CHAPTER 10 -- 12

Chapter 10
The Exquisite Design of Car Bumpers

   After my emergency debut, Dr. Lieber gave me a week off from chemo, to recover from the onslaught, followed by another week of chemo; and because in the meantime my tumor had completely disappeared we skipped the last week.  

   Now I had a month to recover, before the second course of radiation adjunct chemo would start. They prepared a ghostly mask of my face from a stringy white plastic-material. Its design would match three tattooed dots on my neck, and this mask should make sure that my head would always be in the exact same position during the treatments. There was no room for mistakes!

   Dr. Wollman, the radiologist, was responsible to map my skull, jaws and neck and he designed the plan for radiating to radiate the suspicious tissue and leave the rest intact. There was a 95% certainty that my tumor was next to my tonsil; and we agreed that we should treat it accordingly. Four weeks of radiation were planned as well as a solid dose of chemo right at the beginning.

  Had we not agreed about the likely location of the primary tumor I would have had to endure another two weeks radiation.

   Mind you, my tumor had disappeared, and there was no diagnostic tool that could determine if all microscopic cancer-cells were gone or not. The second course of radiation/chemo was mostly a prophylactic effort to get rid of these recalcitrant cells, that make Squamous head and neck cancer so hard to treat. They tend to reappear with a slightly changed code, so the last treatment will not work anymore, and you will have to start from scratch, which you can't.

   Once the visible tumor is gone, one has the tendency to believe that now the cancer has been beaten back and there is no need for further treatment. Dr. Lieber mentioned another patient of his who did exactly that – but we could never find out how well he fared, because he just disappeared.

   I was going to be a good patient and did not skidoodle, but drove faithfully to every appointment. Robin had to work a lot these days, Christmas was coming, and so I had to drive myself to St. John's hospital, which wasn't too much of a problem in the beginning. Later it turned into a strange psychedelic odyssey – sixteen year old schoolgirls in full goth costumes waiting at the traffic-light – each counting the holes in the other girls multi-layered dresses.

– Or cars from the future – gleaming bumpers in novel -- never seen before shapes.

   When you age fast, when your body becomes more fragile and decrepit day by day, every futuristic design, reminds you of the future that you might not participate in anymore, and you wish you could stay alive, just to see the latest foolishness of mankind expressing itself in the design of a car bumper.

   I see a world where every object is oozing with love, the result of enormous sacrifices, pain and suffering that were necessary to make things, to put them here, to put them together.

   Every nail would tell me a story – how it came that it became a nail, all the will and the blood of people, who dug it out of the ground, and forged it, and sold it, and got rich, and then lost it...

   And now the nail was stuck in a wall of a little cafe holding up a framed sign that betrayed such hope for the future of the establishment. It said “Our First Dollar” and it contained a dollar-note.

   The cafe did not do too well.

   And I felt the broken hearts of all the people, whose dreams just didn't pan out.

 

Chapter 11
The State of my Demi-Corpse

   I was in poor shape. I had lost weight; the weeks on protein-drinks were not without consequences. My throat was completely swollen shut. Only liquids would pass – with great pain. Robin had to buy a pill-crusher, so I could pulverize my medication and swallow it with a liquid. Instead of six protein-drinks a day I managed barely two. At the time I noted: ”The protein-drink hurts like sulfuric acid running down my throat, and I quickly follow with a glass of water which only hurts like battery-acid.  Then I would sit down and wait for the pain to subside. (About twenty minutes or so...)

   All this in spite of all the Vicodin or any other painkiller I could have wanted. I tried to avoid opiates as long as I could, because of the constipating side-effects, but there came a moment when the pain just became unbearable. I knew I had to watch my digestion and could look forward to a withdrawal.

   They gave me "Vicodin liquid”, bottles of it!

   I also had become super-sensitive to smells. Just getting near a bunch of candles would create the sensation of somebody emptying an extra-large box of detergents over my head. I would gasp and try to calm down, because there is no running away from a horridly distorted sense of smell.

   When I looked in the mirror I saw a grotesquely worn out face, all asymmetric features seemed to be exaggerated, the hair had not grown back jet – just some soft white cover. I contemplated to have photos for a set-card taken – I would have been a perfect concentration camp Jew, or any other long-term prisoner of war.

   The skin hung from my body, thin and wrinkly. I wasn't happy with my mirror image!

   At the beginning of my last week of radiation I started to salivate profusely, a handkerchief full of an alien, green-black mucus every five minutes needed to be disposed of. Within three days I used up all the handkerchiefs, toilet-papers, paper-towels in the house, desperately trying to absorb an unstoppable stream of a foul liquid that tasted like shoe-polish with sugar.

   Then my olfactory nerve must have gotten hit with a major dose of radiation, because one morning I realized I could not make it to the bathroom without seriously gagging. The mixture of smells outside the bedroom was overwhelming. I had to hold my nose and not breathe until I was back in bed, surrounded by more familiar odors.

   I was supposed to drive to the hospital for my daily radiation, but I was in no state to make it to the hospital, unless I was anesthetized!

   When the time of my appointment passed the phone started ringing.

   An almost comedic scene followed: Robin would pass me the phone, but as soon as the phone was about a foot from my face, the most disgusting smell of old man's rotting teeth originating from the phone made me gag, and I'd just gesticulate desperately for Robin to remove the vile gadget from the room.

   Next the nurse called, then the technicians, then the therapist, then the radiologist again.

   I just could not talk into this revolting apparatus! 

   I don't think they understood my problem at all...

   In fact, the day before I met Dr. Wollman, my radiologist, in the hall of the radiation department. He asked how I was doing. I knew I looked like a zombie, but tried to be upbeat and assured him that I would make it through the last three days.

   His response was a knock-out hit, that I didn't see coming:

“What do you mean – three days? You still have another two weeks, because we did not find the primary tumor.”

   I was shocked, did he really believe I would confuse four weeks radiation with six?

   He might – he has many patients. I am my only patient and I don't hear four weeks when I'm told six weeks. (Six weeks would be what the insurance would suggest, because it's in their book of rules – “Squamous head and neck, no detectable primary tumor – six weeks!”)

   I assumed Dr. Wollman had enough leeway to make decisions according to his own medical judgment, but he obviously preferred to follow insurance instructions, and lie to me. I drove home trying very hard to accept this new situation.

   I still was determined to go through, even with this new timetable, but I felt a deep sense of betrayal. Suddenly Dr. Wollman's expertise looked like trickery, and he lost all credibility in my book.

   Now, a day later, incapacitated by gagging on any new smell, the decision was taken away from me. As I wrote before, I could only either be anesthetized or in a coma make it to the hospital. Every smell that entered my bedroom, particularly chemical/perfumed smells made me gag uncontrollably – though I never vomited, presumably because my throat was completely blocked – and because there was not much in my stomach anyway.

   After six PM they stopped calling for the day and I was closing in on a point of despair like never before during this therapy. My body and its excretions disgusted me. I fantasized running out of the house, away from those smells that might never go away again. I wanted to throw myself into the wet grass of our backyard and claw into the ground – which I knew was pointless – my nose, my olfactory nerves were part of me and there was no escape from the ugliness of the smells however far I would run. 

Chapter 12
The Darkest Night

   The possibility that I could be condemned to endure these shrill and painful smells for the rest of my life was frightening, and realizing that I had broken the rule by missing the radiation-appointment terrified me.

   There was no way I could have made it to the hospital this day, nor did I see any chance to make it tomorrow or the next day. And Dr. Wollman had left no doubt in me that a break of more than two days was unacceptable, and I believed him.

   I was torn between excruciating and exhausting sensations of pain, horrendous smells, a deep disgust of my body, and a tortured mind that condemned myself to death, because I was a bad patient. If I was not strong enough to survive the cure – I wasn't strong enough to live in this world – and why would I even want to?

   I yearned for an accident, something that would kill me instantly, blot me out! Traceless. Like I never was...

   The night came early – it was winter outside. Miserable darkness and no escape from this body.

   After finishing with her last client Robin entered the room followed by all kinds of unsavory smells. She was tired, went to bed instantly, and fell asleep within minutes. Suddenly I smelled a terrible foul smell like rotten meat, and it turned out to be Robin's breath! I was horrified and ashamed of my deleterious perception -- she was sleeping so peacefully, and I was supposed to wake her up to ask her to turn over and breathe in the other direction, because the odor of her breath was making me vomit? How do you tell this to someone you love?

   I held my breath to stop gagging, but luckily she turned over by herself, and did breathe in the other direction.

   I checked the TV and the first image I saw was a strange muscular man, like a strongman in an old circus. He wore an awkward blond hairpiece. I thought I had landed at one of those obscure Mexican astrology channels, but then I realized quickly that I was watching Werner Herzog's "Invincible".

   I was a great admirer of this German director and although we both lived in Munich in the Seventies, we only met casually, or at the Soccer-Sundays in the Park, where young German filmmakers would get physical.

   "Invincible" was a film I had not seen, it is about Berlin in the Thirties, about the mystic and prophet Hanussen, who tried to enamor himself with the Nazis by predicting a great future for the "Aryan Reich". He hired a young strongman for his mystic Cabaret to play Ziegfried, made him wear a blond wig, and showed him off as example for the strength and magnificence of the Aryan race. When the strongman later exposed himself as Jewish, he became famous and beloved by the Jewish community in Berlin, but Hanussen lost his grip on the imagination of his Nazi benefactors and was discovered to be a Jew himself. While he did not survive the unmasking, the strongman went back to his Polish village, to pass on the message of the coming Holocaust. One last time he agreed to play a strongman to convince his people that they needed to be strong in the fight for survival, and in the process he accidentally injured himself with a rusty nail. Eventually, before he could pass on the warning, he died.

   Many of my friends acted in the movie and there where moments when it seemed like I knew everybody. Everybody I saw, I had met sometime in the past.

   Was I dying? Was I seeing everybody for the last time?

   ...and wasn't the film about me? Me, who never wanted to be, who I was, and when I surrendered to my true self -- I would die? Was that the message?

   At the end of the movie Herzog chose a piece of classical music, so heartbreaking, so filled with melancholy, so deeply, hopelessly sad -- while the image on the screen showed a train following it's rail track through a jungle, while millions of red crabs covered the ground, crossed the tracks, were maimed by the train, or not -- it did not matter to them. It did not matter to the train either.

   Then the film was over, it was late. I turned off the TV and sat there until the early morning.

   Was I going to die? I could not say -- did it matter? I could not say either.

   I decided to stop all medications. This, I knew, was going to be unpleasant, particularly the large amounts of Vicodin needed weening, but I had to make a decision to either stay sick, or trust my body to recover and heal.

   I was not sure if I was going to wake up in my bed in the morning... but I knew, if I did, it was going to be a new life. A new life.