An Actually Informative Timeline of my Cancer Journey

 'Round January I noticed a lump on my lymph note at the jawline and irritation at the base of the tongue. I gave it a couple weeks to resolve, and it did not.

I had a dentist appointment in February, and scheduled a medical checkup for the same day. The dentist didn't see anything on my tongue during their usual oral cancer check, even with my extra concern. Doctor sent me to an ENT.

ENT stuck a camera up my nose [Fun! Remember the scene in "Total Recall"? If not, don't go watch that now. Anyway, just a tiny camera, not a... well, anyways!]. Couple days later a couple demands come in via the ENT to get a scan of some kind involving large machines into which you are moved by servo-motors. That sends me to the point man on the cancer team [see "Second Opinion", I think, re: Occam's Razor.]

At this point, Kaiser just starts taking liberties with my time. I'm like, "Can we maybe schedule some of these on the same day? Every time I get an appointment, I have to spend about an hour writing sub plans!". Yeah, so Dr. G, the point man, sends me to more electronic tunnels with a slab on a servo, and a couple of biopsies that confirm that it is HPV- related-- not, thankfully, related to my 8 years as a smoker.

By this time, the school year is really coming to a head. Maybe we can start this after school is out? Maybe I can actually Get Away at least a little in early summer. Nope. Well, Dr. G hands me off to radiation therapy and chemotherapy folks. From here on in, Kaiser has dibs on my time. During the last week of school, I miss 4 of 5 days [see "Peaks and Troughs], returning only to say heartfelt goodbyes to my li'l bunnies, and providing precious little guidance to my subs. Bless substitute teachers' hearts!!! They muddled through and nothing got broken except the disc drawer of the DVD player that I only ever use on the last day of school.

That last week had me recovering from the installation of a feeding tube on my stomach which was not as fun as I had been led to believe. It hurt for quite a while, though on day 4 I was able to ride my bike and get it up on the train to see the students.

2 weeks after surgery,  it was time to start radiation daily, Monday to Friday, and chemo once a week right after radiation.

The first radiation was harsh. It usually takes about 5 or 10 minutes, but the first session takes 15 or 20 minutes. Your tongue is immobilized, and you have to be able to breathe through your nose. Fortunately, this is something I have been practicing for the past 4 years or so, since my morning grudge matches against the Berkeley Hills on a bicycle. My goal there was to both inhale and exhale only through my nose, inspired by "Breath" by  James Nestor, an author interviewed by Terry Gross in 2020. This is part of my one-word title book collection.*

The first session was very, very difficult.  After that, it gets both objectively and subjectively shorter. I'll talk below about what the outcomes and side effects of radiation therapy.

Next up was chemo. Just like the scenes in "Breaking Bad", but a bit more medical, and less comfy. Sweet nurses. Claudia accompanied me at the first session. This whole thing creates a great deal anxiety for her. Lots of IV hydration beforehand. I was doing fine. In fact, next radiation treatment I bike the 5 [flat] miles to Kaiser. Mostly just to prove a point. I, uh, did not bike on the next 2 days. 

I did fine for the next day and a half, and I failed preemptively to take my nausea meds. Nausea, a Greek term, means "puking your guts out", apparently. Through today, Saturday, I am not good for much, in part because you can't drive your car without gas and you can't run your body or your mind without food.

As you can see, I am now well enough to fire up my laptop and type. I want to take a walk in a bit. I'm doing better.  I'll add more to the timeline next time. I want to review for myself and for any interested reader what the process will be-- it gets worse-- and what the effects will be.

*One word title. Preferably a mass noun like "sand", not a count noun like "trees". Nonfiction. Subject of book must be the same as the title. Examples: "Vanilla", "Cod", "Salt", "Banana"

Dumb Stuff I Gotta Do

Dumb Stuff I Gotta Do

My dad used to have a notepad in, I think, the early 80s where each page, if I remember  right, said the above title. It was a kind of dayrunner notebook. Such notebooks are still available.

I have to do an amazing variety of dumb stuff these days. Thing is, for years now, largely in the trenches of elementary education, I have realized that the key for me is not to think about the things I have to do, but to think about how I need to go about doing them.

This has led me to strategize or "plan" my short to middle term future actions. Plan is a word that I am told refers to thinking about the future in terms of concrete, ordered steps. It may amaze some of you to know that I can entertain this kind of thinking at all. It amazes me. Now, my dad, you see; planning was actually part of his job title. He is an emeritus professor of Urban Planning, a Planner, and a planner. The gene was not passed on.

For myself, the problem has not been planning things out, but rather communicating to ordinary Homo Sapiens Sapiens just what those plans are. This comes must sharply into focus in the various journeys I have taken, such as my exquisite month of filth and suffering in Quebec on a bicycle last summer, but also in something as simple as what I can get up to just traveling form Emeryville Amtrak home. Pity the fool who would be subject to these whims. In company, I tend to leave the planning, for better or worse to others.

The watchword here for me is that if you can't change your mind, how do you know you even have one?

Well, I been changin' a lotta plans lately. This current week was to be a heroic glidepath of not teaching too hard as we come down to the end of the year. Oddly, Kaiser seems to have a different view of things. I gave up on asking them to schedule my appointments on days that were convenient to me. They just have no understanding of what it takes to set up a substitute teacher even in glidepath days. Their apathy toward the needs of my working life is palpable. So it is that my last week of the school year has an at least 3 day cookie cutter hole in it. 

My line in the sand is the last day of school. Clearly, nothin' educational is going to happen tomorrow, Friday, before the kids leave for summer. I do have a lot of organizing to do, that is, I need to have the kids take home everything in their desks. Turns out tomorrow's work day is not a "thing I have to do", not a "thing I need to work out how to do", but rather a thing I will not be able to do.

There is a famous and perhaps apocryphal quote of a pro cyclist, Tom Simpson, who died on the Tour de France in 1967. He had been using amphetamines, among other things, in an apparent effort to improve his performance. Allegedly, his last words were "Put me back on my bike." There are stickers available with this phrase. (I think I need one.) The tragicomical thing about this is that at some point, we need to acknowledge that we cannot just pedal away. In his case, he really needed to get on with the business of dying, and he did. Cyclists visit his memorial on a French mountain road. Sheesh. (This is not the kind of cyclist I am.)

Well, anyways, back to the subject at hand! My plan was to finish the school year and then start therapy. Funny, not everyone has that option. Not every teacher even has their cancer line up with their calendar. But here we are. As to finishing the school year, I have had to scale way back, as I said above. But at a certain point, school year or not, a teacher has to face the possibility of just leaving the whole shebang looking like a bomb has gone off, just walk away, leaving it for the hapless sod who has to clean it up. Leaving the spare underwear in the closet (rainy days on the bike), the yogurt container forgotten on the snack shelf (it keeps surprisingly well!), and the despicable pile of ignored paperwork for someone else to deal with.

I just found out that there will be a 1 week gap between the end of school and the beginning of radiation therapy. If the pain of my abdominal surgery (long story, off topic here, and as you can see, I stick doggedly to my topic) recedes, I will be able to use that to impose some kind of order on the room for whoever it is who starts out next school year in it. It may not be me.

Peaks and Troughs

Yesterday, in the last week of school, I played in the annual teachers vs. 6th graders soccer game. I've been doing that since I came to this (soccer-mad) school 9 years ago. 

The experience when I first came to the school was quasi-religious. It lit up circuits dormant since I was about 10 years old: the spatiality of the game, the focus of the game. [Note: this may be the basis of how I behave at political demos.]

As one commentator famously said, "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death...I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." I would not go that far, but it is pretty cool. 

Anyway, yesterday I was on top of the world physically. Now, to quote a favorite olde epitaph, I am a poor caitiff.

Radiation treatment on my throat will make swallowing feel comparatively like it does when you have strep throat. (As a kid, I thought it meant your throat was stripped.) To keep my weight constant and the tumor in the same place for the radiation (X-ray radiation, actually), I have a gastro-something-or-other tube installed to inject "food" directly into my stomach.

If anyone can find that Alan Watts quote about not trusting anyone who refers to food as fuel, I would appreciate seeing that.

It might have been nice for Kaiser to let me know that I would be pretty fucked up for the next 24 hours. I have 3 sub days this week, the last week of the school year. I will not relinquish the last day of school, though, not unless there is bleeding, severe dizziness, or projectile vomiting.

Second Opinion

Doctor says, "You're overweight!" I say, "I want a second opinion." He responds, "Yeah, you're ugly, too!!"

Well, anyway, the doctor tells me that based on Occam's Razor (i.e. "If it walks like a duck...), it's an HPV related cancerous tumor on my tonsil, but that actually good news. It involves chemo, and that's tough, real tough, but odds are good that I will recover.

I have 3 questions. One is about cancer. Another is about treatment. My third question is about cannabis, what we used to call "pot" in the dark ages. He says it does not interfere with the treatment. Our science teacher Isabel says that cannabis has some good medicinal qualities with things like cancer. Honey, I ain't interested in medicinal benefits. There's only one thing I'm interested in with pot. 

"Hard work fine, and hard work good, but first take care of head." -The Toys, "Smoke Two Joints", played on KFOG every Friday at 5 p.m. back when we had rock 'n' roll radio in the Bay Area. No, I will not be smoking. For one, that's not hip. It's not easily dosable, and the doctors have some rather dire things to say about inhaling smoke during chemo. Like, fungus infections and stuff. I'm pretty sure that's bad.