Part 6 & 7

Part 6 Vanity tumbles, and observations on the bald look


One evening soon after starting treatments, I notice the bandage on my neck is oozing some substance compliments of the surgery two weeks ago. I had replaced the bandage with a flesh colored band-aid (which looked much better), but now have to return to the bandage. My neck is improving, though, with much less swelling. I am obsessing, however, about hair loss. I ask my oldest daughter Breanna if she would mind if daddy were bald. She makes a face, replies that she wouldn’t like it, and walks away. Later she returns, smiles, and I feel somewhat better.

I soon become an ardent observer of shaved heads. Athletes on TV, commenting on the game during halftime. They smack of cool and hip – bulked up physiques, sharp suits. (ex-football star Shannon Sharpe indeed!) An African-American news commentator on CNN also looks impressive. In contrast, though, are the patients in the waiting room. Pale, skinny, hairless, hunched over and staring blankly. Fragile shadows of people. Nothing hip about that, just a sickly neon sign saying “look at me, don’t I look strange and pitiable?”

After school one day, Bree comes up to hug me but I pull away, fearful that she would press against my portable chemo pack. She leaves, tearful. When she returns, I try to explain, but she huffs and angrily walks away again. Becah enters and acts as an intermediary. I am eventually able to talk to my daughter, but it underscores her difficulty adjusting to all this, her awareness of my condition, her fears of change and her need for security and predictability at home.



Part 7 The first days of everything is different/Of pills and patience


On the night of the Orange Bowl, Kool and the Gang are shouting “Celebrate” during the halftime show. Now this is uplifting! Of course, it helps that I have always been one who feels more optimistic at night. Ever since the troubled teen years, I have always found it easier to dream during evening time of how life would work out better. It was always the cold light of day that would shake you back to reality. Despite these tendencies, I actually wake up early the next morning feeling calmer despite not sleeping well all night. I sleep on the couch now (as I will also on successive nights) because it is a shorter distance to the floor and therefore less likely that I will jump up and disconnect the chemo pump that had been going all night. I also feel fortified by having two registered nurses that are staying in my home overnight (being my wife’s mother and her grandmother).

A few hours later I find myself anxiously pacing in the doctor’s office as my pump is beeping. Do I disconnect it now? Is it running out of fluid and pumping air into me? Should I initiate panic mode? I look around at all the others who have arrived before me. They have a right to treatment too, and they got here first. But let me go in the room now! Sad that I have been reduced to this…

As I wait, there are also thoughts running through my mind regarding which pills to take and when to take them. I never feel comfortable with pills, and how they may adversely affect my one and only body. Even in the halcyon days of college, when someone approached me and said, “here, try this blue pill” I would back off. What is it? Where did you get it? How do you know what it will do? Now I was having the same concerns, no less because these are “professionals” doling out the pills. I’ve seen the tiny print on the back pages of ads in magazines. Scary. There are substances running through my veins (chemo, itself a poison ravaging the disease and my body which it inhabits) and I am ingesting prescribed pills. Some you take one hour before food, some with meals only, etc. How will all this affect my treatment? One doctor tells me not to take my biotin supplement (which I was taking to improve my skin), but multivitamins are deemed okay. When they give me meds that generate adverse secondary problems, they simply prescribe others that will counter those effects. (“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small”). Straight out of Alice in Wonderland.