Something Evil This Way Comes

hey, did I say my dad was getting a bit better?
Did I?

What a freakin’ fibber I am.
Damn…
Today they told me that they are gonna move him to palliative care.
Yeah.
Wow.
I can hardly stand to listen to myself, I have turned into such a whiny little wanker.

Yep, that’s how it is.

Well, actually, there are other nasty, ugly, tortured bits, but you might think I was just making crap up because it’s almost Hallowe’en. Dark, twisted painful tales of gut-wrenching sorrow and loneliness.

I’d just like a bit of a break soon.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
I’d like things to settle down with my girlfriend, I’d like things to settle down with my family, I would like school to be the only complication in my life.

Can I please have that?
Don’t I deserve that yet?

I’ve been kind of quiet, blog-wise, lately.

Things have been busy.
Things have been hard.
Things have been weird.

It’s hard to figure out where to start or what to include.
After all, this is the world-wide web.

So, my dad is in the hospital.
I went up to visit him cuz my girlfriend had buggered off and I was alone and I decided I might as well make the most of my free weekend, so I fired up the mighty 4×4 and drove and drove and drove.
The good news is that driving, alone, with the music cranked, really helped clear my head on some long smouldering issues on the subjects ‘what do I want?’ and ‘how can I get there from here?’.
After an extra long drive, due to not quite grasping the subtle nuance of several directional signs, I ended up on a not completely incorrect highway, but one that added about 2 hours to the drive.
But it was a beautiful drive and I am glad I made the wrong turn.

When I finally arrived at my dad’s place, I walked in the front door and found him on the couch, unable to get up.
Seems the old man had a dose of the pneumonia.
He has been in the hospital for about 10 days now, and frankly, I am not sure what his future holds.
I think he is awfully sad, and tired, and he misses my mom more than I ever would have expected, and I think he just feels like checking out.
Maybe I am wrong.
But he seemed very much like a man who was tying up loose ends when I spoke with him.

So, that’s hard enough.
And sad enough.
And I don’t even know how to begin to process that.
See, for all intents and purposes, I lost my mom when I was doing chemo.
I think my poor old dad couldn’t believe his Old Testament luck in 2004.
I need to make sense of the fact that I have lost my mom and I am going to lose my dad sometime in the not too distant future.

Like I said, that’s hard.

And I am in school.
I thought that would be great.
And it is.
But it takes an enormous amount of my time and energy.
It isn’t that it’s hard, because really, it’s not.
But it requires about 35 – 40 hours of my time and attention each week.
And I already work full-time.
I am really glad that I am in school and doing something different.
And if the way the gals in the bar were reacting to me being in library school is any indication of what my future holds, I am all for academia.
It’s just a bit of an adjustment.

And I am finding that I am trying really hard to make sense of what the hell I went through last year, but it is such an enormous amount of information and emotion and memory and ideas that I end up doing a Linda Blair and my head spins around and it’s a mess.
And I think I am messing up my relationship with too much Linda Blair.
Actually, I think (sshhh, this is a secret) we both have our Linda Blair moments and that makes it extra specially hard.
But here is the thing…
and I don’t mean this to be anything discouraging to anyone still in the trenches with cancer…
but here it is:
I think cancer eats a big hole in a person.
Leaves you looking like a freaking donut.
It takes something from you and from the people you love who go through it with you.
My girlfriend and I, we are the donut people.
Sometimes I think I can hear the wind whistling through the empty spots we have, where cancer wore through us.
And I don’t know what to do about that.
I love her more than anything and just want us both to get back on track.
I thought we would be cancer super-heroes.
Turns out, we are just regular, and that, just like my veins, we got some scar tissue to work through.
I wish it was different, but it isn’t.

And after all that sister-Mary-Sunshine routine, here is the kicker.
The thing you have been waiting for.

Last week, the nice gal who does the genetic testing at the cancer agency called me.
Asked me if I could come in and get my test results.
“Why sure,” I said.
Now, my girlfriend was super-busy doing 12 hour days for the movie industry, for The X-Men3, of all things, so I didn’t mention it.
And I was pretty solidly convinced that I was going to get good test results, so I wasn’t too concerned.

Oh.. let me back up some.
See, there is a bit of an overlap between breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
And there are two gene mutations called BRCA1 and BRCA2, that’s what they look for in the test.
Testing positive for the gene mutation means you have this wildly unpleasant chance of getting breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer.

Anyway, back to the funny story…

I didn’t tell my girlfriend because she was busy and because I didn’t think much about getting the test results and a whole lot of other reasons.
But I did happen to mention it to a friend in a phone conversation that morning.
She said that I couldn’t go by myself and she said she would come with me.
She’s a bit bossy, as are all the women I really enjoy, and she got on the phone and re-scheduled a job interview and then came to the meeting with me.

Have I mentioned how much I like the gal who does the genetic counselling?
She is just so nice.

So, the other E. and I went in to meet with the nice genetic counsellor and we sat down and chatted a bit, and she asked me if I was nervous about my test results and I said, no, I hadn’t had time to get nervous yet (bearing in mind that they did the blood work for this test about 10 months ago and since then, I have been waiting, and waiting, and waiting and waiting).
We all chatted for a bit and then she opened my file and said, “You test positive for the BRCA 1 gene mutation.”
I confess, I was gobsmacked.
It was *so* not the information I thought I was going to hear.
See, no one in my family has ever had cancer.
No one.
I am the freak, in that, and a few other, ways.
It makes no sense.
But there it is.

And what that means for me now is, I have a 50 – 85% chance of developing breast cancer in my lifetime.
I will go get mamograms and MRI’s, every 6 months.
I can have a mastectomy tomorrow, if I want.
Okay, not tomorrow… but pretty freakin’ quick, I reckon.

It’s weird.

Totally weird.

I don’t know what I will do.

It’s bizarre to think I have been walking around since birth with my cells mutating.
That’s weird in its own right.
And now, apparently I should make some major life decisions about stopping that.

Shheesh.

Gawd, I miss the lazy, hazy care-free days of 2003.

If you have a lazy, hazy cancer free life, even if you hate your job, or the collection agency calls you at dinner time, or your ex took all your valuable electronic equipment, or you didn’t get to start in the big softball game, or your girlfriend was necking with some mindless bimbo in the bar, hey
I am here to tell you.
That stuff doesn’t matter.

Carpe fucking diem, amigo.

I’d be so happy to have some little problems, some time soon.

Anyway, that’s where I am at today.

I don’t know what I am going to do.
I have already been thrown back into the system of all things cancerous, so I am waiting for my phone to ring, so I can make an appointment with my newest doctor, the one who specializes in the bosums.
And there are a whack more details I have to take care off, and doctors and peeps I have to meet up with.
And I am kind of pissed off about that.
I’ll tell you the truth on that one.

But yesterday, I was out walking, and I thought, I am not going to make any major life decisions till I finish this semester.
So, sometime in December, I’ll try to get to the bottom of all this.

Untl then, who’s your favorite mutant?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my cancer buddy and Tour de France champ, Lance Armstrong.

Maybe it’s because of all the wise things that Cancer, Baby had to say about the man in the yellow jersey.

And partly because everywhere I go, I see someone wearing some wrist band, of some colour, with which they hope to communicate some message.

I am still working through what I think about the jelly bracelet business.
And it certainly does seem to have mushroomed into a huge business overnight.
Imagine being the king of jelly bracelet production.
Why, I imagine the King of Jelly Bracelets is now sending his kids to private school, don’t you?

I have a yellow bracelet.
And I wore it pretty religiously, especially right after I got it.
And then a couple of things happened.
The first thing that happened was I noticed that other people seemed to wear theirs sometimes, and sometimes not.
See, for them, it was just another bit of jewellry(??), albeit with a social message attached.
Then I started to think that maybe other people can take their bracelets off because they just can.
They can take a day off from cancer.
Leave that yellow jelly bracelet next to the sink and wear something tasteful in silver instead.
And that just made me crabby.
And then I realized I had no idea what the silly little bracelets mean to anyone else.
Have I mentioned I have been mucho mental lately?
Mucho.
Si.

Then I had another problem.
Okay, maybe it is a problem that comes from having grown up queer and lived a life with a billion secret identifiers that hover beneath the radar of the common man.
See, I put on my little yeller bracelet and I felt like I would now be able to find my people.
My cancer people.
I mean, that in itself is kinda strange.
But I do have my cancer people now, and I am glad of that.
But I thought that the little yellow jelly bracelet was going to kick down the doors of the invisibility of cancer survivors and that we would…
I dunno what happens after we all meet up and identify each other.
I guess I just got stuck at that yummy Hallmark moment where we all hug and put all our previous differences behind us.
Anyway… I thought it would be great.
It would be just like so many of the secret signals we homos have been using for years and years, so I thought I would take to it like a duck to water.
I’d be a natural after all these years of living with the secret signals.
And then I would be out and I would see someone else with a tell-tale yellow bracelet and I would think, “Oh ho!!, a yellow bracelet!!”
And I would find them in the most unlikely places, on the most unlikely people.
Then I became really confused.
See, part of me thinks there are billions of people who are affected by cancer and many of them wear the snappy yellow bracelet.
People who had cancer and all their loved ones and supporters, all sporting the yellow bracelet.
Cool.
And then I realized, as I saw the wee bracelets everywhere while the Tour de Lance was happening, that I think some folks wear them just because they think Lance Armstrong is super-cool.
Because, you know, nothing says “I think Lance is the man!” more than the stylish yellow bracelet.
And then I was completely confused and didn’t know if I should wear one or not.
And I think if you are totally in to bicycling and not that into cancer, maybe it’s weird to wear a yellow bracelet.
Not that I am the fashion police or anything… but really.
Just put on a Nike shirt if you just like the athletic angle of the story.

I am still piecing it all together, and I have gone back to wearing my bracelet, but I now give myself some freedom to take it off if the whim strikes.

And about Lance Armstrong and all those charges of performance enhancing drugs…
Here is what I think.
I don’t give a red rat’s ass.
Well, I guess that’s not completely true. I hope he didn’t.
But even if he did, so what?
Lance Armstrong represents hope for so many people.
I don’t care if he took performance enhancing drugs.
I can tell you, I couldn’t win the Tour de France with a barge full of performance enhancing drugs and I am willing to bet, neither could you.
I think Lance Armstrong is a symbol for us that life can go on after cancer, and that it can be a magnificent thing, full of accomplishment and challenges and thrills and joy.
Because when you know what it’s like to lay on your ass for months, and you see how he bounced back from that and did so much, that is a huge help.
I don’t care how he did it.
For me, it’s about the sense of hope he provides.

The other really huge thing about Lance Armstrong is, he has this life where he has gone back to doing the thing that he loves and he also stays devoted to giving something back to people with cancer.
I am still trying to figure out exactly what shape that will take in my life and how I will balance the drive to get things back to normal with the really deep need to give something back to the other people who are going through this.
To me, Lance Armstrong is about hope.
And about helping the people that come after you. Trying to make it just a little bit easier for them. Because it’s one of the few things we can do.

And finally, I just want to say, it’s time to knock it off with all the other jelly wristbands.
I mean, when they were for specific types of cancer, I was okay. A bit overwhelmed by the whole rainbow of bracelets but mostly okay.
But now, they are out there representing various political issues and even some bands are using them to advertise.
That’s too much, folks.
Knock it off.

okay, in this post, I will demonstrate for any and all of my readers that I am, in fact, a bit of a sloe learner.
slough.
sloww.
slow.

See, I have to tell you that I am now at the point where I find myself kind of wrestling some element of disbelief, some lingering doubt, some feeling that maybe I just had this terrible dream for a big chunk of last year and look at me now, all rested and refreshed and handsomely hirsute.
Sometimes, and always at the oddest times, I find myself stopped dead in my tracks while I try to make sense of the sentence, “Holy crap! I had/have cancer.”
See, I am so not good with all this that I don’t even know what tense to use for that sentence.

You see, I have had a pretty solid political understanding of AIDS since my friends started dying in the eighties.
And I know a bunch about the horrors of Hep C, because so many people I know have it and have to deal with all the crap that comes with it.
I have spent some time in the ringside seats watching those I love battle some big nasties.
And I have certainly had friends and loved ones deal with cancer, don’t get me wrong.
I just never, ever though I would be someone who dealt with cancer.
When it came to my time to step into the ring, I never saw myself, in the black silk trunks, going up against cancer.
Yes, even though I smoked for all those years.
Never mind that.
I just never saw myself that way.
So imagine how odd it was for me to get a type of cancer that, according to Dr. On-call-ogist, isn’t effected one way or the other by smoking.

I complain a lot lately about how I feel like I can’t keep up and how I am still trying to rebuild my life and I wish people would understand that.
Here’s my dirty confession.
I am not so good with remembering that detail myself.
I really want my old life back.
And if I can’t have most of that old life back, I’d like to fast track out of this time of reconstruction and re-figuring everything out again.

I would like to know how one mentions the events of the year 2004 without bringing any conversation to an awkward and grinding halt and creating a situation where I get treated, errr, differently.

I would like to have enough time in my life to make sense of last year, repair the carnage that exists in many little pockets of my life from last year, and think about my future and start getting on with it.

I would like to have enough time to have a thorough and comprehensive break-down about all the shit that happened to me and mine in 2004.
2004, really not my favorite year.
Not by a long shot.

I would like to just feel solid again.
And I would like to someway, somehow, make it up to my girlfriend.
I don’t even know where to begin.

That’s what I would like.

I guess the first step in accomplishing all that is to realize the totality of what I went through.
Sometimes I feel like I can only peek at the events of last year for a few moments at a time, otherwise it’s just too freaky and overwhelming.
So, every so often, I pry the lid off my box of terrors and watch my demons spin around the room and I wrestle them and sometimes I win.
There are a lot of demons in that box.

I think this is going to take a while.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Nagasaki.
80,000 people died, 74,000 of them almost immediately.

Today,I heard an interview on the CBC with one of the pilots.
They asked him if he felt any grief, in retrospect.
He said, no.
He said that the Japanese had been really mean to the American troops.
He didn’t seem to think there was anything that was extra fucked up about killing thousands of civilians, including all the children that would have been killed.
He said he had gone back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years after the war.

Apparently, Nagasaki was not the original target. Kokoru was, but the Americans couldn’t fly there because there was a typhoon.
Imagine that.

Having gone through 8 rounds of chemotherapy, I find it hard to understand how seemingly normal people could drop that bomb and kill and poison so many people.
See, I had cancer, and people hopped on board and helped me.
Because cancer is awful and people feel compelled to help.

But somehow, it’s okay to drop an atomic bomb on a bunch of unsuspecting civilians and have them die totally awful deaths.
It’s okay to kill those people with a ton of deadly poison (that will stay in the atmosphere and kill lots and lots and lots of people over the years) because, well, apparently because it was important to end the war.
(And besides, they weren’t that pink colour that we so admire in each other, so they must have brought it on themselves.
Or something.)
And hey, don’t get me wrong. I think bringing WW2 to an end would have been a pretty big priority.
But apparently, ol’ President Truman had a bit more on his mind than just “ending the war”.
Apparently it was important to get an unconditional surrender from the Japanese and send a message to the Soviets and the Japanese and the rest of the world that the Americans were the big old bad ass super-power of the world and they weren’t afraid to pull out the big guns to prove their point.

So, happy anniversary.
Let’s all pause to think about how far we have come.

I’ve been waiting and planning and waiting and waiting for this for a long time.

See, I have wanted a new tattoo for a while.
And then I got sick, and I couldn’t get one, partly because I had no money but mostly because I had no immune system.
So, my g-f bought me the tattoo as a combo Xmas/birthday prezzie.

And then I waited and waited for the immune system to come back.
And then I waited and waited to get my appointment, cuz my tattoo dude has a long line up and I had to wait a couple of months.

Anyway, here is the finished product.
I could babble on about the why’s of it all, but basically, this guy taught me a long time ago that the opposite of fear is faith, and that seems like a good thing for me to remember these days.

Okay, I am loading up the truck and I am heading out of town to camp for a few days.
All by myself.
First camping trip I have ever done all by myself.
But the truth is, I have been a bit of a crabby old rat bastard the last while and I think I need some time to just sort through some things.
See, I don’t mean to suggest that doing chemo was easy, cuz it totally sucks great green monkey dicks.
But, here’s the thing…
Being back in the land of the normal, it’s kind of weird.
An awful lot happened to me and mine in the last 14 months or so, and I am feeling like I continue to scramble to make sense of what happened, catch up with the things that need to happen on a day to day level, and figure out what the hell I think I would like to do with my future, whatever that may look like.
And after cancer comes and rattles your cage, your perception of “the future” is kind of different.
Sort of how you might view “the future” if you had had your retina detached in a bar fight.

So off I go.
To sit among the mighty pines and mighty firs and just take some time to think about things.
And hopefully, to also take some time to not think about things.
Because frankly, this is the wildest ride I have ever been on.
And I am still trying to make sense of things, even though I am back on the ground.

Catch you again in a few days, campers.