Garrulous

To anyone still reading this: I’m sorry! I’m a terrible blogger. I think there’s an expectation with this medium, a promise even, of content provided and updated reasonably often, and here I’ve gone over a month and a half without a new post. There are reasons for that – reasons I could spend an entire blog post or ten explaining – but let me just say they mostly involve work: some serious injury and illness (not mine this time!), some ill-timed vacations, some walk-outs and firings, a little vomiting and blood (again, not mine!), and, on the whole, me spending more time at work than I cared to; and when at home, me giving more time and mental space to the consideration of new bedding, throw pillow options, and furniture arrangement than I should. I’ve always been a bit obsessive, partial to trivia, and given over to trivial obsessions, and I’ll be honest: when confronted with a choice to revisit the cancer experience or dwell on home décor, the home décor often wins out. Again, sorry, and as we say at work after mangling your order and spoiling your visit, we’ll try to do better by you next time.

My lapse and lengthy silence here reminded me of an email exchange I had with an oncology social worker who helps run a local support group for young adults with cancer. (Or who’ve had cancer. Or – and this may describe the majority of its members – who fall in the nebulous region between the past and present tense of the disease, people who are past treatment yet far from the point where a doctor might at last suggest that okay, perhaps they can now be called free and clear. I’m still uncertain how to precisely label or describe such a group, a sign of the complexity of the disease and the confusion and anxiety of life touched by it.) I had a chance last summer to attend a group meeting, and I thought I’d have a chance to attend the one after it but work, as it has ever since, got in the way. I’d told the social worker I’d be at the meeting, and a few days after I wasn’t, I thought I’d best explain myself. Her response: “I appreciate you letting me know why you were unable to make it. I worry when people indicate that they are coming and then are unable to make it, so thank you.”

In the time before all of this, I could sometimes be a thoughtless and inconsiderate son and go weeks and weeks without thinking to call my mother and check in. At a certain point, she would call me and invariably begin the conversation with “Just wanted to make sure you’re still alive.” There’s exaggeration, of course, in that statement; I’m pretty sure she never actually thought my body was lying undiscovered and decomposing in some corner of the house. There’s not a pinch of hyperbole, though, in the worry of the social worker. In her world, in which I suppose I now reside, something truly bad may have happened to someone who doesn’t check in, who hasn’t been heard from in a while (so again, to the social worker, my mother, my handful of readers, I apologize, I’m fine, still here).

This is one reason I resisted for some time the idea of such a group, towards which I’d been urged by various people at the center where I received treatment – that center’s own social worker, the psychological counselor, my speech pathologist, the nurses. They all suggested I might benefit from talking to others who’d experienced – or were currently experiencing – issues specific to young adults with cancer (or who’d once had cancer, or who’d had cancer and probably don’t anymore but maybe do – who can say for sure just yet but, God, let’s hope not – or whatever you want to call it.) I figured I didn’t need it. I have a solid support system of family and friends to whom I’ve blathered on at length about the ordeal, detailing for dozens of people every scary, painful twist and turn in the saga. I’m sure I’ve bored some of them. I’ve certainly bored myself on occasion. And so I thought a support group might prove redundant: “… and then they cut me here and stitched me there and fed me this and zapped me with that, blah, blah, blah.” But I also worried that such a group might prove depressing, terrifying even: perhaps there would be those fuzzy heads, bald heads, the head-wraps and scarves, gaunt faces, faces without eyebrows, shriveling arms, trembling fingers, bad skin and scars less polite than my own. Maybe there would be members who wouldn’t be walking away from their disease. Members who up and died and reminded you that perhaps you could too, should your disease rear its head again. Which it won’t, damnit!… but maybe could?

I figured out soon after surgery that the whole matter wasn’t resolved by surgery, and wouldn’t be completely decided by the subsequent radiation and chemotherapy. Not really. You’re cut and poisoned and irradiated and then wait and hope for the best. For years. Every so often extremely expensive pictures are taken of your insides and everything appears clean and fine. You’re pretty certain you are clean and get by just fine, for the most part, on this faith. Every so often, though, you catch sight of an idea swimming like a crocodile in the back of your mind: perhaps a few specks of the disease have survived and are swimming somewhere inside your body, just waiting for an opportune time to take hold and bloom again. You learn that even after cancer has been obliterated and wiped from your system – you know it has, damnit! – it persists as the idea of its return. You drift nonchalantly through most hours, unconcerned… except when any strange protuberance appears on the skin or any twinge or flutter occurs below it. Any unaccountable sensation in the body induces an instant flood of panic. Your throat is a little sore one day; you have some sudden irritation around your gums; a slight ache travels through your ear – surely the cancer has returned! You idly run your hand under your arm and feel a bump that you know, in a horrible moment, is a lymph node swollen with disease… but which turns out to be a pimple. You know the odd pains in your chest signal a tumor in the lung but after a few sleepless nights and a clean chest X-ray, the doctor suggests merely an inflammation of the cartilage around your ribs – possibly from one of your physical therapy exercises. Your surgeon explained the phenomenon when, during a follow-up appointment a few weeks after surgery, you gestured in terror to strange swellings on your tongue that bore a disconcerting similarity to the original tumor (just part of the healing process, it turned out): acute cancerphobia, possessed, he said, by every person who’s ever had the disease. He has patients 20, 30 years in remission who still call him in extreme alarm after every spasm and pang. The surgeon and your other doctors don’t want you to be eaten alive by anxiety, but they also want you to remain vigilant and alert to any symptoms signaling a recurrence of the cancer, just in case. It is a fine balance to maintain. It is a different, sometimes difficult, way to live. Sometimes you wish you’d just had a car crash or heart attack or been shot – you’d almost died but hadn’t, that simple, and could move forward without this doubt trailing you.

I have friends whom I believe can understand this. I have friends whose older cousin, a radiologist, is so haunted by his fight six or seven years ago with melanoma that he gives himself frequent scans (he owns his own machines), once interpreted a sore ankle (he’s an avid runner) as cancer spread to the bone, and has begged several physicians he knows to preemptively remove several clusters of lymph nodes (they’ve refused).  I have a friend whose mother a few years ago survived lymphoma. I have a friend who lost his mother a few years ago to colon cancer. I got in touch last spring with a good friend from college whom I haven’t seen or spoken to since then. Her father, it turns out, passed away in 2000 from lung cancer just a month after diagnosis, which had been preceded, as lung cancer usually is, by a strange and persistent cough. My friend now has her own mysterious cough, which has caused her, given history, no little anxiety, and she’s been referred to her own ear, nose, and throat specialist. I also spoke just last week to my former boss, a man whose father experienced prostate cancer and whose brother is currently in the final stages of a long battle with the disease. He had just had a regular check-up and blood work done; everything came back just fine except for the prostate test, the only thing which really concerned him but which had somehow been fouled by a technician. He had to redo the blood draw and was anxiously awaiting the results. It was, he said, his chance to peer into the “hole” in which I lived.

I have friends who, even if they haven’t lost loved ones to cancer or had cause to worry about their own health, worried about me. After my diagnosis and during treatment, my co-workers passed the hat and collected a thick wad of cash, stuffed in a card signed by all and inscribed with many wishes for my continued well-being. Many of them called, texted, emailed, and visited. They asked about the pain, the fear, about how I coped. Most, when I see them, still inquire about my health and wish me well.

This last winter, though, I lost a job and moved locations in the company (more on that later). The sympathetic audience I had at work was gone. My new co-workers, the people with whom I was now spending a good part of each week, hadn’t followed any of my medical ordeal and didn’t have the years of emotional investment in me, of course, that would make them care about the outcome one way or the other. They didn’t know about the cancer. For the most part, they weren’t too curious about my scars. Or were too polite to ask. I had to wait for opportunities, however thin, to introduce the subject. If asked if I liked Indian food, for instance, I might reply along the lines of, “Well, I used to, but after radiation, I can’t handle the spice too well.” Even when the subject came up, many still weren’t too curious: “Huh… bummer… but you’re fine now, right? It’s all gone?” And I’d start to explain that I sure hoped so, and so far so good, but there was still a lot of wait and see in my future… and their attention had already wandered off. Strangely, almost none of them had any experience with the disease. One man did – his elderly mother is being treated for gall bladder cancer – and he was easily the most empathetic, took the most interest in me, but he was fired a few months after my arrival. After that, I finally took an interest in the support group and took my chance to attend a meeting.

In the interests of space and time and at last getting something new up, I’ll recount that meeting in my next post. So, to be continued…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 2:54 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.