Time Out of Mind

Not dark yet.

On the day this email goes out, I’ll have completed my final radiation session, thus concluding the full course of treatment for the cancer I was diagnosed with in early May. Here’s a little stat sheet: Over the course of the last six months, I abruptly lost 30 pounds, then slowly gained 40 back (oops). I received six rounds of chemotherapy, with each round lasting about seven hours and consisting of a combination of five different hardcore chemical poisons, aka lifesaving drugs. When I was hospitalized from the side effects caused by my first chemo, I received four blood transfusions, plus a procession of IV bags containing sodium, potassium, and other restorative substances meant to offset the damage from anemia, jaundice, diarrhea, and neutropenic fever. Oh and I shit myself at least twice. My radiation consisted of 17 treatments during which I was zapped with precisely 1.21 gigawatts of high-intensity X-rays (j/k…the doses are measured in “Gray” units; my dose is 3.6 Gy). I’ve had two CT scans, three PET scans, a surgical biopsy, a bone marrow biopsy, and I've had my blood drawn at least 25 times. The drugs I’ve been administered include prednisone, allopurinol, zofran, Benadryl, oxycontin, morphine, dilaudid, adriamycin, rituximab, vincristine, and cyclophosphamide.

As of today, that’s all over. They tell me the nausea from the radiation will persist for a few weeks following the conclusion of treatment, which would bring us to about mid-November, right about the time our baby is due. Then it’ll really be over—the cancer stuff I mean, but I guess also whatever pre-baby version of my life that exists, has existed. That’ll be over too.

Sometimes you plan these things and sometimes you don’t. We planned to have a baby, but getting pregnant was a journey of several years. We didn’t plan to have a miscarriage, the one-year anniversary of which is next week, which blows my mind to think about, the bookending of it all, but I prefer not to think about it. We certainly didn’t plan the cancer. I don’t know when the right time might be to process all that’s happened this year, because it seems like once there’s a clearing for doing that, something else comes up, and I have no doubt this will continue to be the case, because baby.

There’ll be that first smile, that first sense of recognition—we were just at this newborn class and the teacher said this happens sometime around week four, when the baby starts to distinguish forms. So many firsts: steps, words, crawling, solid freakin’ foods. Especially significant for me will be the first time the baby gets a kiss from my dog Marshall, who’s 19 years old and who I’ve had since before Danielle and I met, who I adopted after I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes because that experience was harrowing (lost 40 pounds then too) and I decided I’d get a dog after it, because I’d earned it, because I’d been visiting the shelter most days on my lunch break that year, and when the shock of being diagnosed with this chronic medical condition wore off I said, Fuck it, getting a dog, and Marshall was the one who chose me that day at the shelter, and has been with me ever since, through my first cancer diagnosis, through sobriety, through our wedding day when he and our other dog Stella (RIP) walked down the aisle. There’ll be the first time Marshall senses our baby, and gives her a kiss, and when that happens I will lose it. I’m losing it now, just thinking about it.

Sometimes I think about how much I’m going to lose it on the day she’s born. You make a plan for that day, but it seems to me like that’s mostly for show, because every birth is different; the babies have plans of their own. But we’ll stay flexible and go with the flow, follow instructions and try to use the relaxation techniques and “comfort measures” we’ve been learning, and eventually, whether it takes hours or, more likely, days, she’ll be here, and those last few stages of delivery will be this primal unfolding, this symphony of raw emotions and instincts. There’ll be screaming, moaning, blood, smells. The idea is to keep it dark in the room—dark and quiet, calm and safe. I can’t even imagine, except to some extent I can, the way sometimes you have no choice but to let go and give yourself over to your body, because whatever set of instructions it has were written long before you got here. There’s that moment when a switch flips and time goes out the window, because your body has no use for the concept of time, it has only biochemical processes that unfold according to cellular whims we barely understand. Why do some labors take 12 hours and others 40? Why do most pregnancies make it to term while others are lost in the tenth week? Why do some cancers respond to treatment while others never do?  

Here’s something: When I came home from the hospital for the second time on May 25, the tomatoes I planted in our backyard in the spring were enormous, easily the biggest plants I’d ever managed to grow over a decade of trying, and I remember feeling so sad that I wasn’t going to get to eat them, because at that time I was hardly eating and could barely walk, let alone harvest tomatoes, let alone cook them. Of course, the actual harvesting was still a few months away, but to me, at that time, a few months away might as well have been years. My first chemo had obliterated me, and I had no reason to think the five I had to go wouldn’t do the same. My oncologist was sympathetic but blunt: We have to keep going, he told us when he visited me in the ER the morning after my ambulance ride. I have recordings of all these conversations—I’ve yet to mention this, but I do. My oncologist was kind enough to let me record everything he told me, from our first meeting on. And so I can listen to those now, and occasionally do, and what I hear is bracing—this ghost-voice, my voice, paper-thin and raspy, frightened but nevertheless resolved: I get it, doc, let’s keep going. Let’s push through. Put me in, Coach, I’m ready to play.

The tomatoes were ready to pick in late August, dozens and dozens of them. By then I had enough energy to harvest and prep and store them all (plus eat a bunch), and now we have a shelf full of summer tomatoes in the freezer in our garage, the containers ready to be pulled out one by one for use in soups or chilis, pastas or casseroles, the better to nourish new mothers with.

The truth is Marshall is mostly blind and kind of deaf, and he spends way more time than we’d like wandering around our backyard looking for cat shit, which our cat deposits most days because he, the cat, is also very old and stopped using his litter box some time ago. Marshall struggles to get up and down our stairs, but if we try to carry him he squirms, because he still prefers to do it himself, even if it’s hard. Despite or because of his mobility issues, one of our favorite activities is going to dog beach, because once we arrive something amazing happens: Marshall turns into his old self. His eyes go wide and he runs, becomes curious, sniffs butts. I dunno what it is—some combination of the saltwater and the sand, the pungent, rotting smell of sunbaked seaweed, the feeling of being surrounded by a small army of equally excited dogs, all of them ecstatic, all of them losing their minds. A switch flips and time goes out the window. 

---

This is the Healings Newsletter. It’s sent out on Thursdays.

It’s written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs.

It’s illustrated by Abner Clouseau, whose pen name we apologize for.

It’s about illness and recovery, and comes with jokes. 

Healings is free for all, but if you subscribe, half of every dollar goes to charity, currently the Patient Advocate Foundation. The other half goes toward paying our contributors. This is the model for now. We reserve the right to adjust it but will let you know if we do.

If you have a suggestion for a story, would like to contribute, or want to chat with Garrett for any reason whatsoever, reach out: healingsproject@gmail.com.

 “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor