Do Root Canals Cure Cancer?

The root canal is set for Monday at 11. In the meantime, the snow is melting in Carpenter's Woods. 




january after the snow
carpenter's woods

last week the white grayed down
little yellow caverns melted in and refrozen.
little turds-the punctuation
of brown gems flush-set in the crust
of last week's snow.
and there was a wash of gray
just because the snow lives here
under the same dirty roof as us.

last week the woods wanted to tell us
that every drift has its own shit
and any warmth will soften the deepest chill
and that every day has its gray.

this week, a thaw:
you won't see a lump or sump
beside the trails in carpenter's woods.
today the woods will tell us
that it's got enough earth
to cover a multitude
and there's no harm that won't disappear
in sweet decay and earth and time.

"Non-Diagnostic"

That's how the surgeon describes the results of my Fine Needle Aspiration biopsy. I am so taken by the sheer ambition of the phrase that it's going to be my new expression, the cliché by which ye shall know me.

It means "I have no idea what the results of that painful and expensive test indicate and I hope if I talk fast enough and change the subject, no one will ask me why I ordered it in the first place."

A bit more conversation in which it becomes clear that nobody has any good ideas about why I'm still feeling lousy and losing weight. And then we wait until the seventh of february for another scan and another week for results. In the meantime, I'm going to the dentist and officially offering myself up as quack-bait. Crystals? Vibrations? Wanna sleep in my pyramid?

•   •   •
The dentist shoots me up with novacaine and the pain in my jaw disappears. So the good news is: part of my pain comes from a mere toothache. The bad news is that I have a root canal in my near future

A Very Cruel Thing to do to Sick People

I’m thin and weak and I don’t eat very much. Maybe it’s because I’m nauseated all the time. The docs are sending me for a dose of intravenous anti-nausea drug. There’s a room at Fox Chase that’s devoted to ‘infusing’. It’s also where you get chemo-therapy. My appointment is at 11.
Three hours later, I’m still waiting for my name to be called. I haven't eaten and the pain meds have worn off. Worse yet, there are people there with the awful gray tint of chemo on them slumped into upright chairs or sliding out of wheelchairs and staring off at something that I can’t see right now. They’re suffering.
In circumstances like these, I’m usually pretty polite. I know that the young woman behind the counter isn’t the one responsible for scheduling more people than the infusion room can hold. But I gotta say something and here’s what I say-

”Hi. I hate to bother you, and I know it’s not your fault, but it’s been three hours now since my appointment. This is a very cruel thing to do to sick people.”

All I’m looking for is a nod and I get one. I guess she knows. Fifteen minutes later they call me in.

•   •

The anti-nausea drug-kytril-didn’t work and at midnight, I’m standing in the bathroom, retching and musing.

Aspiration

By a little trick of the English language, aspiration means both ‘something devoutly wished’ for and ‘the act of removing fluid from a cavity of the body by inserting a hollow needle’.
•   •
Yesterday’s scheduled punch biopsy turned into the more elegant-sounding Fine Needle Aspiration. I’ve never cherished any sort of needle aspiration, much less a fine one.
What they do is the opposite of an injection. they stick the needle in your skin and then they pull the plunger on the syringe out to extract a piece (actually some small pieces) of you. The cytology lab will examine those cells, taken from the sore and swollen lump under my jaw, to see if it’s cancerous. It hurts, maybe a six or seven on the pain scale. the typical draw is three separate shots. With three samples, they're sure that they got some of the right cells. The surgeon does the first one and then he asks me if
I can stand two more. Do I have a choice? Well the lab likes three samples, but he figgers he's good enough to get it in one or two. I turn my head away and he does it again. (I'm squeezing J's hand, fortunately too weak to do any damage.)
It's mostly fluid, but he can see cells floating around. Off to the lab to see if the cells are cancer.
•   •
The test takes two days, but they'll let me know in a week. Why the delay? One thought is that the patient is better off getting bad news if there’s a doctor around when it’s delivered. I wonder how my doctors would feel if I knew something that was vital to their well-being and was planning on telling them four days from now.
Would they feel patronized? Just wondering.

Mr. Pain

The pain is bad today, it breaks through the Oxycodone. My throat has closed some more and what I'm able to drink makes me gag. J tries to cheer me up. 
"Maybe you should try the smart version of that drug."
"Huh?"
"You know, Foxycodone. Or the one where the pill is in the shape of a cube."
"I give up."
"Boxycodone."
A few minutes pass: "You know they make a dosage of that stuff that gives strippers extra courage"
"?"
"Roxy Moxycodone."
Good try, not much help. It's a bad day for prose (as you can probably tell). Lemme try the other form-

Mr. Pain

Mr. Pain is a gentleman.
He doesn't wake me, he stands
Respectfully beside my bed
His glowing steel fingers politely
tucked beneath cactus spine arms.



He waits 'til I'm awake, 'til I know
that I'm not in my dream but in this bed.
He watches my eyes, listens for my breath
And he reaches for my face
To begin his grim undertaking.



Mr. Pain is head technician
In this raw neural laboratory.
He welcomes me back
From the night’s rest and into
The day's dark research.

Life Summary-Part Three

The Would-Be Lepidopterist

You would have known more about butterflies
if you had killed them more and watched them less.
If you had used a killing jar and a scalpel and collected
the various, variegated genitalia
of Nymphs and  Satyrs, Blues and Coppers.
You could have been.

But no, you only planted flowers for them to suck
and sheltered the weeds where they laid their eggs
And applauded when you saw them jump into the air
and wink their way along their next performance.
Applauded! (Who the hell were you applauding?)

No eternity for those bugs or you,
Just a messy, scaly, insect stew.
No dry forever on a pin,
Just vanished scale on a dusty wing.


So you don't know much about butterflies,
You even forget their names from time to time.
You can't tell a Painted Lady from an American,
Vanessa cardui from Vanessa whaz-er-name.

All you have left is that stupid, sharp indrawn breath
as you see the Mourning Cloak
(arrogant first-bastard of spring)
spread her wings and pump the April into them
to mark the end of March.

You would have known more about so many things
if you hadn't whooped and danced and shook your fists
as the chrysalis broke and gold wet wings appeared.

The Bachelor's Cat

"Cat" was my first novel, a tiny romance about a guy with all the wrong instincts who ends up doing the right things. The agent who repped it in 1997 put it up for auction and we got to sit around and listen to the bids come in. The auction went on for a week, so for seven days, I felt like the hottest literary property around. The best part was that we had to go to California for a wedding. Not only did I get to take a phone call on the 'plane as the bid went up, but I had an experience right out of a cheap TV show. I was sitting by the pool at our hotel in Beverly Hills and a guy comes out with a 'phone on a tray. "Dr. Hoffman? Dr. Hoffman?" I waved and as he approached he said in booming voice "It's your agent calling from New York." If I hadn't been laughing so hard, I would have been impressed with myself. At the least, I could have rounded up my ex-wife's family and have them watch while he said it again.

We made a ton of money on The Bachelor's Cat and put it in the kid's college fund. And I, silly man, thought that it was going to be this way from now on; write a book, it gets auctioned, people compete for the chance to publish it and I end up making a living doing exactly what I want to do. In fact it would be nine years and a lot of discouragement before I got another book published and ten years for my second novel.
Earlier this week, I heard from a New York publisher. They want to republish it in a 'special gift edition' for the holidays. Would I? Of course I would. None of my books are still in print on paper, and considering circumstances, it feels good.

•

The circumstances include not being able to eat a salad. The greens might as well be sawgrass and I work my jaws around a bone-dry mouth and the mixed delicate mini-greens turn into a hard, stringy mortar. My tongue hurts and eventually, my lower jaw gets tired and starts to hurt. The salad greens still don't change at all. It's not swallow material and while I could amuse myself wondering when the swallows come back, what I really do is pour a glass of milk. I try to use it to swallow the pounded greens and when that doesn't work, I  spit them out and have milk for dinner.

The Worst Day Yet

Saturday's pain is about double Friday's. I can't swallow without wincing so I can't eat. My hands tremble. I can feel my throat closing on the right side and I'm getting weaker.  And my doctors are just telling me to wait.
I'm not scared-I think I'm too drained to feel fear, but I'm sad. It's so cruel to have been getting better and then have it all snatched away.

A Bright Idea

The pain is shimmering up and down the right side of my head. In a couple of weeks it’s outrun Oxycontin/Oxycodone’s ability to keep it in check. Along with neck, throat and temporal lobe pain there’s an ache in my right jaw that won’t go away. It’s sharp, then dull. Like a toothache.
Toothache?
Shit! Could I have a toothache? Could this whole thing be related to a lousy cavity?
This morning I called a neighborhood dentist. She saw me this afternoon. Sure enough there’s a cavity-a big ‘un and no, it’s not big enough or bad enough to be the source of all this pain.
But the good doctor keeps talking, asking questions, taking a moment to think about the answers. Would I mind if she called the oncologist before she dealt with the cavity? Not at all.
At the end of the day, there’s a message: would I please call Fox Chase to schedule a punch biopsy? You bet I will.

The Job (Life Summary, Part Three)

We’ve established that even if you have cancer, you continue to walk the dog. It’s just as true that your karma continues to walk you.
I got a call a few weeks ago from the Dean at the Academy of Culinary Arts. They have a Visiting Professor slot available-would I like to come visit? Maybe teach courses like Gastronomy and Culture?
I drove down there two days ago-it’s in the Pine Barrens on the way to Atlantic City-did a few interviews, signed some papers and shook some hands and it’s a deal. I haven’t taught anything more intense than a tasting in a while. I miss it. No, that’s not right. I miss myself as a teacher and I’m very happy to have me back.
One of the best things about this job at this time is that the Dean and her faculty who asked me to come are former students. They took culinary or wine classes with me. They must have had a good time doing it. In fact, they told me as much and that, my friends, is the best Life Summary I could get right now.

•   •   •

A bonus from all this is that I get to rethink everything I’ve ever taught. What do I say about food and culture in fifteen hours? What matters? What do I find still exciting after all these years? What would you say about Italian wine if you only had two hours to do it? Or the American lust for meat? The French passion for cheese? How do talk about the sheer voluptuousness of food when millions of people don't have clean water or sufficient food?
Wow. I don’t know what I’ll say, time to get to work.

Pain

There is a common code for conveying how much pain an adult patient is having. The health care worker says "On a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain you ever felt, how much does it hurt"? I hope you are unfamiliar with it. (There's a different one for kids called the Wong-Baker Scale that uses smiley faces,)
In the few days since we heard that the biopsy was negative, the pain in my ear, throat and jaw have gotten worse. Right now it's about an eight. The radiation doc and the surgeon were both stumped and J is puzzled. Infection? No temperature. A virus? Maybe.
My next step is the oncologist if I can get her on the phone.
Stay tuned, I know I will.

The News

You wait for a while in a room with brown speckled wallpaper, recessed lighting and fake wood floors. There's a rack with machines, an endoscope, some cameras and a monitor, a cabinet below a built-in unit with sink that looks like it came from a suburban studio apartment. There are two patient chairs, beige things with control units. I find its very banality forbidding-It's a room whose dullness could blunt the sharp keen of somebody wailing.
You wait for the surgeon for a while. There's a range of outcomes here. We could be looking at radical, disfiguring surgery and a feeding tube. There's the heart-warming story on the Fox Chase website of the woman who sewed up a little fanny pack for her husband so he could carry around the bottle of food that was connected to his tube. Enabled him to play golf, it did. Or we could be over and done, cancer gone and nothing to do but outlive the results of the radiation and chemotherapy, finish up a novel, build another kayak and go sailing all summer long.

What we got was something in between. The biopsy was negative, but there is a large sore that may be masking some tumor. In the meantime, the sore is giving me a raw throat and sharp stabbing pains and they're getting worse. What's up? Well, they're not sure. Another biopsy would just irritate the throat some more. So we will have another scan in five weeks and another chance to sit in the brown room.

How do I feel? Relieved. Grateful. Numb. Did this really happen?

The End of the Road

I should have seen it coming. She was old, she had a leaky valve and more than her share of dings and nicks. I had even fantasized about what life would be like without her. But still, it's hard to say goodbye to a 1994 Toyota Camry that's served you for 150,000 miles. This was the first car I'd owned after years of Center City living and walking everywhere. It was the one that carried my kid around and the car in which the dog and I drove away from home when it wasn't home anymore.
Of course I know that it's silly to personify a car, but there's an attachment that's bred of reliability and usefulness. Right now, just a day away from getting the news about what's going on in my throat, I feel kind of fragile-I can barely stand the thought of anything else changing.
And yet.
And change is the is and so it's time to reframe. Maybe I'll come out of this with a clear throat and a new car. Maybe I'll drive down the road singing.

Oysters and Chocolate

Let's call this a case of internet-induced amnesia:

I use a Google feature called Blogger to put this blog up. Blogger tells its authors a lot about how their blogs are doing in the world. One of the bits of information is 'referring sites'-that is, where was the reader when he or she clicked on the link to your blog. It turns out that the main referral source for radiationdays.com is:

http://www.oystersandchocolate.com/Home.aspx

I was completely puzzled when I saw this. Why would a well-known erotica site be referring people to a blog about cancer? So I clicked and down in the lower right corner of their home page, I found the answer. I had completely forgotten that I sent in a portfolio for their consideration. I guess this also explains how the blog got readers from Bosnia and Ukraine too.

Looking Back: Life Summary, Part Two

Belvedere-Vienna

There’s something pathetic, even tacky about all of the new year-provoked ‘looking back’ features in the press and on the screens. Commentators who are known mostly for their hair being blown around in the wind of the latest fads are suddenly possessed of a sense of history. Sillier yet, things that truly lack a history-like this past NFL season-are suddenly the subject of reflective consideration. What, exactly are we supposed to learn from ‘the ten best forward passes of the year’? How about ‘best celebrity embarrassing moments’?
You get the idea. I’m reluctant to sum anything up for the sake of making a list. I flatter myself when I think that’s because I live so much in the present, but maybe my reluctance comes from distress at having to look at the list itself.
At the same time, I find myself drawn to a summary. Maybe it’s the clip-clop of the hooves of mortality, maybe it’s the pure weaselly desire for self-justification.
•   •   •   
So, how did I do with all these years of sucking down oxygen and taking up space? What's my grade? Did I break 700 on the SAT? (Substantial Accomplishment Test)
You may be shocked to hear this: it depends. A kind way to put it would be that I spent most of my time doing things that I liked and hardly hurt anybody in the process. Along the way, there were five books and twenty years of teaching that was pretty well received. Most of my ex-’s are still talking to me and a few friends keep in touch. It’s a two column-inch obituary sort of life.There is also a brilliant daughter and a great golden age romance, but I think myself more lucky than deserving in those instances.
Less kindly, I think that my accomplishments were pretty modest. I lacked the courage or the energy to keep my first marriage together and my vocational efforts were spread across so many fields as to be diluted to almost homeopathic proportions. I let myself drift away from Art and I was too scared for Drama.

•   •   •
So what it comes down to is this: if I tote up all the nouns in my list of accomplishments, it doesn’t look so good. If I consider how I spent my time and the pleasure I gave and satisfaction I took, if I concentrate on the verbs, it’s not so bad after all. (And what should I make of 'Great Thanksgiving Dinners Cooked'? The applause on the last day of a class?) How much of an Apologia do I need for Vita Mia?

It's a heavy question, one that cuts to the heart of what it is to be human. The sun is shining as I write this. I have ‘til Friday before I meet with the surgeon to get the biopsy results and J just suggested that we have some sushi. I think I’ll go with the verbs.