My nurse is a bit odd, but she cooks a mean roasted chicken.......ALas, I am back on the blogness as I have now made it to treatment #7 of my predicted twelve. As I was told there would be a cumulative effect as I became more and more intimate with this poison. Seems ever since the beginning of my last treatment I just want to sleep and I'm having a different sort of fatigue. Oddly, this is almost better though because now I can just make the time blur away in a foggy mixture of family guy episodes, surf films and the back of my eyelids. Been getting an elixir down to help reduce my aches and my almost over the edge anxiety, a drug called adavan which is a pre-0p sedative and some special baked goods have turned this whole escapade into something nearly manageable I reckon. SO things get a little weird around here day after day by myself, the cats stare at me like I'm lazy and unemployed which I am I guess, but so are they those little bastards. It's been funny getting super deep into the computer cyberlife thing, lurking on facebook, writing two blogs and for once actually using my email to communicate with people. It's the little tasks I get to complete that would never get done or even hold a spot on my to due list. Like the other day I "had" to go get a new bulb for my Spiderman Lantern that I keep next to my bed, and also a tiny watch battery to put in another micro headlamp I have. There has been talk since I started the treatment about "chemo brain" though I hadn't really felt it I kind of wrote it off. Well now I know what those people who don't know what they're doing are talking about. I'm thinking about starting to wear a man purse around my waist to keep track of the five things in my life that I'm responsible for as to avoid leaving my wallet in the rental car, my water bottle at the hospital or the cereal in the fridge all of which were haphazardly executed this last week. "I FEEL LIKE I"M TAKING CRAZY PILLS! So, what the heck happened to the Stickman? How the what the fuck did you end up with cancer?
Last Christmas 08 I was home with the family having a generally saucy rip riding helluva good time. We got waist deep snow on Christmas day! When we got home from the mountain and for most of my visit I felt tired as the evening developed, more than usual though. One of the best times in Reno is going to the bars over the Holidays, surely something I never would miss. Well it was different last year, I was just too tired and not into it. Didn't really think twice about it other than maybe the pow days were just draining me. So we had a Christmas dinner toast and everyone wished for a better year to follow, expressively my brother who had just gone through a lame break up. Looking back now this gives me the goosebumps...... I remember thinking "This was the sickest year of my life, I'm the luckiest guy ever really, nothing truly rotten has ever happened to me" I honestly said that to myself!!!!!
When I got back to Washington I was working for LiB Tech building snowboards and had also been hired to work at one of the elementary schools as a TA in the special needs department. After my first official day working at the school I came home and my dad was putting up some siding on the house and asked me for a hand. From the time that I had had a faint cough at lunch break to the time I was fumbling to help my dad I felt like I had developed fucking malaria or something. For the next week and a half I called off work with a brutally deep yet dry cold and flooding amounts of exhaustion. In order to prove I was legitimately haggard to my employers I had to go get a follow up check up from the urgent care who had given me some anti-biotics to wrestle my symptoms down. In a possible out of step move, the nurse ordered a chest x-ray to ensure there was no pneumonia impending on my lungs. I left the clinic back to my house thinking this sickness was in the bag like the twenty others I'd waded through, " I don't have pneumonia" I said to myself. Two days later the phone rings and my x ray nurse tells me they see some surprisingly enlarged lymph node in my chest cavity and want to schedule me a CT scan.
"What does that mean"? I thought. "What do those lymph nodes do?""You have them in your chest?" "Why are mine so big?" With the news I eagerly broke out my computer and began researching what these findings could mean, Lymphoma, Leukemia, Lymphadenopathy....all daunting prospects. That day was the first day I had cried in years and years, I was so scared and confused. The cold grey Washington day felt so much darker and unjust.
I had to go to the University of Washington Medical Center for my first Biopsy which would be an outpatient surgery though I would be anesthetized. They stuck a tube and a camera scope down my throat and sliced a small portion off of one of the two now striking familiar and large toad nodes. The surgery was about an hour and a half and I woke up comfortably sedated and numb. My dad and my girlfriend wheeled me down to the car and off we went back across the Puget Sound onto the Peninsula. It took about two weeks for the results to prove that there was no malignancy and that the swelling was most likely caused by environmental effects like something I had breathed in while remodeling the house or working at the snowboard factory. Well Far Fuckin Out! I had no cancer, I just had to focus on taking care of this weird unknown lung infection. Happy Days were back!
After being confronted with such a gnarly scare I rearranged my life plans and decided it may be the best thing for me to get out of the snowboard shop, and head back to San Diego to complete my teaching credential studies. Arriving back in SoCal felt ok, nothing like I wanted it to feel like though. I had been scarred by the small town country roads, rural farming communities and huge glacial mountains in my back yard with peeling surf at their bases. The hustle and bustle that I was now back in the thick of was creating feelings of anxiety that I had never felt in my life. As it turns out the five months I spent back in San Diego going to homeopathic doctors, nutritionists and message therapists trying heal myself ,were not going to help and it was not the City, the move, or the people that were making me feel so tweaked. It was the cancer starting to really poke it's head out.
In July after a follow up blood test my inflammation rate was six times higher than it had been back in Washington and chest pains were feeling a bit too foreign and questionable to write off. I flew back to Reno where my Mom set up for me to have another Biopsy, this time they would take a full node from my collar bone region and have it tested at Stanford. Again It was an outpatient procedure and I was back on the plane the next day to San Diego to continue my life.
I had just come downstairs to grab my surf stuff to go slide when my cell phone rang. It was my mom so I knew she had the news whatever it be. I wanted to screen that call so bad.....I picked up the phone as my Mom's voice cracked and said 'I'm so sorry honey". Those four words was all she had to say as I swayed back looking for somewhere to sit down and deflate. That moment seemed like all the innocent childhood self perceptions I still clung onto were all taken away by some fuckin asshole bully guy named Life. He had hit me with a lead pipe right in the throat. I had no Idea what to do, I sat in the garage staring at all the artwork I had done when I was little and all the photos on the walls of me having great times. I cried, I couldn't believe all the innocence was gone, my life was no longer that great story I loved telling myself. I felt scared to call or tell anyone about the news, when I did call somebody I could only get through them saying "Hello" before my pre planned composure disintegrated into a muddle of tearful collapse. It took almost a week to fully comprehend the whole thing.
So off I was, I had to give notice on my killer apartment by the beach and leave my wonderful girlfriend to handle the final moving procedures. I packed my van with all I could stuff and drove to Reno in the beginning of October 2009. Leaving behind my jobs, house, girlfriend, school and happiness to go battle the unknown with my Mom by my side. The first week was staging, I had two heart scans, a CT scan, A PET scan, and a bone marrow biopsy. The bone marrow test alone will forever be the gnarliest most humbling thing that this experience will deal me. You never want one of those. So after two weeks and a stream of tests I swam away with Stage 2B Hodgkin's lymphoma. No organ or bone marrow infections. I get chemo every other week for 24 weeks and then a balmy dose of radiation in April to zorch whatever pesky death is left.
It's January now, over halfway into this mess and I'm having fun with it I suppose. It's weird to see how scared i can make myself and then how easy it is to bounce back by taking in the little things and thinking about all the people that encourage me and make me so strong. I miss you all so much. It was so great to hear from all you SB friends who I haven't talked to in so long. Believe it or not the comments I get on this lame little blog give me so much positive outlook and encouragement I find myself looking everyday to hear from a familiar face. I'm winning this because I have you all! LOve you guys, THanks for listening, SICKSTICK
I also write some potentially comical and insightful surf junk as Kenny Bloggins over at mitchsnorth.blogspot.com. Have a gander.
