Return to Seidman Cancer Center

Seidman Cancer Center
Beachwood, Ohio 

Morning:

I'm sitting where I love to sit in the morning—at the Open Door Coffee Co. here in Hudson. It's very foggy at the moment—with an added hour of darkness courtesy of EDT—and from my perch I can see the Village Green. Our house is just on the other side of it. Joyce is off at the health club. Her morning ritual. It's almost 8 o'clock right now. In about an hour I'll head home.

And then it will be time to drive up to Seidman Cancer Center in Beachwood. Time again for my quarterly visit with my oncologist. Time again for my quarterly injection of Lupron, the drug that has, until recently, kept my recurrent prostate cancer on Pause.

As followers of this blog know, I had surgery to remove the cancerous gland in June 2005, but some cancer cells escaped the surgeon, and the disease began to show signs of a return sufficiently worrisome that I underwent a month of radiation treatments early in 2009. Things calmed down a bit. Then the cancer came back, made a move into my bones (a favorite place for prostate cancer when it metastasizes), and in July 2014 I “enjoyed” my first Lupron injection.

Lupron's side effects are unpleasant: depression, periods of intense body heat, death of the libido, lack of energy. The upside? I'm alive and able to do many of the things I've always loved to do--though in a somewhat diminished way.

Anyway, for two years Lupron kept my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) at the “undetectable” level—though I knew (and my oncologist continually reminded me) that Lupron is not a cure; it’s a temporary roadblock. The cancer will reappear.

And it has. On September 23, it was no longer undetectable. It was .01 (the lowest measurable level). My oncologist then decided that I should get PSA tests (blood draws) every six weeks. And my PSA has continued to rise: .18, .25, .56, and last week’s .80. Soon, I'll be on another drug in addition to Lupron. Again—no cure. A delay.

I also had some bone scans recently, and I'll be learning about the results a little later this morning.


Evening

Not the most pleasant of days today. I learned from my oncologist that I'm going to need monthly PSA tests now--to keep close tabs on its progress (such a horrible word for cancer). And--soon--I'll be on an additional drug: bicalutamide, a medication which does much of what Lupron has done (I will stay on Lupron, as well, as long as I live). The side effects are the same--with the addition of the possibility of breast enlargement, of seeing "halos" at night. I joked with my oncologist that I'm going to become an Aura Guy. (Link to more info about bicalutamide.)

The other, more worrisome, finding: my bone scans show that one of my ribs (the same one that the cancer had visited before) is once again "lighting up" on the scan--and there's a new spot, as well: at the base of my spine. If these spots become painful, he said (they're not right now), radiation will be an option.

So, we left Seidman today in a mood a bit darker than the one we'd had earlier in the day. A little pain from the Lupron injection; a little depression about the persistence of this damn disease. A more certain realization that this enemy is persistent--and deadly.

As I've written before, I remain fortunate in many ways. I am not "sick"--not anything like some of the folks I see--folks of all ages--in the Seidman waiting room. I weep to think of some of them. I can still read and write and laugh and exercise (critical on Lupron, which works hard to pack weight on me). I do not look forward to exercise anymore: It's difficult. I have to stop more often. It exhausts me to do things I could zip through just a few years ago. I have to force myself to go out there, and I don't always succeed: Sometimes, Mr. Nap convinces me that some time with him would be a lot more fun (it always is!).

Best of all, of course, I'm not alone. And this is one of the reasons I always wept near the end of The Scarlet Letter when I was teaching it. Arthur Dimmesdale is wailing about his situation. Hester has told him he should just leave. Get out of Boston. But he cries out about being alone. And she responds with the words that every true lover has always said: Thou shalt not go alone.

Sunday Sundries, 93

1. AOTW--Oh, there was competition this week for this coveted award (two were in traffic), but one that annoyed me the most was this: Last night (Saturday), we went to the Chagrin Cinemas to see The Lady in the Van (see below). As we arrived, I saw behind us a woman with three or four kids. As I entered the door, I paused a moment to hold it for them. Got a mumbled thanks. Then--as Joyce and I headed through the posts-and-strips set up to keep the line orderly, she cut right straight to the ticket-seller to get ahead of us.

2. I finished two books this week.

• Lady Byron and Her Daughters (2015), by Julia Markus (Eng/Creative Writing at Hofstra), is about Lord Byron's former wife, Annabella Milbanke (their marriage did not last long: he had an "interest" in his half-sister, Augusta, an "interest" that produced a child). I'm going to deal with this book more explicitly in my "Frankenstein Sundae" entries (and soon!), but for now ... very well written, sympathetic. I learned much I had not known.
• John A. Williams' fifth novel (I'm reading them in order now), Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969) is a powerful and prescient story about the racial and political divides in America in the late 1960s (all healed now, right?). It begins--get ready--with a white cop gunning down an unarmed black teen. And then the black establishment decides enough is enough. They adopt a new (tacit) policy of one-on-one retaliation. And so--after a bit--the guilty cop himself is gunned down by a hit man hired via the mob. And then ... as Yeats said ... things fall apart. Williams follows three principal characters: a black intellectual who's seen enough and arranges the hit, the Israeli hit-man, a semi-retired mob boss who is fascinated by Eugene Browning (the intellectual) and initiates a friendship with him (Browning does not know who he is--but suspects something awry). I was very affected by this book--and not just because of its contemporary (and deep) relevance--but by the quality of the writing. Williams, as I've written here before, died last summer--the author of numerous novels and works of nonfiction--and I'd never heard of him. That is changing. Going to read them all! And, meanwhile, I worry about Civil War 2.0.

 3. On Saturday night, Joyce and I saw The Lady in the Van (based on a short memoir by Alan Bennett--which I have now just ordered!). We both loved the film. Maggie Smith plays a homeless woman in Camden Town (in northwest London), who ends up living in the eponymous van in the driveway of Alan Bennett, a rising playwright at the time--started in 1969.

A bit of a coincidence? (Or someone having a good time?) When I saw (very early in the film) the sign for Camden Town, I leaned over to Joyce and whispered, "William Godwin [Mary Shelley's father] lived there." A minute later--a realty sign: Godwin Realty. !!!  And then later in the film, the Alan Bennett character--a fantastic performance by Alex Jennings--quoted William Hazlitt (1778-1830), a friend of Godwin's.  Hmmmmm ...

Anyway, I thought it was one of the best films I'd seen in a long, long time. (Oh, and Bennett himself, who wrote the screenplay, makes a quick cameo very near the end.)

A film about writing--about being a writer (the film shows the writer as two people: the writer, the "real-life" person, so two Alan Bennetts were often simultaneously on the screen, often conversing with each other).

Link to trailer for film.

4. We're happy to see Bosch back on Amazon Prime. We've watched a little of the first episode, second season. I love the Bosch novels by Michael Connelly (have read them all!), and although the TV version is not exactly what I pictured, I still enjoy watching it. (Link to trailer.)

5. Last Words--Some words from my word-a-day providers during the week.

• Psittacism   \SIT-uh-siz-uh m\  noun (dictionary.com)
   mechanical, repetitive, and meaningless speech.
  Origin
  Psittacism comes from the Latin word for "parrot," psittacus. It gained traction in English in the late 1800s.
• ridibund, adj. (OED)
  Inclined to laughter; happy, lively
• Isonomy    \ahy-SON-uh-mee\   noun  (dictionary.com)
  equality of political rights.
  Origin
  Isonomy derives from the Greek terms ísos meaning “equal” and nómos meaning “law.” It entered English around 1600.

Do I Have That?

When I was a kid, I never forgot what I owned--for a simple reason: I didn't own much. A baseball mitt, some clothes and comic books, a few "real" books (most of which my parents had bought for me in the desperate hope that I would read them; they didn't understand that I was saving most of my reading for my Later Years). A Timex wrist watch that I lost. A bike.

So ... if someone had asked me, "Do you own a baseball mitt?" the answer was simple. As it would have been if they'd asked me, "Do you own a hair from the great Cham's beard?" (I stole that one--the example, not the hair--from Much Ado About Nothing.) Simple answers.

Years pass. Decades.

And now the question is not so simple. I have so much clutter that I can't remember what I have and don't have. This insight pierced me yesterday. Again.

The story: As some of you know, for three days each week on this site I've been serializing a (very rough) draft of a book I'm calling Frankenstein Sundae--about my ten-year pursuit of Mary Shelley, et al., a pursuit that commenced in 1996 and cooled (somewhat), well, about 2012 (earlier, really), when I published The Mother of the Monster: The Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley on Kindle Direct.

But then I got the idea to write a memoir-y sort of book about all the fun I had--the places I went--the things I read--to prepare for that wee volume.

And it was then that I began realizing that I'd forgotten much of the detail--not just of her story but of the materials I'd collected to research her story.

In the past couple of weeks I've been writing about what (to me) was one of the most fascinating portions of her life--the mid-1820s when, a widow back in England, she became enchanted with Washington Irving. She actually had a date (sort of) with him. Frankenstein Meets the Headless Horseman. It was just too good to be true.

So, as I began reassembling the story to tell in my blog, I realized (1) I'd forgotten a lot of it; (2) I had no idea what resources I owned that would help me re-cage those flown details. I did remember that one key text was a volume printed in a very small run--The Romance of Mary W. Shelley, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving, 1907--or, as the book puts it, MCMVII. I remember finding that book at the Kent State University Library. Reading that book.

But did I buy it?

I was pretty sure I had--but where-in-the-hell is it now?

Couldn't find it among my Shelley things. So I hopped (!) online and bought another on ABE--$35 well spent, I told myself.

Until, just moments after the confirmation of purchase arrived from ABE, I saw the book standing on the shelf, exactly where it should have been, almost glowing with delight. (It would have a sibling! A twin!)

Damn.

Well, I've done this before--far more than once. Bought a book I already owned. Even worse: I've (more than several times) read (unintentionally) a book I'd already read and not realized it until it was far too late.

Damn.

By the way, I do own a baseball mitt. But not a hair from the great Cham's beard.

Frankenstein Sundae, 216

But Payne—cut from sturdier cloth than I—proceeded to do just that: acquaint Washington Irving with Mary’s continuing … interest in him. And he (Payne) became quite assiduous about his new role as go-between, as if (in desperation?) he figured: Hey, if I do this job well, Mary might change her mind! Oh, the deluded male imagination …

In one letter to Irving, Payne wrote: She said you had interested her more than any one she had seen since she left Italy; that you were gentle and cordial, and that she longed for friendship with you.[1] And meanwhile, Mary and Payne were corresponding regularly. There were two patent items on her agenda: acquiring free theater passes from the generous Payne; finding out what Irving (whom she called Irvine often in her letters) was up to. What he might be thinking of her.

Payne, who had some financial difficulties, went to Paris to stay with Irving, and there, on August 5, 1825, he gave Irving a packet of Mary’s letters—letters that (as we’ve seen) inquired (slyly at times, blatant at others) about Irving himself. Irving’s journal records only this: Read Mrs. Shelleys correspondence before going to bed.[2]

Of course, Payne had well prepared Irving for what he was going to read; it was no surprise to the American that Mary was interested in him. But now he was learning some details. I try to imagine what he was thinking as he read those letters—letters which Mary surely knew (hoped) Payne would share with Irving. Was he shocked? Worried? Horrified? Flattered? All of the above?

The only thing we know for certain is that he was not “interested”—not in the way Mary clearly was.

---

[1] Endnote—to come.

[2] Journals and Notebooks, Vol. III: 1819–1827, ed. Walter A. Reichart (U of Wisconsin P, 1970), 510.

Gone Shoppin' ...

My dad--most of his life--didn't do much "going to the store"; that was Mom's job. (Later, retired, he liked going: He could buy the things he shouldn't--things Mom would not have bought for him--like dry-roasted peanuts and beer, the staples he consumed while watching every single football game he could.)

When I got out on my own (1966--my first year of teaching), I liked shopping--though I would have liked it more if I'd actually had some money to buy things I wanted. My take-home that first year (as I've mentioned here before) was $168.42 on the 1st and the 15th of every month. After rent, utilities, car payment, etc., I didn't have a lot for food (and cigarettes--yes, I was smoking then). I shopped at the market in Twinsburg, Ohio, where I had my first apartment (now razed ... to remove all evidence of me?). I think it was a Sparkle Market (it's gone now).

I would buy hamburger, ice cream, potatoes, Coke--health food, in other words--then watch it gradually (and far too quickly) disappear. By the end of each pay period I was employing a two-pronged strategy to avoid starvation: (1) eating mounds of boiled potatoes, mashed with butter, (2) dropping in on friends and colleagues around supper time on some bogus errand. And so I stayed alive.

After I got married (Dec. 1969), Joyce and I shopped at the Sparkle Market (RIP) in Kent, Ohio, right behind our place on College Court. We often went on Friday afternoons, a date and time that soon solidified into a ritual, a ritual that continued on through my public school teaching career.

But when I started teaching at Western Reserve Academy (in 2001--post-public school retirement), Friday was not all that good a time: We had Saturday morning classes, and I was always scuffling to prepare, grade, etc.

So ... a new routine. On Sunday mornings (now in Hudson, Ohio) we would go to the local Panera for a bagel, coffee, the New York Times, chat; afterwards, we would walk over to the Acme and do our shopping for the week.

In one way I was becoming more and more like my post-retirement father: shopping because I could buy the things I wanted (but, often, most assuredly did not need). But over the years I'd also assumed more and more of the cooking duties--and virtually all of the baking.

I'd begun baking our bread for pecuniary reasons back when we were first married and in grad school: It was cheaper to do so (and tasted just a lot better). As my Facebook friends know, I still bake every Sunday and post on FB some annoying pictures of the result.

But why all the cooking? Well, Joyce got home from work (in most cases) quite a bit after I did. So--a combination of being nice to her and hunger propelled me into the kitchen, where, I soon found, I enjoyed being. I do almost all of our cooking now--though there are things Joyce likes that I don't, so she will prepare them. (Some meals are amusing: Our plates look entirely different.)

We stopped our Panera routine a year or so ago and now go to the Open Door Coffee Co. on Sunday mornings (a five-minute walk). And we've changed our shopping day to Thursday afternoon: far less crowded. We both go--assuring, as I've said, that the "right" items for each of us end up in the cart.

For me, that means chicken (which Joyce will eat, but not so eagerly), salmon (Joyce loves it too), eggs (I make omelets once/week--hers are more veggie, mine more (turkey) sausage-y), yogurt (she eats a different brand/flavor than I), fruit (apples, bananas, strawberries, blueberries for me; Joyce gets a few different things), flour, bread-fixin's, pasta, veggies (totally different here: Joyce is more like a ruminant--loves all sorts of veggies; I'm more ... picky: corn, peas, carrots), etc. We both like sparkling water--though different brands/flavors. And, occasionally, we'll buy something naughty--Italian ice (lemon, berry), crackers (I cannot resist them, so we don't buy them often).

Nowadays, I have to be a lot more careful about my diet. I'm "enjoying" quarterly injections of Lupron (to battle my persistent prostate cancer), and that drug makes many recipients gain massive weight--as I started to do at first. But my oncologist gave me a dire (Dyer!) forecast, so I've lost most of it by undergoing an unpleasant (but effective) regimen: healthful food only, no seconds/desserts/snacks, regular exercise. It ain't fun, but it works.

Meanwhile, today is Thursday, and I'm already thinking about the store, about the food I will buy, about the food I will see but not buy and wish I could.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote continually in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), "So it goes."

Frankenstein Sundae, 215

Washington Irving decided it was time to leave England (was Mary’s evident ardor a reason?), and he headed for France & Spain. By August 14—just four days after seeing the plays with Mary—he was in France. Safe.

I wonder, of course, what Mary thought of his swift departure. (Her journals and letters are silent.) She was clearly interested in him: a literary man, charming, celebrated, respectable. His status would have greatly attracted her, for she was still suffering (and would continue to do so throughout the rest of her life) from the blows to her reputation earned after her elopement with the already married Bysshe Shelley just a decade earlier. Did she see Irving as a savior of sorts?

And did he sail for France because he read all of this in her eyes? He was a very conventional man in many ways, and an association with Mary Shelley—despite her accomplishments, her beauty (acknowledged by all), her brilliance, her patent interest in him—could have had no enduring benefits for him—and would probably have sullied his own reputation.

But the story was not over. On June 25, 1825, Payne, walking Mary home from tea at the Godwins’, declared his love. She replied with the words that have crushed every young man’s heart since the first cavewoman uttered them: Let’s just be friends.

That was bad enough. But then she expressed her continuing interest in Irving.[1]

I try to picture this: confessing my love, getting the let’s-just-be-friends reply, then (a breath or so later), hearing my beloved ask me to hook her up with a friend of mine. I’m pretty sure I would not have taken that well, not at all.

But Payne—cut from sturdier cloth than I—proceeded to do just that: acquaint Washington Irving with Mary’s continuing … interest in him.

---

[1] Betty Bennett summarizes this story in her three-volume The Letters of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, 493n.

On My Nightstand

I go to bed a lot earlier than I used to. Back in my public school teaching days I was rarely in bed before 11 p.m. I'd been grading or preparing for classes all evening. Teaching was a seven-day-a-week job for me (plus evenings). Over the years I developed routines--very fixed routines--to deal with all of it.

Just one example (don't want to get all self-righteous on you!). Compositions. The kids would turn in their pieces on Friday, and I would return them the following Friday. I divided the number of kids I had that year (as high as 200; more commonly, 125-150) by the number of days I had for grading. I would start on Sunday--so that gave me five days to grade them all. So that meant up to thirty compositions a day. I would not go to bed until I had that day's quota done; otherwise, I knew I was in trouble. I graded all day long--before school, on my "free" period(s), during lunch (unless I had duty), after school (unless I had play practice or a meeting or something), evenings.

Anyway, them old days is over, and now I'm usually in bed by 7 p.m. I read for an hour, about ten pages in several books. Currently on my nightstand:

• David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I confess that I'm not "enjoying" it--not in the sense that I generally enjoy novels. It's a big book (in every way), and there are pages without any paragraph breaks, any dialogue (daunting, even for a bookaholic). It's dense, too. But I have to finish it because I've got kind of a "reading thing" going with a former WRA student who has finished it--and I can not have that! I have passed page 800, and the end is in sight, so I'm feeling some imminent relief.
• Tobias Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy (1766). After finishing all of Smollett's novels (there are only a half-dozen), I read a biography of Smollett, and the biographer recommended Travels. Well ... it has its moments. Not enough for me. But I'm charging ahead anyhow.
• I ususally read one "older" writer each night, and doing so has enabled me to read all of the novels by Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray (and Smollett). Waiting next: Wilkie Collins; I've read a few of his--e.g., The Moonstone, The Woman in White--and now I want to read all of them!)
• Stephen King's 11/22/63 (2011), now being dramatized on Hulu. (I decided to read it before watching--quite a task: It's long.) For a long while I'd kept up with King, reading all his novels as they appeared (except for the Dark Tower series--don't know why?!?); I even reviewed a couple of them for the Plain Dealer. But then I sort of moved elsewhere (not "on," which sounds elitist!)--until I saw the Hulu series was going to commence. I've read about 100 pages (barely making a dent) and am having some fun. I was in my second year of college in November 1963, so I remember so much of the context.
• Joe Nesbø's latest thriller, Midnight Sun (2015), which I'm enjoying (it's short!). I really like his work--well, most of it--and this one is quite different from his celebrated Harry Hole series.
• Cori McCarthy's You Were Here (2016), her latest YA novel. Cori went to Harmon Middle School (where I taught--but, sadly, she was not in my class) and to Aurora (Ohio) High School--then on to college and grad school. This novel draws on her experiences in college--and before. I've read about 50 pp and am having a good time, admiring her ...

Lined up to be next--the latest John Irving, another Longmire mystery, plus some other things I'm too lazy to go check on upstairs. Oh, just remembered a couple: a history of the Romans plus the latest by biologist E. O. Wilson.

As I said, I read only 10-20 pp of each of these at night (and not always all of them, depending on weariness). When I was teaching, I was usually too tired to read late at night--though I often did, anyhow. My most ferocious reading came on vacations--and summers.

But now--a retired Old Coot--I read whenever I damn well want to. Which is one of retirement's greatest blessings (not that there are a lot of them ... don't get me started!).