It Takes a Worried Man (9 page)

Wednesday before Thanksgiving I have a half day at work, and these are almost always terrible, but today it’s not. My students are working on performing scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
, and we spend our eighty-minute class period rehearsing and giving people feedback on their scenes right up until dismissal time, and I believe this is the first time in my eight years of teaching that I have felt like I had a really good and productive day on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

I head home early to meet Kirsten and we head down to Blockbuster so I can rent PlayStation games.  I quickly discover the joy and horror of this experience. The joy is that they have a ton of games, and you can play them for 4 bucks instead of 40, and if you come across one that really sucks, you don’t feel like you got royally screwed. The pain is that they give you the game without any instruction booklet. Now, I’m sure that your average twelve-year-old finds this no impediment at all to his enjoyment, but to an old man like me it is daunting to face this controller with twelve buttons and two joysticks without any indication of how I’m supposed to use them.

We then head over to a great secondhand clothing store where we get a lot of Rowen’s clothes because she needs a jacket. We find one for six bucks, and I also find a heavy-weight Champion sweatshirt bearing the name of a school I actually attended, also for six bucks. We also stop at the auto parts store to get a replacement headlight (I have been driving around with a padiddle for about three weeks now, and this is much more humiliating than the fact that the door to my gas tank won’t close and flaps in the wind or the fact that the car is covered in birdshit from parking under a tree) and a replacement bulb for our inside light, which has been burned out for at least two years. What can I say, it just never seemed urgent.

We then head over to the only one of the three all-vegetarian restaurants in town that we have never tried. The other two are run by the same people and are good but overly-greasy Chinese/Vietnamese food with dingy atmosphere and indifferent service. This place, on the other hand, is beautiful on the inside, the service is friendly and relatively good, and the food is celestial.  We spend the whole meal going, “Wow, this place is beautiful…so much nicer than the other place…The bathroom here isn’t a filthy hellhole like the other place…Ooh, try this, it’s delicious…”

It is really nice to have a date with Kirsten. Even running errands with just the two of us is a wonderful change, something we get to do very rarely. It is a lot of fun. We laugh, we make jokes, we gush over how great the food is. She is my best friend, and I love just hanging around with her. It is something we don’t get to do often enough, even before she got sick. Much of the time it feels like we are co-workers in the child-rearing workplace, and, you know, it’s a fun job, but it’s also nice to remember why we got married in the first place.

We come home and, like a fool, I start looking through these children’s books that Kirsten’s friend Jen got for us. Mind you, we asked her to look for this kind of thing, so she came through.  They are books about kids whose parents have cancer, and I knew they existed, but they are tough to find. There are like a million books about kids getting sick and being hospitalized, mostly from the 70′s and mostly having to do with getting tonsils taken out, which is something that I am sure the HMO’s make them do in the office with a hot pair of tweezers these days anyway, but the books about sick parents are hard to find. We thought that seeing her experience reflected in a book might help Rowen feel that what she was going through was normal, just like having your home invaded by a puckish, bipedal talking cat or other such normal stuff you find in children’s books.

So I read through one, and it’s about this girl and how her mom loses her hair, and how she remembers cheering her mom on in some 10k race and now she can’t get out of bed, and in the end she starts to get better, but she says she can’t promise that she won’t be sick anymore. And I start to sob. Now, I’m not talking about the stoic, tear-rolling-down-the-cheek kind of crying I did, for example, while watching
Romeo and Juliet
with my class, nor am I talking about the more expressive twisted-mouth crying I often allow myself while I am walking to work and no one’s around. No, I am talking about full-on, out of control sobbing. You know the “Ahheeeeeeeehh…. heeeeeennnnhhhh… heeeeeeeenh” my-heart’s-being-ripped-out kind of sobbing that, if you’re lucky, you have not done very much as an adult. And which I have not allowed myself to do since this whole thing started.

Kirsten comforts me, and I apologize, because, you know, she’s doing my job and I’m doing hers right now, and she says it’s ok, and I can’t stop sobbing, and the thing is that the vocalization that accompanies it is strangely high-pitched. What I’m trying to say is that I sound like a girl. A little girl. And it just kind of strikes me as funny, and I manage to sob out, “don’t know why…..can’t stop crying like a girl……” and this strikes me as really funny, and then I start to laugh hysterically, and this is also not the manliest sound, totally “hee-hee-hee-hee-hee” kind of laughing rather than hearty “ha ha ha’s”, and it strikes me that my laughter sounds just like my crying, and I keep alternating between hysterical sobs and hysterical laughter, and I guess that just about sums up what it’s like to be me these days.

I keep being reminded that making fun of someone makes you become them. No, I haven’t bought Phish tickets or any Ecuadoran knitted goods yet, but I know that the group of people I have probably been harshest on during this whole thing are people who are going through something similar but not as severe. I have written several snide and shitty things about them, and at one point my mom sent me some thing that some guy had written for one of the Sunday insert magazines about how he dealt with his wife’s lumpectomy. Lumpectomy, yet! It talked about how he comforted his wife and assured her that she wouldn’t lose her hair from the chemo, and my reaction at the time was, “Shut the fuck up, you fuckin pussy!”  (to get the full effect you have to do it in the Southwestern Ohio rural accent, because that is the accent in which those words were frequently hurled at me as a youth.)  “What I wouldn’t give to have Kirsten have a fucking lumpectomy! Don’t talk to me about losing hair, man, we’re worried about her losing her fucking life!”

Ok. So then yesterday I am reading in the paper about Geddy Lee’s new solo album. Let me say as an aside that I was listening to Rush when we had our marathon appointment with Dr. J. Well, not during the appointment, except when they drew the curtain and felt Kirsten up and I needed to feel like I was somewhere else. I found listening to “Red Barchetta” very comforting because a) it fuckin’ rocks, dude! and b.) it sort of reminds me of middle school. Now you know I’m in the midst of a horrible experience if reminding myself of the hormonal hell that was middle school is comforting by comparison.

Anyway, so why is Geddy Lee putting out a solo album? Well, it turns out that Rush is kind of on hold because drummer Neal Peart lost his only child in a car wreck and his wife to cancer in the space of like a year. And so that kind of puts me in my place. I mean this in the nicest way, Neal, and I am glad you’re still with us, but I really think I would’ve killed myself. Well, actually I know I am way too cowardly to kill myself, but I look at where I am and where Neal Peart is and all I can think of is him reading this and going, “shut the fuck up, you fuckin’ pussy!”

After telling her that her first round of chemo didn’t work, Dr. J schedules her for a second round that involves some kind of speedball of two drugs that have a synergistic effect, or something. I get all this second hand because I don’t go to any of Kirsten’s appointments. Her mom and her friend Olga go with her a lot, and I go to work. It is ok because her mom really wants to go and, as I’ve said, I hate to leave work, and Kirsten doesn’t seem to mind, so everybody’s happy. Well, actually, everybody’s kind of miserable, but you know what I mean.

Dr. J also tells Kirsten that they want to get two rounds of chemo that work under her belt before she is hospitalized, so her hospitalization will be pushed back by three weeks. This is a big blow to us, because we were starting to make plans and my mom was on the verge of buying a plane ticket, but more importantly, we were just getting psyched to be done with this. Now there is more waiting, which is what so much of this has been. Waiting for test results, waiting to see if the chemo worked, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting in examining rooms, waiting for phone calls.

Kirsten has her second round of chemo, and once again she tolerates it really well and doesn’t puke at all and is kind of tired all the time but not dishrag-on-the-couch tired, and I have lots of blank days and a few angry days, and eventually it is time for her follow-up appointment, and this is when we will finally find out if this second round worked or not.

I have been tying myself in knots wondering what would happen if the second round didn’t work. I am sure it would involve switching up medicines and postponing the hospitalization again, but it would be another setback, and, it would suck. Bad news is starting to feel inevitable, because every time there has been a possibility of good news or bad news, we have gotten bad news. I am getting pretty fucking sick of the tiger, and I really want the lady, but the fact that the tiger keeps coming up makes it seem like it will again.

Kirsten goes for her appointment, and it turns out that Dr. J is overbooked or something, and I didn’t realize that doctors worked like airlines, but apparently they do, except, you know, you never have the hope of getting bumped to first class, or getting a free drink, and you damn sure don’t want a free ticket for next time. They take blood and another doctor examines her, and this is not really helpful because this doctor has never examined her before, so she doesn’t have any baseline, and Kirsten says that she thinks her tumors are shrinking, and the doctor makes some noncommittal noises, so we have to wait for the bloodwork, which takes a couple days.

At the end of our nice day before Thanksgiving, Marie the oncology nurse calls and says the first tumor marker has come back down a little and that Dr. J wants to see Kirsten next week. We don’t really know what to make of this news. It is certainly good news that it’s down, but Dr. J said she wanted to see the number halved, and Marie just said it’s down slightly. Still, the fact that it’s down at all seems good, and coupled with the fact that Kirsten thinks her tumors are shrinking, this must mean it’s working. Right?

The night before Kirsten’s appointment with Dr. J, I sleep like absolute shit. I fall into bed exhausted at ten because I was at work late watching my students perform scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
. And I am bolt awake at 12:30., with snatches of lines from the play going through my mind (“too flattering sweet to be substantial” gets big airplay for some reason) along with snatches of songs and other stupid sounds and thoughts. I am not worrying, I don’t feel nervous. I just can’t sleep. I get up and turn on the TV and watch some ads for some really remarkable and amazing new products, and catch a couple of minutes of
Car Wash
, which is like this amazing 70′s time capsule with giant-Afroed men, stereotyped black revolutionaries, stereotyped rich kid revolutionaries, and Starsky and Hutch’s Huggy Bear, Antonio Fargas, as the stereotyped, scarf-bedecked gay man, who, in the few minutes I watched, told the angry stereotyped revolutionary: “I’m more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever get!” Meow!

I finally fall back asleep at 3:30, and I am up again at 5:30. Kirsten’s dad has stayed over and comes out of the bathroom naked and asks me for a towel and I am humbled by the fact that he is 62 and looks way better naked than I do. I go to work and still feel like complete shit, and many cups of tea and some positively sludgy Puerto Rican coffee that one of my colleagues brews up for our department meeting don’t help.

While I’m practically dead by the time I get home, Kirsten is bouncing off the walls. “How was your appointment?” I ask. Today is the day of another big followup appointment with Dr. J.  I didn’t go because we are anticipating that I’m going to need to miss a lot of work, so we are trying to save up my absences for when she is totally incapacitated. This is Kirsten’s idea, but I am all too happy to go along with it.

“It was really really good,” she says. “First of all, the woman who drew my blood was an
artist
. I felt
nothing
. And then Dr. J did the examination, and she said the tumors were definitely shrinking, and one tumor marker is up, but she thinks that’s just because, I dunno, one of the tumors is breaking up, and there might be big pieces floating around in my blood or something gross like that. So then she said, ‘well, since this is working, let’s not wait, let’s get you into the hospital next week.’”

Kirsten is practically walking on air, and I am too. All my fatigue and worry just completely fall away. I had been ready to fall over, and now I am bouncing off the walls.  It’s amazing what comes to pass for good news, but I am ecstatic that they are going to take my wife away for three weeks next week and give her so much deadly medicine that they will completely destroy her immune system and ability to make blood and that I’m going to have to live with some combination of my mother-in-law and my mother during this time. This is fucking fantastic news. At last we’re really doing it. I feel like Sherlock Holmes, shouting, “the game’s afoot!”

My hormones are out of control. I mean, yes, always, as a rule, but right now especially. This is, I am sure, partly due to the fact that, you know, chemo and sex don’t exactly mix, but I think there is that old fear of death/desire for sex thing, and I have been terribly afraid of losing Kirsten while waiting to find out if the second round of chemo worked, and I am just looking at other women all the time, even more than usual.

Now, I always have been this way to a degree, and I justify it by imagining that everybody is like this (and an unscientific poll of everyone I know who is married shows this to be true), that being married doesn’t stop you from being attracted to other people, it just (hopefully) stops you from acting on that attraction.

So I periodically get meaningless crushes, and I know that they are meaningless crushes, and we are secure enough in our relationship at this point that we can joke about our crushes, as long as they are on celebrities, so when I beg to go see
Charlie’s Angels
, Kirsten says we can go as long as I promise not to drool openly over Drew Barrymore (I manage, but just barely. She’s dreamy! And the movie kicks ass!) And I can tease Kirsten about her frequent trips to the pizza place for an eggplant parm sub and her crush on the guy who works there with the enormous tattooed biceps. Yeah, I know he’s not a celebrity, but he’s not somebody we really know, and he’s probably about as accessible to Kirsten as Drew Barrymore is to me. (She’s so dreamy!)

We are not yet to the point where we can joke about our crushes on people we actually know, though. When it became obvious several years ago that Kirsten had a crush on some British, motorcycle-riding co-worker with numerous piercings, I got cranky about it, and I never mention my work crushes. Right now I have moderate crushes on three women at work, two of whom are attached and one of whom I think is probably a lesbian. I also have crushes on two moms and one teacher at Rowen’s preschool. All are married or attached. Some woman who used to work at my school and who, I should in fairness after mocking Kirsten’s crush, admit has multiple piercings stops by my classroom to borrow books and we have some kind of interaction that she probably doesn’t think anything of but I think is flirtatious because she smiles at me a lot, and my students tease me and say they’re going to tell my wife, and I say, because I am stressed about their upcoming performances and Kirsten’s upcoming test results and lose sight of propriety, “you don’t have to tell her I’m the mack! She knows that already!”

But that night when the students are doing their scenes, Kirsten shows up with Rowen, and Rowen is wearing a fancy dress that Kirsten’s parents bought her and Kirsten is wearing her wig, which is called, “The Cory” but which we call “The Velma” because it looks kind of like Velma’s hair from
Scooby-Doo
. I know this sounds corny and probably unbelievable in light of everything I’ve just said, but it is absolutely true that the whole rest of the room just falls away because my whole life just walked in the door, and I hug and kiss them both.

The next day we are doing a lesson on adverbs and I ask the kids to add an adverb to the sentence “Diana kissed Dwayne________”and somebody says, “hotly, ” and one of the students says, “Ooo, I saw Mr. Halpin kiss his wife hotly last night,” and I say, because propriety was never my strong suit, and I am sleep deprived, “girl, that wasn’t
even
hotly,” and this gets a chorus of “Oooooooo,”s and “He means they kiss hotter than that!” s. The bottom line is that I just love her so much and I just want her back and I want her to be cured and live and live and live.