Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (27 page)

“Sure.”
I visited her home salon.
She took my chemo
‘d
o and
shaped
it into something presentable.
But
the unstated hung in the air: 
my hair’s days were numbered.

When
my
Overlake doctor
first
told me I’d have to do chemo (
with its corollary, go bald) I of course
turned toward
the Web.
I found a
company
that
offered bathing-style caps
which
you’d freeze and wear during
treatment
.
This was supposed to curb
hair loss
100%
!
I’d schlepped (in my sister’s van) all the way to Corona, and picked up as many boxes as it took to deliver a
n IKEA kitchen
.
I
filled
a cooler
with
dry ice, which
promptly
evaporate
d
overnight
.
What the caps
really
needed
was formal refrigeration
, the kind they have
in hospitals --
which
cost
s
thousands of dollars.
So much for my hair-loss
gain.
I trundled back to Corona,
reluctantly facing the truth
.
I would be as bald as my Grandpa Sam.

Tingle tingle tingle.
Drop drop drop.
All I needed was
a
cartoon
WAV
.
When I looked at the back of my head, using the two-mirror
method
, n
ausea shot through me, as bad as my hospital days.
There was nothing there but skin.
And my head looked enormous
, bigger than
an ancient alien’s!
A few wisps still remained
on
my forehead,
but they hardly hid the evidence
:
I
had less real hair than Trump!

Men reading this may say:
BFD, I
lost
my hair in my
thirties
.
Well guys, Bald Is Beautiful:
but only if you’re a male.
Our
culture,
which so pr
izes tossing tresses,
looks on
a bald woman
as
more freakish than LaToya
.
I
thought
that if I went out on the street, people would
start to
throw
things.
If I hadn’t felt Apart
just
by nature of having cancer,
now
it was literally marked on my forehead
.
Hey folks, here I am!
Over
here!

Shelley lent me a wig, but it was so itchy, I had to take it off in the car.
I tried a variety of hats, but it was pretty damned clear that under
all of them
, I was bald.
I finally settled on
bandanas
, like the
ones worn by
street
gangs
.
I decided to head
off
comments and had one embroidered
with
:
“
I have Cancer.
What’s Your Next ?”
You could say I was a tad defensive.

Here
at last
comes the moral
:
children did
not point
at me
in Target.
There was no sound of laughter; no murmuring as I
passed
; no cries of “Unclean!” when I
walked in
to
a restaurant.
People were very cool.
They saw a woman in a
head
scarf (and I had maintained those few strands in front, another exception, as Dr. Pilgrim
was quick to point
out).
So
after
all of that
fear
, that
angry
anticipation,
life went on as
it always
does
.
Cancer patients, take heart!
Nobody gives a damn if you walk around
in a hat
or if you’re naked as
a Kardashian
.
As I’
d often told
Aurora:
Nobody cares what you do.
They are
much
too busy thinking about themselves.

OK,
I did something stupid
(
again
)
.
I went to
a
Lobster Festival.
I have always loved
shellfish,
which makes me naughtily non-
kosher
, and I’ve
eaten
them by the
score
.
My picture is probably
posted
at
The Crab And Clam P.O
.
What
I didn’t realize, while devouring one-and-a-half Maine lobsters, is that
crustaceans
had become
the enemy
.
Call it a punishment
directly
from God.

The next day, September 21
st
, I didn’t feel so great.
There were two things
happening in tandem
:
my intestines
were
slowly
being twisted by that sadistic
giant hand; and I had a terrific pain in the neck (not caused by
relatives
)
that was
like being stabbed
with a
sharp
s
crewdriver
.

“Nigel, this is not good.
I think I need to call Dr.
Port
.”
I did, and he instructed
to get me
to the
hospital, stat.

Fortunately, Dr. Port was
on staff at
Los Robles
, so I could sp
are myself the “Oops!” factor at
Sinaloa.
Again, it was the same old drill.
Wait wait wait in the lobby; wait wait wait in the ward.
After six hours (this
must be
the
E.R. S
tandard) and an ultrasound, the doctor delivered
his
verdict:
I had a blood clot in the port.

“Good thing you came in,” he said cheerfully.
“If the clot
breaks apart
,
you could die
.”

Could
anything
in my cancer
treatment possibly go right?

They put me on a
new
drug, Warfarin, a blood thinner I would have to take for
as long as I had the port: a year
.
So a
long with everything
else, I would be like
Tsarevich
Alexei
, a hemophiliac who had to watch
his
every
step
(before
being
gunned down by Bolsheviks
, but that’s another story).

As with all bad commercials
, there was more!
When they discharged me from
ER,
I came home with another goodie:
Cumodin sub-
cutaneous
shots.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I got to take shots in the four quadrants of my stomach, alternating every day.
Let me tell you,
tho
se things sti
ng like a
pissed-off
bee
!
Nigel, in his continued train
ing as a doctor, had
to administer the shots
.
I
could see the day
coming
when I
would
operate
on myself, patting myself on the back and asking, “
Well, how’s
the patient?”

Was it because I’d never had cancer, or had medicine
not
been
practiced
outside the home when I was
little
?
My Mom
never gave
us shots
–
a Band-Aid was pretty much her limit
.
These days, parents must
have to
scrub in
after every
playground
fall.
If they don’t heal the wound
readily
,
they’re probably
sued for malpractice.

October 14
th
.
The
Third R
ing in
my
Big C
circus
.
Radiation.
What distinguishes
cancer
treatment – makes it so damned hard – is that just as you’re
recouping
from one phase,
they shove you into the next one.
When I
started
to feel
better
after
surgery, and
even swam
in the
Oakwoods pool, chemo
got
me with its
toxic fumes
.
When I
expelled
them
and had the temerity to eat lobster, boom!
the
n
came
sickness and radiation
.
They never
give
you
enough
ground
to
retreat
from the prior hell
.
But
Time and C
ancer
are locked
in a footrace where Time
is always the victor.

R
adiation
for me
this time
was no five-day Mammosite
picnic
.
This was the real deal, seven weeks of
treatment, five days a week.
When I first showed up at
West Hills
, I was in
terrible
shape
.
Bald
and
scarfed
,
I was
so weak from
inte
stinal
meltdown
s
that I could barely sit
.
I
sprawled,
like the way we’re supposed to recline on Passover.
My new doctor was Dr. Wolinksy.
His
name sound
ed
familiar,
and of course I found out
why
.
His
daughter had had a tryst with a
sitting
U.S. President.
Uh huh:
that one.
I wondered what
the
office
had done
once
that scandal
erupted
:
hid all the
People
s
, U
s
’
s
, and
Times
so as not to see
her
mug blazing from every cover?
He was a good man, this doctor.
Too bad his airhead
progeny
had sullied his name forever, through no fault of his own.
Sometimes, you wanted to
shove
your relatives in a spider
hole
,
like the one
that hid Saddam.

“You will undergo
35
sessions,”
Dr.
Wolinsky
told me.
He had a face like Walter Matthau.
“T
he radiation will be
directed
at
the
surgical
site, and
will
slowly
increase
toward the end
.”