places to hide

So Melissa tells me in the comment below that you can take any medicine as a suppository. This gives rise to all kinds of passive-aggressive ideas for how my gladiator wife can help out, doesn't it?

Laura and I set out at 8:00 this morning to get haircuts. This was to be stage 2 in my gradually shortening mop. I am reminding myself of those dolls that other girls owned when I was a kid. I wasn't a Barbie-type doll owner, and here I will pause while that shock sinks in. This doll had hair you could pull out when you wanted her to have long (blond) hair, and then somehow push back in when you wanted her to have short (blond) hair. In our day, that feature was high-tech, an astounding feat of creativity and manufacturing genius.

Anyway, still suffering from limited brain space, Laura and I drove to West Hartford early this morning and waited for the salon to open up. We waited a long time, well past our appointments, and the place was still dark. "Wow," we said between sips of Starbucks coffee, "this is really bad business." Turns out that Laura had scheduled our appointments at a different salon, one right near home. One that actually opens on Saturday morning. We were way late.

This is the kind of thing that my parents would have put in their "Accident Book," where for many years they recorded life's little mishaps and snafus, to later remind themselves of the humor in events that may have been annoying in the moment. It is worth noting that they ended up filling about a dozen accident books. My parents were big on flaky mishaps.

Yesterday La and I walked over to our friend (an oncology surgeon) Jim's house, just as we did a few days before surgery. I needed to hear Jim say that I am doing the right thing. Before surgery, I wrote down what I wanted him to say, and he did it for me: "If you don't do this surgery, the cancer will spread and it will kill you." I felt so much better hearing that, having that clarity. And yesterday was the same: "Though this is a very aggressive regimen, given your pathology report, this is what I would do in your place. This is what my colleagues would have you do. This is what I would have my wife or my daughter do." That is what I needed to hear. Seeing Jim has each time been like a last parachute check, a straight-in-the-eye talk reminding me that the plane is on fire, then a shove.

Conversations with survivors, books I'm reading, yesterday's talk with Jim -- all of these are making me think a lot about chemo. Your nails fall off and after a few treatments you start to bleed wherever you have soft tissue -- lips, fingers, pud. I get a clear and frightening picture of that, but don't stay long. My mind instead lands on the tiniest of thoughts and spends an inordinate amount of time wandering around there, as if this small thought is more compelling than the fact that I am about to feel very, very bad for quite awhile. Last night, after the requisite 4:00 a.m. pee break, I could not stop thinking about how complicated verb tenses are in English. I was stunned by the sentence fragment "I would have had to have had"; I couldn't get that absurdly complicated snippet out of my head: "I would have had to have had..." Jesus! What a tortuous way of getting to the point. I finally had to write it down to get back to sleep. On my bedside notepad is a barely legible scrawl, but with effort you can make out a puzzled protest against my native tongue: "wd have had to have had." Such a sad little puddle of verbal quicksand. 

Tonight I realize that if I didn't have these little places to hide, to sink into, I'd have to be with the crumbling nails and the mouth sores. I'd have to face that survivors tell me different stories about ACT chemo than the doctor does, and that the survivors have a vested interest in telling me the full truth and my doctor has a vested interest in withholding it. Tonight if I get scared or sad, I am going to look for another tiny place to hide in my mind. I don't know where it will be, but this time I will feel more grateful that those places are there.