Closing Chapters, But Not the Book
Feeling like you're in the light at the end of the tunnel, and the transformative power of New York rich kid indie rock.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you something deeply uncool about me. When I go on work trips, I listen to Interpol every morning because I think it helps me project a cooler and more relaxed vibe into the world.
Most of my work trips involve busy trade show floors where I have to do interviews and generally just interact with dozens of people. I am a naturally anxious person. I like people, I like meeting people, I like talking to people. But I’m still susceptible to social anxiety like anyone. And the sensory overload of a convention center doesn’t help. To combat that, I’ve started this practice where every morning as I leave my hotel room – usually in a suit and often in sunglasses, which helps – I listen to Interpol in an attempt to let the feeling of steely, well-dressed aloofness verging on bored superiority wash over me, setting my baseline at a chiller speed so even if my wheels start turning comparatively faster when I’m working, I’m still a pretty fucking cool guy.
Or at least I pretend to be one. Visualization and manifesting work to a degree.
The enormity of having cancer doesn’t hit you immediately. At least I don’t think it did for me. It sort of unfurls with each step you take. You’re getting the port put in and you still don’t think about the fact that you’re doing chemo until you’re actually getting chemo pumped into you and you think, Whoa, I’m actually doing chemo. I’m doing chemo because I have cancer. If anything big-picture hit me that first day it was the financial part of it, and even that didn’t hit until I was paying the first bills. What a country.
I remember a few times walking into the hospital and seeing the sign out front: Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Cancer center. That would hit me.
Holy shit, you have cancer. You’re going to the cancer center because you have cancer. YOU have cancer. You HAVE cancer. You have CANCER! You’re at the Cancer Center, Cancer Boy!
Yada yada, I got better, because I spent enough time at the Cancer Center.
The bad things didn’t hit in one fell swoop, and neither did the good things. It’s little victories, little reminders about how much better things are now than they were then. There were some milestone moments that felt bigger than the rest. Getting a call that the cancer was responding to the chemo rocked. Having the surgery to remove it and hearing that it was successful was good, but preceded a hellish week in the hospital when my remaining digestive system forgot how to digest and I spent the time throwing up green liquid - often on the floor/myself when the nursing staff was too busy with other patients to help Puke Boy (my new nickname since I didn’t have cancer anymore. I don’t know why they wouldn’t just call me Normal Boy.)
That first clean scan that fall hit like a lottery win. I remember biking as fast as I could just because I had so much energy to spend – not least because I had spent the morning and early afternoon at various coffee shops, too afraid to go home to an empty house and wait for the news, so caffeine and adrenaline rushed me around the city at what felt like the fastest my bike had ever gone. I’ve made a habit of posting the “OH YEAH” part of the Menzingers’ “In Remission” every time I get a good scan.
Here it is:
It’s fun when one of your favorite bands has a song called “In Remission” where there’s a big fuckin guttural OH YEAH to encapsulate exactly how you feel – even if it’s at odds with what the band had in mind when they wrote it. It feels like a “the world is a simulation” moment to me. And of course it is. It’s a simulation for me, because I am the main character, and the main character can’t die that early in the movie, unless it’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” or something.
It felt awesome every single time I got a good scan result back. The returns never once diminished, and posting the “OH YEAH” part of “In Remission” was still as fun as it always had been. But each good scan didn’t feel like the end, or a victory even. It felt a bit like in a video game where you need to stay up in the air or keep some sort of power-up alive, and you hit a little icon or something to keep it going. Each one is progress and every successive scan makes it less likely that it’ll come back, but it never felt like the end of a chapter or the end of the story – would it ever?
Running the risk of being George W. Bush on the boat with the big “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him while the mission was very much not accomplished, I’ll say that this year feels a little different. Barring one scan whose results weren’t as clearly good as the rest, where I skipped the “In Remission” post, this year has been as close to “done” as I’ve ever felt.
Part of it is the fact that my oncologist – a very straight shooter who once when I joked that everyone thought I was going to die except me she said “uh huh” – used the word “survivor” for the first time, and not as in “hey did you watch Survivor last night? It’s still good, can you believe it? Anyway, you are going to die.”
May 9 will be three years since a surgeon rooted around in my guts, removed a sizeable chunk of it, stapled together what was left, and wished me the best. My doctor says three years is a pretty good indicator of cure, although they can’t legally declare me cancer-free until five years clean.
I got the port taken out of my chest, for one. That seemed like a pretty good “I’m putting all of this shit behind me” moment. Having that put in was one of the first “Oh wow, this is real” moments.
For those who don’t know, chemo is poison, and the trick is to kill me just enough that it kills the cancer without fully killing me in the process, and it’s often better to administer especially gnarly batches of chemo into a larger vein rather than a smaller one in your arm, so they surgically implant a port with a tube into your jugular that they access through your chest. It looks like in a movie where a bug or something is crawling under your skin, but stops just below your collar bone. I asked the doctor if I could listen to a podcast while he put it in, because “waking sedation” sounded like I’d still be too aware and uncomfortable, and he told me “You can do whatever you want.” I don’t remember anything from the episode of Maron I was listening to, but I do remember being wheeled out having remembered that there was a soccer game on, and then giving the thumbs down to the dreaded Arsenal scoring. What anesthesia?
Anyway, I got that port out, and the same doctor who put it in was the one to take it out. I was fully awake this time, and could hear him clearly say “Come to papa” as he pulled it out from under my skin. I chuckled because the stereo was also playing “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” and when the opening line said “There’s a port” I wanted to say “Not anymore!” but I didn’t want to break his concentration or cause any jerky motions while he had a scalpel next to my jugular vein.
Leaving the hospital that day felt like a win. It feels fucking awesome to leave the hospital feeling like a winner rather than having your soul sucked out of you either through chemical poison, radiation poison, bad news, or a combination of the three.
It somehow didn’t even feel like a win when I got to ring the bell. THE bell. The bell is a huge aspect of the public’s understanding of cancer research. You get pumped full of chemo, your hair falls out, you run to the bathroom to puke, and then when you’re done the treatment you ring the bell. Roll credits.
I’ll once again write about the power of visualization here. When I was in my little chemo cubby, chillin in the chair with my cold mittens to protect the nerves in my fingies and dozing off to the sound of The Price is Right, I’d sometimes hear someone get to ring the bell. Out in the hallway, the nurses would stand around and recite this cute little poem, and then you’d hear the bell ring, and everyone would cheer. I’d think about how I can’t wait to be the one ringing the bell – partially because it meant that I’d be done with chemo, but partially because it’s fun to be the toast of the town for a second. Everyone loves to be the one who blows out the candles more than one of the people who sings “Happy Birthday.” I think it’s OK that one piece of your end-goal of “being done with cancer” can be selfishly wanting attention. Anything that helps you get to that point seems fine by me.
Anyway, after I had done IV chemo, there was no fanfare, but I figured that just meant because I had to do radiation next (and I’d still take chemo pills every day. They had a little C on them, for “chemo” I assume). Every day I walked back to the radiation area and I’d pass the bell. I’d think about how I can’t wait for my turn, and how I’d ring the hell out of it like I was a minor local celebrity and the Sixers are about to come out. When my last session finally came, there was some confusion about the extent of the treatment on my lymph nodes. It’s a little inside baseball that I won’t get into now, but all you need to know is that we were confused and upset and I, at least, felt like physical shit. That said, I wanted to ring that god damn bell because I would be double dog damned if I went back into that basement again. They obviously weren’t aware that this was my last day, so I told Michele to hold on and asked the front desk if I could ring the bell since it was my last day. They said yes.
I walked over and rang it half-heartedly, because when you ring it you realize it is a bell that can be quite loud and sick people are just trying to chill and ignore the Skyrizi “Nothing is everything” jingle playing incessantly on the waiting room TV and a bell isn’t helping any of that. I got a half-hearted “yay” from the room – sort of the same you’d expect from a half-full restaurant after the waitstaff does some whole birthday song and dance on a weekday afternoon. I flashed a quick thumbs-up to Michele while she filmed me and posted it on Instagram to get that attention that I desperately craved.
After I got the port ripped out of me, the next time I was at Penn was to speak with their board about the phenomenon of colon cancer among young, handsome people. My oncologist has known me long enough to know that I like to riff and talk about myself, so she thought I’d be a good candidate to be there and say “Hey, look at me, I am flesh and blood proof that this is happening to young and handsome people at an alarming rate, money please!”
I hopped off the bus on that warm spring day in my best business casual clothes and looked at the Abramson Cancer Center sign. There have been a few times during this process where I’ve thought about time’s non-linear structure, like when I was in the hospital after surgery and all I wanted to do was go swimming, so I got in the ocean as soon as I could upon release, even though the Atlantic was frigid, I knew there was still that version of me in the hospital bed who would have killed to do that.
On this day, I thought about all of the days where I walked up to the hospital and saw the word “cancer” and realized that they were talking about me, so I made sure to really appreciate the fact that I was now going in arguably the healthiest I’ve been in my whole life as a sterling example of surviving it.
Behind my sunglasses, I was cooling down my brain by listening to Interpol. Because I was excited. I didn’t used to be excited when I came here.