No one wants to talk about my mortality but it’s almost all I think about.
Let’s face it, kids, the odds are that the metastases in my liver are going to kill me, probably some time in these first five years after diagnosis — which means in all likelihood I have 4 years left, maybe, on the outside.
If I make it to 5 or even 2 or 3, the odds are good that the cancer will come back after surgery, requiring more surgery and more chemo. That’s a given in everything I’ve read on the subject.
(I know most people are looking for “happy” cancer blogs. Well, that’s someone else’s job, I guess.)
So, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Adam, says in the cancer/buddy movie 50/50, constantly insisting that “everything’s going to be all right” and “you’ll get through this” is simply not helpful.
(On the other hand, as Adam’s best friend, Kyle, says, “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds!” That’s comforting, but only because Seth Rogen said it.)
Last week I met the surgeons who will be cutting me open – 6 surgeons in a room, all of them intensely interested in working on my ass. One of them digitally examined me, roughly and with two fingers. He was a hairy bear with a beard and under different circumstances it might have been hot. Instead, it hurt the rest of the day. Combine that with the sunburned, infected skin of my ass crack, and my butt just isn’t doing too well.
Because of that, the radiation doctor has stopped radiotherapy until my skin improves. I’ve unilaterally stopped the oral chemo, as well, without consulting the docs at Marie Curie. The hand-foot syndrome has gotten pretty bad. Even holding a toothbrush in my red, red hand hurts and often I can’t walk, I hobble. That dime-sized blister just will not go away. And, oh yeah, my skin around the head of my penis is red and blistered again. That’s a side effect I haven’t read about.
The head surgeon told me to get an MRI ten weeks after my radiation/chemo cycle ends. Then they’d schedule surgery. He seemed to pull that number out of the air, though, so I don’t know whether this is standard operating procedure or if March is the earliest they can get me in.
My oncologists had already told me that they’d keep me on oral chemo in the weeks before the surgery in order to curtail the spread of the metastasis in my liver. I just didn’t think it would be 10 frakin’ weeks to wait!
Right now, I don’t get the sense that anyone is thinking about my quality of life, not to mention the quality of my death. But if all I have left is 4 years then the quality of my life seems really, really important right now.
But, if I look — and I don’t even have to look hard — quality is really hard to find.
Juanele AR is done so I don’t have a steady income now. It will take a couple months to ramp up the next project I have in mind. (However, the surgery is in a couple months.) The Art Walk income is sporadic and if I don’t have the energy to give it myself then my take is cut in half. The affiliate porn business is very slow — who buys porn these days?
Without that benefit, I would have no cash at all.
To top it all off, last week, because there was a 2-day party in my flat, and yeah, this cancer patient needs to sleep (a party which, by the way, made no money for Juanele), I stayed at a hostel in San Telmo. And my backpack was stolen with my passport, my camera, my only jacket, a few t-shirts and cancer drugs inside.
I’m not an amateur traveler and managed to survive homeless in Prague with fewer thefts that you’d expect. However, it’s been a long time since I’d been out in the backpackers’ world where, really truly, you can’t trust anyone. I guess I lost my edge.
Time of your life, hey kid?
