Off We Go

In which I hesitantly begin to share what it's like to Battle Cancer and launch a new email newsletter in the process.

Illustrations by Abner Clouseau

I have never called 911, not once in my life, and I guess technically I still haven’t: My wife was the one who actually called, who explained to the operator what was happening: My husband is experiencing complications from chemotherapy and we need an ambulance. Within minutes we heard the sirens and then saw the lights. Then there were firemen in the house, moving our coffee table so they could better attend to me on the couch. I remember the firemen seemed huge, which is weird because I myself am quite large—6’5’’, typically around 240—but I guess under the circumstances I felt diminished. I remember their equipment seeming fictional, like props, as they clunked it down on the floor, the whole scene feeling so foreign, staged even, like a moon landing, right down to the phony-seeming flashing lights that swept our living room from the street. (This all occurred on a Sunday night 15 minutes into the penultimate episode of Succession, which stands out because it was during the first five minutes of the show that I realized the extent to which my body was shutting down—it felt like I was like watching the Roy family speechify through the wrong end of a telescope—and told my wife we needed to call 911). The firemen asked me questions, asked my wife questions, presumably took my vitals. I wish I could remember more of the details but I was so far gone by then. Pretty soon the ambulance showed up and they transferred me to a gurney and buckled me in and wheeled me into the back. The inside of the ambulance smelled metallic, sterile, like the school buses we used to ride on field trips. I had never ridden in the back of an ambulance, either.

Full disclosure: I don’t know how to do this—I’m not sure how to talk about any of it, what format it should be in, when the right time might be. At some point, a while ago, I used to write and publish things, and those things were oftentimes quite personal. I’ve written about my embarrassing history with third-wave ska, and about the time I was laid off and spent the subsequent week smoking weed and fantasizing (via Grand Theft Auto) about the violent ends my headspace might lead to. Once, a long time ago, I wrote about the size of my testicles after a night of heavy drinking (thankfully that link doesn’t exist), and then about 15 years later I wrote about getting sober. I used to consider myself someone whose life was an open book, mere fodder to be employed in the service of conveying Bigger Truths, or, at the very least, Occasional Jokes. But something changed. Did I just get old? Perhaps this is something that we’ll figure out as we go along, although it’s probably of secondary concern.

Because, like: Cancer. Again! This is my second time. The first was 11 years ago, when I was diagnosed with the testicular variety—I wrote about that, too—which resulted in an orchiectomy but no chemo because thankfully it never spread to my lymph nodes. I had no idea how lucky I was at the time. I’ve since learned. This second go-round is for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (“diffuse large B-cell,” for the especially curious). As I write this, I’m a few days from receiving my third dose of chemotherapy, out of six total doses, spaced three weeks apart. The side effects from the first dose are what led to the ambulance ride. The second dose was benign by comparison: There were no major side effects—no vomiting, no diarrhea, no “neutropenic fever,” no life-threatening drop in my potassium levels (who even knew that was a thing?). I still have a fraction of my normal energy, so I get tired a lot, and my feet are numb and my legs feel like jelly from neuropathy, and of course I’ve lost all my hair, but like I’m no longer bed-ridden and the “chemo brain” has receded and so I have this nagging feeling that I should be doing something with my time and my limited but nevertheless extant stamina.

Secondary disclosure: I googled some stuff just now to quickly fact-check myself, and it didn’t go well. I got more information than I bargained for, about long-term side effects and potential complications, and I got scared and started crying and had to leave my desk and hold my dog and talk to my wife, and this is the sort of thing that happens these days. To the extent this post or this project can provide some useful perspective or advice to anyone going through something similar, I’ll share mine on information gathering: I hate it. We all know the internet is useless for this type of thing, a junkyard of search-optimized noise. So the hope, or at least my hope, is that the doctor will tell me the things I need to be concerned about, but the doctor’s time is always in short supply, and so their priority is whatever is most pressing, which right now, for me, is pushing forward with an aggressive treatment plan to combat this aggressive disease. This does not include discursive detours about long-term side effects, detours that could sow doubt about the treatment plan itself. And so the doctor doesn’t conduct them and it’s up to me to take them, if I want, which I don’t. For example, there was a link just now to a page containing survival rates for various types of cancer. No thanks! I subscribe to the Han Solo school of risk assessment: Never tell me the odds.

Right. So if you’re reading this, at least here at the outset, it’s likely because you’re a family member, a friend, a colleague, or some combination. One of my first goals is simply to provide more substantive updates and/or glimpses into how I’m wrapping my head around all this, dispatches that go beyond the text exchanges we’ve all been having:

“How are you feeling today / this week?”

“Better!” or “Hmmm…”

I love these, I do, but there’s so much more to share, for anyone interested, which brings me to goal No. 2.

We are each of us grappling with pain, so much pain, and my pain is no more or less consequential than yours. There is the pain (and the joy!) and then there’s how we move through it, and it’s this latter question that I hope to focus on the most with this project. This means long personal essays by me exploring various aspects of my illness, my treatment, and (one hopes) my recovery, but I plan to expand beyond those things as well. For example, there may be interviews or guest essays from other fellow travelers, sometimes about cancer, other times not. A lot of us are dealing with shit, and if I can self-indulgently put my cards on the table for a moment, I know a thing or two about that. I’m a Type 1 diabetic and recovering alcoholic who’s now battling cancer (everyone loves this term) for the second time, and that’s not even the full list! So I’m starting this project as a way of exploring how I deal with shit, and also how you deal with shit, in the hopes that we can all better navigate how we deal with shit.

As of this writing, I have several more months of cancer treatment to go, some of which is clear (chemo), some not (radiation?). On top of that, there are additional life events that were too difficult to even figure out how to work into the first installment of this email, and which we will get to. The theory is, somewhere amid this journey there may await some Bigger Truths we can dig up, and at the very least it’s a reasonably good excuse to launch a project like this. If nothing else, I’m confident there will be Occasional Jokes.

This is my first attempt at sharing, at least in a very long time. And certainly my first email newsletter. But hey, there’s a first time for everything.