Boardwalk Punk 
“Hey, you want some Red Devil?” 
Clean Cut Recruit
Greetings from ChemoLand! As this was my first week, I figured I’d get some highlights recorded for posterity’s sake. But before I go there, I want to again thank everyone out there for the amazing support our family has received. Prayers, kind thoughts, well wishes, texts, calls, notes, letters, pop-ins, drive-bys, meals, help with the house/yard, you name it – all these little acts of solidarity and love have lifted us up more than you can imagine. I want to call everyone out by name – to detail every kind act, big and small – but that would be impossible at this point. I will, however, give a special shout out to the care package delivery we received a week ago today (Brooke and Lee Ann)… all sorts of goodies, personal notes, and a stack of gift cards … C’mon man! From the whole community? Wow – I had to hike my mask up and pull my beanie down in case I teared up. Much love to all for that! Did kind of make me feel like a grifter though. Wasn’t there a Seinfeld episode where Jon Lovitz played some dude who faked cancer so Jerry would buy him a wig or balding treatments? For the record, I’m not faking this.
With that said, I’ve heard a few murmurs about possible public events in the future – maybe fundraiser or benefit type things to support our family. I’ll be honest with you, this is a tough subject for me to address, as I can’t say it enough how thankful our family is for every one of you, and I don’t want to sound unappreciative. Our gratitude towards our family, friends, and community-at-large runs deep and true, and the thought of such big-hearted gestures is humbling and overwhelming. But the long and short of it is, there are just a lot of people out there in need and many other worthy causes to put our community resources towards. In other words, your love and support (in the forms you’ve been giving it) are more than enough for us! For what it’s worth, in lieu of such events, how about we shoot for something like this: 1. I beat this thing 2. we all come through this difficult year together 3. we throw a big-ass party where our family gets to celebrate all the amazing friends and family who have taken this journey with us. Now that would be AWESOME!
Okay, enough business. Without further ado, here are some random, chronological notes I took on the past week – please feel free to sign off here if you want, as this stuff is mostly just for the record …
T-minus 12 hours (last Sunday evening): Wrapping up day full of phone calls & visits with friends and family. Heard a lot of tough guy talk: “You got this!” “You’ll crush chemo!” “You’ll be one of those people that it doesn’t even phase!” … I do have kind of a love/hate relationship with suffering. There is a little part of me that likes to explore the edge when it comes to enduring stuff. But I have a little secret (actually it’s a well-known fact here in my house): I AM A PROLIFIC BITCHER & MOANER! I mean maybe I can take it, but you’re gonna hear about it all day long. The other inhabitants of our house are no strangers to pain: migraines, back issues, major knee surgeries, jacked up chromosomes, CHILDBIRTH … but I drown them all out when I get a stuffy nose.
T-minus 3 hours (5 a.m. Monday morning): Oh, that sucked. I think I bagged a solid 47 minutes of sleep last night. Just when you need it most, the shuteye ain’t there. Exact same thing has happened before every long race, or climb, or whatever, I’ve ever done – there’s nothing like starting a 24-hour race when you haven’t slept in 24 hours already.
T-minus 1 hour (7 a.m.): Due to restrictions, C’s gotta wait in the car all day. Not ideal. Nevertheless, I roll into the infusion waiting room, like a fresh cherry off the transport truck, arriving at the front, all full of piss and vinegar. “Hey, gimme a gun! Let’s kick some ass! Wait, who we shootin’ at?” Grizzled vets avert eyes. An 80-year old woman gives me a “sit down, pretty boy” look. I sit down.
T-minus 30 minutes (7:30 a.m.): Okay, okay, gotta get the game face on. A little harder to find than I thought it would be. No concerns about today itself – I’m ready to roll as far as the process (other than I gotta sit in a chair for 8 hours). But I’m really freaking tired. And suddenly alone, alone, alone. And there’s something else now too. A weight. The undeniable truth that this is really happening. I suppose once you’re in the chemo chair any hope you’re gonna get a pardon from the Governor is gone.
T-minus 15 minutes (7:45 a.m.): BAM! Nice pickmeup right there! Official baseline chemo measurements: 5’10.1 inches (no shoes bro, still holding on to 5’10), 175 lbs, 4.38 40-time (okay, I added that last one)
T-minus 5 minutes (7:55 a.m.): In my curtained booth. The woman in the booth next to me’s coughing up a storm. The guy on my other side’s cranking The Commodores – Easy (Like Sunday Morning) – which is great, except it’s Monday morning, and we’re all about to get nuclear waste shot into us.
Gametime!: My nurse, Cody, comes in and hooks up the thinga-ma-jiggy to my port (i.e. pokes it in and clamps it down) – I feel kinda like Iron Man (doesn’t he have something like that in his suit?) except not really, cause it hurts a little bit, and I can’t fly.
Okay, got the first hit out of the way. Shook off the rust, if you will. Now we’re just playing ball. Except this mask is hurting my floppy ears. Damn my ear cartilage. It’s so freaking weak! It seems whenever I put a mask on, my ears hold out for a few seconds, then the tops just cave and fold over. I gotta tell you, it really hurts like hell after a while (told you I’m a Bitcher & Moaner), and quite frankly it’s embarrassing. My kids make fun of me all the time. One day, both my ears are gonna flop at exactly the same time, and my mask is gonna just shoot off like a projectile – could really hurt someone!
It’s a full-on competition now. I can hear the other patients around me, and not a single one has had to get up to use the bathroom. I think I’m one of the youngest ones here, but I’m apparently the only one born with a gerbil’s bladder. I don’t want to be the first to go, but damn, they’re hitting me with 2 hours of fluids before the meds even start! In my youth, we use to go to this bar where they’d lock the bathroom doors and start serving free pitchers of beer at 5 o’clock on Fridays. The free beer kept running for everyone until some poor sucker couldn’t take it anymore and had to go pee. I really don’t want to be that person, but I finally cave, unplug my IV machine, and roll out.
Alright, settled back in, making my way through bags of anti-nausea stuff, dexamethasone, and more fluids. My jaunt down the hall and by all the booths – getting a glimpse of my compatriots and hearing snippets of conversation … I tell you something, I wish I could go out and give a hug to every one of them. I know that sounds weird, but it’s just an overpowering experience to be surrounded by people that are really sick, really suffering. I want to lift all of them up.
Uh-oh, Cody’s back in, and he’s brought a partner with him. They’re both in hazmat suits now. Not because of Covid, but because they’re carrying the bags of my chemo drugs. Say what?! The bags actually say “CAUTION! HAZARDOUS DRUG! HIGH RISK!” That ain’t cool. They take turns reading off the data on the bags (my name, my birthday, the drug name, the dose), then they make me read it. It’s like we’re authenticating nuclear launch codes. We start with good old Doxorubicin – it comes in two giant syringes (about the size of small grease guns you might hit your tractor fittings with). The drug itself is a deep, burnt orange/red – in fact, its street name is The Red Devil (for real, look it up). From what I understand, because it’s just a wee toxic, it has to be manually pushed into my port over a fifteen-minute period. So, Cody pulls up a stool and slowly injects. He tells me my urine’s likely to take on that same burnt-orange color for a while, and I’ll need to use a separate bathroom from everyone else in the house so they don’t get poisoned if I dribble on the seat. Well, alrighty then. The upside to this is that I now have an effective weed-killer in my pants – I can literally just finish off the mulch beds for the season by walking around pissing on the weeds.
The Red Devil’s followed by two more chemo drugs, Cyclophosphamide, then Cisplatin. I really don’t know what to say here. It’s just a surreal feeling having hazardous materials coursing through your veins. You hope it’s destroying cancer, but you know it’s destroying healthy cells throughout your body too. It’s like that scene at the end of Platoon, where the North Vietnamese are inside the perimeter and the Captain calls in an air strike on everything: “For the record, it’s my call. Dump everything you’ve got left on my position. I say again, expend all remaining in my perimeter. It’s a lovely f****** war. Bravo Six out.”
Okay, chemo’s in, now I’m on to two more hours of fluids. Cody comes back in to go over a few things I’ll need to know. He goes through the side effects of each of the drugs, along with the timing of how things are likely to play out over the next 3 weeks (when I come back in for round 2). I’ve already heard this stuff, but he’s got to cover it again for the record. I won’t bother to record the side effects here. There are a lot of them for each drug, and well, they suck. Cody tells me there’s only a 30% chance I’ll get each of the 6 or so side effects for each of the 3 drugs. Wait, isn’t that like a 540% chance? I’m screwed.
Last thing I need: the Neulasta patch. The purpose of Neulasta is to trigger my bone marrow to produce white blood cells (to protect me from illness, infections, etc.) in order to offset the fact the chemo drugs will wipe these cells out. Cody sticks the patch (it’s really more like a small box) on my tricep, arms it, and tells me it’ll start beeping in exactly 27 hours, then it’ll pump meds into me for 45 minutes before disarming. Roger that. Then he tells me to go get some Claritin and Tylenol, cause the Neulasta causes extreme bone pain in some people and the combo of C and T tends to help (although they don’t really know why). Okay, so I need to take meds to offset the side effects of the meds I’m taking to offset the side effects of chemo? This in addition to the prescriptions I have for nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and constipation? Uh, okay.
On the way out, I meet up with a “chemo buddy.” He’s 65, and a runner. He was in to get his port the same day I was, and Christie and his wife struck up a conversation. Turns out the dude ran the Pikes Peak Ascent in the past, and recently qualified for the Boston Marathon. He’s in a wheelchair now, looking like he’s had a pretty rough day. I tell him one day we’re both gonna get through this, and we’ll head out to Colorado to run the Pikes Peak again together. I immediately regret the statement. The last time I ran that race was 1997 – it’s a death march more than a race, and cancer or no cancer, there is zero chance I’ll ever do it again. Nevertheless, we start talking about it. Confusion ensues. Turns out the Pikes Peak race he’s ran is actually called the Pike’s Peek – it’s a 10K in Montgomery County, MD. I laugh and tell him that sounds better anyway, we’ll do that one together. He looks at me with gaunt eyes and tells me he just wants to be able to walk again. Damn.
32 oz smoothie on the way home. Probably not a good idea, but Cody told me to go for it if I wanted one. Home to the kids. The smoothie’s kinda coming to a boil in my gut, but really I feel okay other than being tired. Now it’s decision time. I have multiple meds for vomiting, for diarrhea, and for constipation. See the dilemma? What the hell am I supposed to do? It’s basically an RPO (run-pass-option) play. Make a bad read (say, take something for constipation and then have vomiting be the real issue) and it’s a pick-six. Plus, I make the mistake of reading the side effects of the prescriptions … damn, is there not a limit to ways medicine that’s supposed to heal you can further jack you up. I make the call based on the oncologist’s recommendations … two different kinds of anti-nausea/vomiting meds.
Day 1 (post chemo): Wait, maybe I am that guy. The guy that crushes chemo. The guy that just rolls through it. I feel okay. A little queasy, but not bad. I get some work done. I walk 1.75 miles. I hang out with the fam. I crack jokes. The Neulasta device goes off and pumps me with meds … then I take meds to offset the side effects of the Neulasta …
Day 2: Nope. Apparently, I am not that guy. I’m not throwing up or suffering any specific pain really, just … hungover, I guess you’d say. In fact, I’d say this is the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life. I walk .75 miles. It takes me about 4 ½ hours. I sit around most of the day holding my head in my hands. I tell myself it’s normal (it is). I tell myself the sludge they put in me is killing the cancer, but it’s a tough sell. (Note: I’m tempted to wisecrack here, to skirt over this part, but I won’t do it. I’m putting this down in words because honesty to myself demands it, and I know, somewhere down the road, I’m gonna want a reminder of where I went – and how I came back from there.) Not to put too fine a melodramatic point on it, but I feel like I’m the one dying, not the cancer. Then, I begin imagining what it’ll actually feel like to die of cancer – that I’ll probably feel worse than this, every minute, of every day, on the long homestretch. Wow. No sugar-coating it, that’s a dark place to go. Pain and suffering is doable, but when the light (inspiration, joy, hope) goes out, well … it’s about as much as I can take.
Day 3 (Thanksgiving!): I “wake up” after spending a long night on the maddening surface of sleep. I can’t think, but I force myself to pray, sticking to the gratitude end of things. I give thanks for everything I can possibly think of, large and small. There’s hope, I tell myself, you just have to suck it up – not physically, but mentally. I go outside. I manage a short walk. I keep listing things I’m thankful for. I’m getting my legs back under me. I chat with a friend. I go home. Then it happens. What, I can’t tell you. I’ll forever think of it as just “the event.” I end up lying on the bathroom floor, dripping sweat, as incapacitated as I’ve ever been in my life. WTF just happened? I’m Mike Tyson after he got knocked out by Buster Douglas … remember that one? Where Tyson’s crawling around on the canvas, trying to find his mouthpiece. Good Lord! I get off a nonsensical text to C that I need help. I hate to do it, but honestly, I don’t want them to just find me up here later. I spend the afternoon in bed, staring at nothing. Everything smells like chemo – like burning plastic. But by evening, I make it downstairs to hang out a little. I can even giggle a little at the bathroom scene. Add that to the thankful list.
Day 4: Back on my feet. Kinda. My walk gets me just down the driveway and back. Pathetic, but I’ll take it. Still woozy. I cut pills in half, begin spacing them out more, convinced the anti-nausea/throwup stuff is doing as much damage as it is good. By afternoon, I’m getting some work done. By evening, I’m outside with Tegan, looking at the sky with binocs, hoping to spot Santa on a route-planning trip.
Day 5: Oh yeah. Feeling good. Kinda. But really, I’m feeling pretty damn good. I’m rocking and rolling now. Just living baby.
Day 6: And here we are. Still doing okay. Not 100%, but the lights back on for sure. Only one thing left to do. Cut the hair. When my mom went through chemo (breast cancer) many years ago, I buzzed my hair as a show of support. Let it be said, I didn’t go full-on shave, but I took it down to the nubbins. I’ve been cutting my own hair ever since (clippers plugged into the truck in the driveway). But I haven’t touched it since April. Call it my pandemic mop. When I throw on a baja hoodie, I kind of look like a boardwalk drug dealer. Well, it’s time for it to go. Let’s call it a preemptive strike. But I’ve never used scissors on my own hair, just clippers. I’m thinking just grab a handful and start chopping, right? Hey, not bad – pictures attached for the record … NEXT STOP, CUE BALL!!!
As always, peace, love, and thanks to all …