It's Always Something (27 page)

Greenspan wanted to give the first chemo right then. He said, ‘It’s nothing, this 5-FU, you won’t have any reaction—let’s give it to you today.”

I said no. I wasn’t ready yet. So it was agreed that the All-New, Improved Connecticut Oncologist that Gene had found and whom I’d never met would administer the chemo to me in Connecticut through Greenspan’s orders the next week.

Gene was giggling all the way home in the car because he was so happy about how this had gone. We came home and we told Grace and she was happy, too. I think her ambition was to get Anthony out of the kitchen. Anthony said in his very even, balanced way that he thought it was a good idea to hear a doctor say this could happen and he thought he could balance the food in such a way to make the chemo much easier for me to take, although he said he didn’t know a lot about chemo and what that did to the system, but he wanted to learn. He was very kind and understanding about it. I thought to myself,
Well, now I’ll have two things attacking the cancer, this chemo and the macrobiotics.

The first treatment caused some vomiting and some irritation of my esophagus. Of course I still had a partial bowel obstruction. A week later when I had the second treatment, which was two drugs, I had some more vomiting and more irritation so it became even more difficult to eat.

The chemo made the macrobiotic food taste terrible to me. I craved more salt. The bland food tasted so horrible that I’d gag when I looked at it. Finally, I stopped eating it.

At the same time, it was my forty-second birthday at the end of June. Judy and her husband and baby and my girlfriend Pam were camped out twenty minutes from the house. They had been there for two days. I had said I didn’t want to see them, but I got sentimental and changed my mind. It was like some of my life was coming back. They looked at me and said, “Gilda, you’ve got to eat.” I was thin and pale and weak. They convinced me to have a hamburger. It tasted delicious. My neighbors invited us all over for my birthday and Grace made me a white cake with white frosting from scratch. That was the end of macrobiotics. Anthony had to go back to New York. But he wasn’t upset; he understood that things had changed. I no longer needed a macrobiotic cook. Everyone agreed that the most important thing was that I eat something—anything—because I was so thin. Everyone—including Anthony—was interested in getting me well again. But even though I went off the macrobiotic diet, which was too strict for me now, I’d learned a great deal about the importance of balanced nutrition in treating and preventing illness. And most important, I had taken action against the disease.

I was back on intensive chemotherapy every week. But my partially obstructed bowel was continually irritated by the therapy. I had begun my treatments severely underweight and dehydrated—in fact, almost at the point of starvation. I needed blood transfusions, and my CA-125 had risen to 245. The All-New, Improved Connecticut Oncologist got a Connecticut gastroenterologist in on my case and they wanted me to go into the hospital for a while to go on intravenous feeding to build up my strength.

I was emphatically opposed to that. No hospital. To me that seemed like the beginning of the end. Fortunately, this oncologist knew that there was a group of licensed intravenous nurses who had their own business called Home Intravenous Therapy. Medical patients could have intravenous food or antibiotics or chemotherapy at home because these four women were licensed to come and set things up and put in IVs or access a patient’s Port-A-Cath at home. They were on call twenty-four hours a day. They did this service because they realized a lot of people are in the hospital unnecessarily.

So early in July, Joy and Linda and Louise and Cindy came to work for me. They ordered all the things I needed in the house: the IV pole, the pump to power the intravenous tube, all the medical supplies I needed. At night I was put on food supplements intravenously through my Port-A-Cath. Just the way Jodi was there for me in California, these four miraculous, salt-of-the-earth women appeared just when I needed them. They were wonderful nurses, very near my own age and all married and raising families. They were able to draw my blood at home, take it to the lab and call in the results to my doctors. Everything was set up so I didn’t have to go to any doctor’s office and I didn’t have to go to any hospital. Each of the four nurses would come on a different day.

The All-New, Improved Connecticut Oncologist was a good doctor, kind and compassionate. He gave me my chemos through my Port-A-Cath at home once a week, every Monday or Tuesday. Then whichever nurse was available would come too. They called it “the chemo party.” Those nurses would make me laugh, or they’d dance around the bed and entertain me. They also got me to wear an ice cap on my head to help save my hair. It’s a weird-looking sort of helmet that cools the skin and blood vessels in the scalp and inhibits the flow of chemical-laden blood to that part of the body. The chemo parties were like the scene in
Cinderella
when the little birds and the mice come to wake Cinderella up in the morning. One minute you think her life’s so bad, but then she has all these little friends. That’s what I felt like.

Gene was committed to doing a movie with Richard Pryor that was to begin shooting in August in the New York area. He hadn’t worked during all of my illness, and we both knew it was important he take this job. But in July he was exhausted from our months of uncertainty, and he needed a vacation. He decided to go to the south of France for ten days. Grace stayed with me and I had the IV nurses, plus my girlfriends Judy and Pam, who came back for extra loving care.

But while Gene was away, I became terribly ill. I began to throw up all the time. I couldn’t hold down any food at all. The chemo was making my bowel obstruction worse. The bowel was closing to the point where I had an almost complete obstruction. Not only could my intestines not absorb food, they couldn’t even absorb the natural secretions that my body produced. Bile would accumulate until I became nauseous and had to throw up. I could not eat. Only the intravenous feedings and fluids at night kept me alive. My bedroom looked like a hospital room. I was so weak from chemotherapy that I had to have four blood transfusions. It was the most frightening episode in my entire illness, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I was so sick that I couldn’t even tell what was going on. I didn’t know whether the chemo or the obstruction was making me sick. And because this happened during those ten days when Gene was away, I confronted my biggest fear: the fear of abandonment. I discovered that even with Gene away, there were people to love and support me.

Greenspan knew I had the obstruction, but he had to bring the cancer back under control before I could have surgery to open my intestines. Greenspan conferred with the doctors in Connecticut and decided to continue the chemo while giving me my nutrition through the IV at night. I was caught in a never-never land of hope and faith and something—maybe a miracle. As awful as all of this was, I didn’t become depressed. I was scared, but things were so horrible that I didn’t dare give into depression. During the worst of it I remember sitting up and saying, “I’m not going to give up. I’m going to fight.” I had the four nurses and my girlfriends Judy and Pam helping me. And Grace was always there, keeping everything under control. One nurse, Joy, used to come over every day just to make sure I’d get out and drive in the car or do something. Another nurse, Linda, always found the time to talk to me about cancer philosophy and fear. All four nurses became my friends and enriched my life. They made me get dressed and washed every day. It was still summer and beautiful and sometimes I’d sit on the back porch in a chair and just stare. I didn’t have the energy to do anything. I couldn’t eat or even drink because I would just throw up. When I felt really hungry, I would take the food in my mouth and chew it, and then spit it out into a napkin, just to have the taste. But as the chemotherapy continued, my taste buds changed and I lost interest in doing even that.

By the time Gene came back, I was out of the most desperate part of the situation. I was very thin still, but I looked better—more color in my cheeks and more confidence that I would get well. My hair was thinning and my eyelashes were falling out, but otherwise I looked all right. My face was rounding out from the low doses of steroids I was on with the chemo. Because of the testosterone, I began to grow a little mustache and hairs on my chin. I bleached everything blond and complained to Greenspan, “What are you doing to me?”

And he’d get that look on his face that said, “We’re talking about your life, what’s a beard and a mustache? You won’t have that forever.”

So I had hair falling out of my head and growing on my face at the same time.

Everything continued this way—nighttime feedings and vomiting during the day—through July and August and September. I continued to get chemotherapy just about every week. The time in between would go so fast that I couldn’t believe it. All of a sudden it would be chemo day again and I’d be nervous. But the nurses would come and cheer me up, being really positive, talking about getting well and how the chemo was working. And there were more good signs—I was putting on weight and I was looking better and stronger.

What do you do when you don’t eat? When I got up in the morning I didn’t have breakfast, not even anything to drink. Instead I got interested in catalogues, sending away for stuff. In fact, I became obsessed with catalogues. Beside my bed I had stacks of catalogues. When I got up in the morning, the first thing I did was go through them. Then later in the day I’d send away for stuff. Within about ten days, things started arriving in the mail—all kinds of things: stamps with my name on them and a scarf that had real hair bangs attached to it in the front and an umbrella with musical notes on it and a talking picture frame. There was a Catholic high school in Joy’s neighborhood that had bingo on Tuesday and Thursday nights. So after all my years in show business, I got back to the bingo table, where I really belonged. No one recognized me. I played sixteen cards at once and didn’t win, but Joy won forty dollars and another nurse, Cindy, won ten dollars.

One night while Pam was with me, she and Joy and I stayed up till three o’clock in the morning. We were taping shows off the radio and dancing in the kitchen. After Joy hooked me up to my intravenous feeding, we got talking. I was doing most of the talking, about my career and my times in television, things that were really amazing that had happened in my life. Talking about all this got me excited about living, the way slumber parties did when I was a kid. I thought,
What are we doing up until three o’clock in the morning?
Joy had a family at home; this was crazy. But I joked with them about it, saying, “Sure, you two can stay up. You’re not battling cancer, you’ll be fine! I can’t stay up this late!”

But we couldn’t stop talking. There was something wonderful about it, exciting and defiant. We all enjoyed it and it made me feel that my body was turning toward life. My creative juices were flowing again. I went back to writing my book, and an amazing thing happened—I realized one day that I had my joy back. Even with all that was happening to me, I was dancing in the kitchen, I was staying up until three in the morning, I was laughing again, I was making jokes, I was going to bingo. I was enjoying my glorious life.

By September, Dr. Greenspan, my Connecticut gastroenterologist, and the All-New, Improved Connecticut Oncologist decided it was time to do something about my obstructed bowel. I had been on chemo once a week for almost three months. My CA-125 had dropped from 245 to 90. My weight was up to 114 pounds and my blood tests were pretty good. But before I could have surgery, I had to go through a whole series of tests. I had an upper GI done, which showed the blockage was in the upper intestines. I had an MRI scan, which is similar to a CAT scan, and it showed no evidence of nodules in the abdomen and no liver problem. I had yet another barium enema, which showed no blockage in the lower bowel (I’m happy to report that the enema technique has been improved in the last two years, so it is faster and less humiliating).

On October 3, 1988, I had my third operation in three years, this time in a big hospital in New York City with a top New York surgeon and a New York gynecological oncologist in charge. They were able to repair the blockage. Biopsies and a saline wash revealed no evidence of tumor activity. I’d be able to eat again, and the Greenspan chemo program was working.

When I came out of surgery, I had a nasogastric tube in my nose and a catheter in my crotch, an intravenous feeding tube in my Port-A-Cath and a peripheral intravenous line in my arm. I went from 114 pounds to 134 pounds in two days because I was retaining fluid. Every part of me was blown up, and I spent a very uncomfortable two weeks in my room overlooking Central Park. Greenspan came to see me every day and my case was followed by what seemed like twenty-five residents and interns, who all looked to me as though they were still in high school. I couldn’t have the tube removed from my nose until there were signs that my bowel was working. The indication, if you can believe it, would be that I could pass gas. After ten long days, lo and behold, I had gas! When I had a bowel movement, I called Greenspan’s office to tell him. He was out so the receptionist asked, “Can I take a message?”

I said, “This is Gilda Radner. Tell Dr. Greenspan my bowels moved.”

When I was sixteen years old, my girlfriend and I had gone up north to her parents’ cottage. Because we went to a girls’ school, we didn’t see boys that much. There were a bunch of boys up north, so we invited them over. We had beer and some food, pretzels, popcorn and stuff. We were all sitting around, and the guys were cute and everything, but the girls were on one side and the boys on the other. We were telling jokes and talking and laughing and I started to laugh, and by accident I passed gas. Everyone looked at me with suppressed laughter. It was obvious where the noise had come from. I was devastated. It was a nightmare—here’s one of my first times with guys and I do the most disgusting thing. What guy will ever like me? How can they even think of me romantically? Now here it was twenty-five years later, and I had all these guys
waiting
for me to fart! Waiting on the edge of their seats for me to pass wind. Here’s life coming around again. All these cute, handsome residents and I say, “I passed gas today!” and they are so happy about it. I think they were even attracted to me. Greenspan was so happy he called back and said, “You made my day, you made my day!”