Brent!”

“I know, right? Oh well, what’re you gonna do? You do what you gotta do.”

They all guessed so. I believe it was Davis who thought about the hair. Told about the reconstruction of my tongue and noting all the hair on my forearm, he asked, “So are you going to have a hairy tongue?”

“Huh… that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask. Maybe? Oh well.”

Everyone agreed I was taking everything pretty well, considering. “How are you so calm?” someone asked, maybe Liz. “I think I’d be curled up in a ball on my bed in tears.”

“Eh, what’re you gonna do? I really like this Vicodin, though. I never knew. I think I’m gonna take a few more before it gets busy.”

“Jesus, Brent!”

“No no no, I’m fine. I’m not high or anything. I’m just…” And my hand described a wave gliding down into a perfect, level plane.

We all agreed the week I would spend in the hospital after surgery might not be so bad, provided there wasn’t too much pain. If there was pain, there would be drugs for that, and drugs that were far more potent than Vicodin. “If I were you,” someone said, “I’d just stay doped up all week watching television.”

So I developed a plan: until the surgery, Vicodin, which left me unconcerned about the operation, the possibility of damaged speech or a hairy tongue, and even the cancer itself, especially since it was confined to my mouth; during the week in the hospital, whatever wonderful drugs the doctors and nurses would pump into me; and for my continued recovery at home, a new television. Gen owned the only set in the house and since at some point I would have to pick up one of my own, I decided this was the perfect time to buy the large hi-definition flat screen of which I’d long been dreaming. I had just endured the difficult, exhausting disintegration of a long-term relationship; I had cancer; I deserved this. After my diagnosis, Gen returned me back to the bedroom and took for herself the futon on the office floor. I would set up the TV at the foot of the bed. I decided I would buy it on the following Tuesday, after the PET scan the surgeon had scheduled for me. “Normally, I wouldn’t do this,” he told me and my mother near the end of the consult, “but I’m sensing a lot of anxiety here, so we’ll go ahead and do one.”

Like many great plans, mine began to unravel. A few days before the scan and after a week of taking the drug, a week of relative ease and unconcern and peaceful surrender to whatever was to come, the Vicodin turned on me. A small but persistent itch began on my chest. Soon after it forked, spread to my shoulders and blossomed into a full-torso rash, a mantle of prickling, burning red that lasted, ultimately, for three days. On the first afternoon I called my friend’s mother, a nurse, who confirmed that it probably was the Vicodin, which she said made many people itch, herself included. She suggested Benadryl. I left a message with the surgeon. I called the specialist, who phoned a prescription for Darvocet to my pharmacy. The Benadryl helped. I could tell the Darvocet wouldn’t, at least not like the Vicodin did.

As I sat waiting a few days later in the lobby of the radiology department of the university hospital, I could tell the Vicodin was working its way out of my system. My itching lessened and my worry grew. I nearly cried as I surveyed the other people in the lobby, representatives of a group I was encountering for the first time and would come to consider, in a way, as my people. There was a pair I would see many times later in the hospital, a little girl, six or so, thin and bald and the woman with her who had obviously shaved her own head in solidarity. I had read about such acts and seen them on television but here it was, in the shorn flesh. All the nurses seemed to know the pair well. There were other bald adults. There was an old man wheeled in on a gurney, a catheter sneaking out from under the sheet covering him to a bag full of urine hanging on the end of the bed. There was the woman I helped into a seat who had the first chemo port I’d ever witnessed. This was now my club, but only, I hoped, for another week or so. The specialist had mentioned radiation, but the surgeon had described surgery and radiation as two separate options, so I assumed he and his partner would do their cutting and sewing and that would be the end of it. In the lobby, I started to question that assumption. I damned the Vicodin for abandoning me.

I regained my calm during the scan, a relaxing procedure, almost the sort of thing you’d find in a spa. In a small room, a nurse sat me in a chair and injected me with a sugar solution containing a radioactive substance. As she explained, the solution would gravitate towards cancerous areas in the body, which would then – thanks to the radioactive material – shine brightly when photographed. We had to give the solution time to move through my body first, so she reclined my chair, draped a warm blanket over me, and turned off the lights. After an hour, when I’d nearly fallen asleep, the nurse pulled me from the room and put me in another and into a massive white cylinder. Something whirred around my head, chest, and the rest of my body, snapping photos I guessed.

Afterwards, I bought a new television.

At home, I assembled the stand I had also purchased. I wrestled the set – a 42-inch LCD flat screen – out of the back seat of my car by myself. I unboxed it, set it on the stand, and unfurled all the accompanying cords. When I screwed in the cable that emerged from the floor in the corner of the bedroom – a cable we’d never tried before – nothing happened, no picture materialized. In the basement, I discovered the cable connected to nothing and had no part of the system of cords currently delivering cable television and internet to the house. Its end was cut and frayed.

I returned home from the work the next day with a 50-foot length of new cable, which I connected with a splitter to the cable coming into the old television in the living room. I tacked the cable to the baseboards and up and along the trim of the doorway of the hall leading to Gen’s bedroom. It wasn’t pretty, but it was serviceable, and as I explained to Gen later, it wouldn’t be there forever. I had gotten almost to the bedroom with the cable when my phone rang.

It was my surgeon. “So you and the Vicodin aren’t getting along, huh?”

I explained about the itching and the new prescription I already had.

“Well, if you’ve got any other issues, just talk to me, I’m your doctor now for all of this,” he said. “I also called because I’ve got some news about your PET scan. Number one, nothing showed up below your neck in the rest of your body, so that’s good.”

“Okay.”

“Number two, nothing showed up on the right side of your neck. But, number three, something did light up on the right side of your neck. That was, um… unexpected. But we’re going to remove all of the nodes on the right side of your neck during surgery anyway.”

“Oh… so I shouldn’t worry about this?”

“No, no, don’t lose any sleep. I’ll see you next week.”

I reached for the Vicodin but came up with only Darvocet, itchless, ineffectual Darvocet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under The Big C. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.