R words

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Wednesday, December 11, 2013 was the day of my last radiation treatment. I had my final chemotherapy treatment the week before, on Tuesday, December 3.

I am done with treatment. I am now in Recovery.

Recovery would be lovely if it took place in a day, or maybe two. It does not. As one waggish commentator said online: “The radiation doesn’t stop cooking you all at once. It keeps simmering for a while.”

Lovely.

Also, there are the naggingly minor side effects, like the sore throat that makes it almost impossible to swallow, and the bizarrely twisted sense of taste. (I long for real tastes, and for solid food. I was reading the biography of Muriel Spark the other day and found a mention of Muriel having drinks with Edith Sitwell – “iced gin with grapefruit juice” – that almost made me burst into tears.)

My energy is returning, which is not necessarily a good thing. I have lots of get-up-and-go, but very little to do. Christmas is useful, because I can use my time making lists, checking them twice, etc. I can organize books on my bookshelves. I can write little feuilletons like this one, when I can summon up enough brain cells to do so.

And I can day by day think about my improvement. I needed less pain medication today. My throat was less obstructed today. I slept a straight four hours last night!

So much for recovery.

There’s another R word that I don’t even want to think about right now, for fear of jinxing myself: Remission.

Remission is the absence of cancer. My radiation oncologist (who is not normally the soul of Christmas good cheer) tells me, with his gargoyle’s grin, that he cannot see any sign of the original tumor in my throat when he looks down inside. (That is, of course, with the naked eye. He is not Superman and does not have X-ray vision.) This is excellent news, and I will be having several more tests over the next few weeks and months to confirm this. Back in September, when this whole cavalcade began, I had a Stage IV tumor (“roughly the size of a Meyer lemon,” according to another clever little Internet source) under or beside my left tonsil, along with an assortment of nastily swollen lymph nodes. Now – who knows? The whole kit and caboodle appear to be gone.

I say again: they appear to be gone.

We Reassure ourselves with the good cheer of our doctors that the treatments Really Really worked. We don’t ever want to go through that kind of treatment again. (The first month or so was nothing at all. The last few weeks were Repulsive.)

So here’s to the future, and to another day of Recovery.

And you know what? The new season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race begins in a month or so.

So I have something to look forward to after all.

(Also: doesn’t the rhino in the illustration above look like a hippo to you?)

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Beard

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Well, we have our first cancer-related casualty: my poor little beard.

It was such a helpless little thing, like a baby possum clinging to my face. Regardez:

My radiation oncologist warned me that my beard would probably go thin on one side, given that they’d be pumping all kinds of protons and neutrons and gamma radiation into my left tonsil. “Probably,:” he said,” you should shave your beard off now. It’ll look irregular after a little while.”

Pooh, I though.

Then, last week, I was stroking my beard while watching TV, and I looked down, and found that I’d yanked five or six white hairs right out of my chin without even trying.

Dearie me!

Beard loss speeded up after that. I could pull out a few dozen hairs at a time by the weekend. The beard looked okay on the right-hand side of my chin, but on the left, it was sort of a hair archipelago, like a map of Polynesia.

Finally, on Tuesday morning, I looked in the mirror and covered the right side of my chin with my hand. “No beard,” I said. Then I covered the left-hand side. “Beard,” I said. I continued this (idiotically) for about ten seconds, swapping sides. “Beard. No beard. Beard. No beard. Beard . . . “

No Beard won the contest. I attacked my chin with a regular razor and finished up with my rotary. And now I look something like this:

Am I not striking?

Only three-and-a-half weeks of radiation therapy to go.

And, frankly, if that’s the worst of it, I’m a lucky lucky boy.

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Sense of taste

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One of the “minor” side effects of both radiation and chemotherapy is the loss of one’s sense of taste.

Well, not so much “loss.” More of a horrible transformation.

I had one of my favorite Japanese dishes recently: ahiru donburi, strips of grilled duck and bits of scallion scattered in a bowl of rice. Delicious! But a bit – hem – metallic.

Then wheat bread began to taste like cigarette ashes.

I tried a McDonald’s hamburger and fries recently. The fries were perfectly inedible, like pieces of uncooked leather. The burger tasted as if it had been marinated in Clorox.

Meat’s not good anymore, nor is bread.

What’s left? Chocolate pudding. Frozen yogurt. Lemonade. Soup. Rice Chex. Cheerios. Grape Nuts. Marshmallow Peeps! Mashed potatoes.

I told this to Apollonia, who was philosophical. “Take a lesson from Robocop,” she said. “Robocop ate a rudimentary paste.”

“A what?”

“A rudimentary paste,” she said carefully. “And now that’s what you’re going to have to eat too.”

“I wish I were Robocop right now,” I said. “I know what I’d do.”

“Calm yourself,” Apollonia said severely. “That’s the chemotherapy talking.”

So: anyone for some nice rudimentary paste?

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High-tech medicine

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My father’s radiation therapy in the mid-1970s was really brutal. It scorched his entire torso, and it did no good anyway, as his cancer was far too advanced.

My mother’s 1990s chemotherapy in the 1990s was much milder. She was only nauseous a few times. Taxol made her hair fall out, which really stunned her; I think it was the worst thing about the treatment for her. But the chemo extended her life considerably, without much affecting her quality of life.

And now it’s twenty years later, and I’m doing a tandem combination of radiation and chemotherapy. The radiation is directed straight at my left tonsil; after the first few treatments, I haven’t noticed many ill effects, apart from a little neck soreness/stiffness. The first few chemo treatments were similarly mild (apart from a little nausea and fatigue).

When I go in for radiation, I lie on the table and let the nurses fasten on my Radiation Mask:

They also give me a plastic hoop to grip with both hands, so I don’t flail my arms too much. The treatment is about ten minutes long; the machine makes all kinds of space-age humming and beeping noises. Then the attendant comes in and unbuckles me.

My mind wanders during the treatment. Early on, I found myself thinking about the plastic hoop. It’s ridged, and slightly flexible –

When the attendant came in to unbuckle me, I handed her the hoop and said: “This is a dog toy, isn’t it?”

She chuckled. “Yep. The medical version costs a hundred and fifty dollars. I bought that one at Petco for seven ninety-five.”

File this one under “health care costs,” and “high-tech medicine,” and probably under “human ingenuity.”

Pity the poor dog going without his toy. But it’s in the name of medicine, after all.

Woof woof!

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