Chapter 4: Everybody’s Working For The Weekend

Been almost a week since my last post. So, here’s the latest.

As many of you may have noticed by now, if it weren’t for cancer my life would be a fairly boring place to visit. I basically get up, take the dog to the sitters, go to work, pick the dog back up, make dinner, chat with the neighbors, watch some tv, and go to bed. I do the same thing on the weekends except I don’t go to work, I go to the lake where I eat, drink, and play with my dog. But sometimes I work at home or the lake if something pressing is on my law horizon. Now I’ve added blogging to the mundane.

Speaking about blogging, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from my friends. It feels good to know that this whole episode is providing at least a little interest and entertainment. My ultimate hope is that I can eventually reach a larger audience comprised of people going through this shit and perhaps give them a forum for emotional support. But I do have to say I feel a little uncomfortable when someone gives me compliments, especially ones I don’t believe I’ve earned yet. For instance, I’m not a cancer “warrior” by any stretch of the imagination.

Truth be known, what I really am right now is a frightened little boy inside a sixty-five-year-old body who has only just begun his journey through this rancid swamp. The major battlefields lie ahead. And yes Fernando, I hear the guns loud and clear.

Anyways, I go to Indy for my MRI towards the end of the month. The first week of November, I have a six-hour procedure to install a feeding tube in my stomach. Sometime shortly, my Indy doctor will be scheduling my surgery, I’m guessing mid-November but that is strictly a guess.

I suppose the good news is that I’m not considered a high priority patient, otherwise things would have happened by now. I recently talked to a man who was in surgery within three weeks of being diagnosed. His tongue had swollen so quickly, he was in imminent danger of chocking to death when he went to see his primary doctor. I thank God because I at least have time to get things organized before surgery and recovery. And there’s a lot left to get done.

But the bad news is the wait. As hard as I try to master my emotions, the calm before this storm is absolutely deafening. I’ve grown increasingly anxious for the beginning to get started.

I’m going to meet again with my local radiologist next week to discuss a couple of recent developments. Turns out my tumor is not from smoking. Somehow, I contracted the cancer via the HPV virus despite having tested negative for STDs dozens of times over the years during routine physicals. I guess the virus just sort of hangs around dormant in the tissues surrounding the throat and can, decades later, manifest itself into squamous cell tumors. And these tumors often show up at the base of the tongue. I think that’s what happened to actor Michael Douglas.

The important point about this information is radiation and chemo are markedly effective in eliminating HPV based tumors without the need for surgery.  Not so with smoking-based tumors. So, I want to find out my local doctor’s opinion since we assumed, before this finding was received from pathology, that smoking was the cause of the disease. We also hadn’t received the results of my pet scan before our last meeting showing my cancer was confined to the tumor and hadn’t spread into surrounding tissues, jaw, or lymph nodes.  

Again, I feel very little discomfort although I do seem to tire easily. But that could be more of a mental fatigue issue as opposed to a direct result of the cancer.  Swallowing hasn’t been too great of a problem but I have to watch the foods I eat. Cereals and banana crepes have now become fairly standard staples of my diet. I’m currently researching food choices because soon I’m going to have significant trouble swallowing and I suspect this difficulty could be with me for an extended period of time once treatment begins. 

So anyways, the past few days have been hectic. I’m trying to organize all this nonsense while handling a fair number of pending cases for my office. I think I have thirty or more trials set through December. Covid has done its best to grind the criminal justice system to a halt, but here locally, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys are trying their best to clear the logjam. And we’re all making progress. At least now I have some time to write and detail the more notable highlights (or lowlights) of the last weekend and past few days.

Despite recent events, I have to remind myself I’ve been pretty blessed. Sure, there were those moments where life didn’t seem to be fair, or at least not as fair as I hoped it would be. But that’s just the nature of being human. We were given consciousness so we get to bitch, birds and fish weren’t so they don’t.

I suspect every one of us, from time to time, finds themselves feeling like the universe has placed a target on our backs. After all, it’s hard on the soul to lose a loved one to death or divorce, a business to bankruptcy, or any other important aspect of your life for reasons either of your own making or otherwise. It’s likewise hard to hear you have cancer or any other life-threatening disease. Simply put, enduring hardships isn’t the easiest way or time to cultivate positive feelings. Like I say, I’ve been there and own the t-shirt. In fact, I have a closet full of them including my newest line of apparel.

I underwent a fairly dark period in my earlier adult life which I’ll probably touch upon in later chapters. As for now, I’m sort of gauging how much candor I should publicize. Unless you haven’t guessed it yet, writing a blog about your personal life filled with esoteric stuff like thoughts and feelings (and dormant STD viruses) can be pretty embarrassing. This is especially true if you live long enough to face the people who’ve been reading the dirty laundry you aired.…which, by the way, I intend to do. 

So, causes aside, during my early thirties I wound up digging a pretty deep hole for myself. And it resulted in an agonizingly slow return from my abyss. But with the help of some good friends and a very wise psychologist, I managed to crawl out of my pit and walk again. Perhaps the greatest teaching I learned during that part of my life was to identify feelings.

Good or bad, it turns out feelings can tell you a lot about the current location of your mind-set. Obviously, most of us are familiar with anger and happiness, one is good and the other is bad. But there exists a myriad of feelings in between Disneyland and Hell.

For example, there’s confused, numb, perplexed, satisfied, annoyed, calm, energized, amazed, ecstatic, etc. The list is pretty long. And as I was taught to do in order to familiarize myself with each of them, I simply chose a feeling and then practiced it by imagining what it felt like.

Case in point, gratitude. I suspect it’s one of the top tier feelings to nourish the soul. I practiced it a lot back then because I hadn’t a clue of the sensations it brought to my body and mind. Turns out It brings a sense of peace and stillness. It also causes one’s mind to wonder as opposed to wander. Recently, current events have caused me to re-visit this practice. From my limited perspective, I’ve quickly come to realize serious illness is a disease of the mind as well as the body. If you don’t nurture your mind during all this nonsense, I think you’re asking for trouble. And God only knows there’s enough trouble ahead as it is.

So anyways, this weekend initially brought with it a feeling of being overwhelmed. It quickly morphed into frustration. I was tired from my recent trip as well as from mulling over my options and the logistics of surgery in Indianapolis. I was also trying to figure out how to coordinate this whole mess with my son who lives in China and wants to come back to be with me. Before all this pandemic stuff, Ryan and I would see each other twice a year. In the winter, we’d meet at bucket-list destinations in warm clients and cruise around for a couple weeks. We’d go to places like Panama and see the Canal or Cambodia and visit the Angkor Wat temples. In the summer he’d come here for a few weeks and we’d stay at the lake.

But Covid has not made trans-Pacific travel very easy. And there are a bunch of questions my mind is trying to sort through. Do I have him here for the surgery or do I bring him back during my rehabilitation period with chemo and radiation? What is going to be best for his job? Will he be able to get back into China? And God forbid, if things were to go south, who do I authorize to pull the plug? You get the picture, lots of moving parts around a wheel of uncertainty as dates for surgery haven’t even been established. Then, there’s Old-man Winter and the holidays. And God only knows how much happiness the holidays will add to these festivities.

The problem with frustration is it’s a precursor to anger. And sure enough, anger showed up as I was trying to get something done on my computer Saturday morning and it just wouldn’t work. I found myself yelling at my barking dog and slamming the kitchen table with my fist. And it was far more than a light touch. After a couple good hits, I stopped myself and noticed how tense my body felt and how fast my thoughts were flying. I also remembered a great way to release anger’s energy from your body is to beat the shit out of a pillow or some other type of object that won’t alert the neighbors you’re melting down. But I didn’t have to go there because the table pounding coupled with a little reflection pretty much did the trick.

By the way, frustrated or not, I often yell at my dog when he barks, especially if I’m watching television or talking on the phone.

So, I calmed myself down and drove to the lake. It was a trip I didn’t want to take. While I love my little lake house, a hundred-year-old cottage sandwiched in between a bunch of newer McMansions, I wanted to just stay home and mindlessly mope about. But I forced myself to go. And I’m glad I did.

First of all, the weather was spectacular. It brought everybody outside to a cottage three doors down which has forever served as the adult community playground. There, I’m typically surrounded by about twenty neighbors and nearby friends who are charter members of my summer family. On this Saturday afternoon, as with most Saturday afternoons, we all sat around having a few drinks telling many of the same old stories we’ve told for years, some of which are so entertaining we repeat them at least twice every summer. And there is a ton of tales to select from in our memory jukebox.

But this Saturday’s festivities were interrupted by a sad story authored, once again, by Father Time. Two of my favorite neighbors (all my neighbors are favorites actually) have listed their house for sale. They came down for the weekend to meet with their relator to get things started and to say goodbye.

I’ve known this family forever. On many a summer’s day, they would walk into my house unannounced just as I’d walk into theirs. Our kids grew up together. We spent every May thru September for the last twenty-five years of our life surrounded by one another. For instance, we were together when the wind took down their shade tree during a fierce late-afternoon storm years ago. Over time, I watched as the new one they planted finally grew tall enough to cool their house during the setting of the hot summer sun. The sense of loss that comes with their departure is indescribable. Despite the fact we used our final words to pledge we’d stay in touch, the stark reality set in that they’ve departed our lake world, pretty much forever.

Yet again, that’s life.

This past weekend also provided me an opportunity to learn more about what is in store for me medically.  A couple living down the road from my cottage, who I know but never really spent any time with, has recently gone through tongue cancer surgery. I found out about them through Laurie, the person who watches my dog during the week here in Fort Wayne. Laurie also does hair and it turns out one of her clients is the wife of the guy from the lake who had the surgery. They learned of my plight via hairdressing chat and reached out to me through Laurie, and offered to help. If you haven’t noticed yet, it’s a strange world in terms of how everybody knows someone who knows someone else who eventually knows you. At any rate, I called the couple on Saturday and walked fifteen homes down the road and met.

Meeting with them was another one of those Godsends. They’re absolutely great people who I suspect I’ll be spending some time with next summer after I get this monster behind me. Turns out we all know a bunch of the same people. I’ve spent the majority of my summers living and working at the lake. For a couple of those years, I bartended at rock and roll bar and got to know a lot of people. So, we spent a little time trying to sort out all our inter-connections. Then we turned our attention to the disease.

As life would have it, the wife is a veteran cancer survivor herself. She underwent surgery a decade ago and is still in remission. Her husband likely suffered from his disease for four or five years ago because, prior to switching physicians, he had frequently complained about some pain in his tongue area. A trip to a new doctor (who they love) resulted in a cancer diagnosis and surgery.

Two years ago, the husband had a portion of his tongue removed and replaced with a skin graft from his arm or leg, I can’t remember which. His surgery lasted four or five hours and he was back home within a few days. Imaging tests performed post-surgery showed no remaining squamous cancer cells so he was able to avoid radiation and chemo. The difference between his condition and mine is that my cancer is in the form of a tumor which apparently makes it a little more difficult to treat so I will likely be doing both chemo and radiation. But the hope remains…..

He and his wife are what I would consider to be true cancer warriors. They both fought their way home to today.  And they gave me access to one of their greatest weapons. They practiced imagery.

Imagery is the practice of using one’s mind to imagine what you want to be true. I have a little background in understanding this concept because a few decades back, I started practicing guided meditations as a regular part of my week. In essence, it’s a way to train the brain. If you want to be happy, tell your brain to keep telling your brain you’re happy.

The first thing to understand about imagery is what we know about our brain is probably less than what we know about Mars. And even though we learn more and more each day, it continues to amaze us with its power. For example, some have harnessed its force to redirect the growth of neuro transmitters allowing blind people to see once again or paralyzed people to walk. The concept is called neuroplasticity and we’ve only touched upon this miracle of human science.

Using brain imagery, my warrior couple envisioned themselves seated in front of a control panel directing the dials of their board to display various readings from ten to zero. For example, they turned their pain dial from ten to zero directing their mind to register no pain. They turned their healing dial from zero to ten ordering their brain to maximize healing. The husband related he had a cancer killing dial that would release Pacman like figures seeking out cancer cells and devouring them. You get the picture. And they focused on this imagery board constantly until it was permanently imprinted into their psyche.

While their practice took commitment along with a huge leap of faith, the results speak for themselves. He went back to work only a week or so after coming home from major surgery. And his speech is almost as perfect as his attitude. All in all, I’d say I met some very special friends at a very opportune time.

I also had a couple phone meetings with tongue cancer survivors that were extremely helpful. I’ll detail some of those conversations when I next post.

So, until then take care of yourselves.

P.S. You don't need illness or disease to use imagery to improve the quality of your life. All you need is a little imagination.