Back to Seidman Cancer Center

Seidman Cancer Center
Chagrin Highlands

 June 29, 2021

Tuesday, mid-day, Joyce drove me up to Seidman (just off Chagrin Blvd. & I-271), where I had my quarterly chat with my oncologist—and also got my two quarterly injections.

Anti-Covid protocols were still in place there: masks, temp and questions at the entrance. (We passed!). And then, three hours later we emerged.

Most of that time was waiting—to see the oncologist—to get my shots—to schedule next time. To think and worry (you know).

My cancer numbers remain good—though as I've said here numerous times, tis all temporary. This current major med I'm on (Xtandi) is an effective testosterone-killer (the food of prostate cancer), and, for the nonce, is winning the battle. My PSA remains undetectable.

That's good.

But my options are running out. So once Xtandi quits working (as it will), we're not sure what we're going to do next.

There is a new treatment for guys like me, a treatment I read about in the New York Times last week, but it's not yet FDA-approved, and until it is, it's useless for me.

I really like my oncologist. We talk a lot, speculate, even laugh a bit. And Joyce is full of questions, which he answers quickly and—sometimes—painfully.

Oh, I was in a wheelchair at Seidman. Even a walker, which I use on other, shorter excursions, is not quite good enough for me for a long time. My fragile balance just does not care about it, and I will fall if I use it for too long a period.

After the consultation and discussion with the oncologist, it was downstairs to the Poke Department, where a kind young nurse stabbed me twice: once in the rear (Trelstar, another testosterone inhibitor) and in the arm (Xgeva, which increases bone strength).

And then, at last, we were rolling out of there.

As usual at Seidman (during my waiting time) I noticed the many other patients who were there, patients who, as I’ve observed before, are a perfect spectrum of human beings: race, gender, age. Cancer doesn’t care much about any of that. If you’re human, the disease is interested in you and will consult your genes to see if it has a way into your system.

I try to talk with other waiting people—without intruding—and those other people are invariably grateful for the talk and encouragement (as I am)—for the good-luck wishes as we head back to the examination and/or treatment rooms.

Anyway, I don’t have to think about it for another three months, when, once again, I’ll head off to the lab to get my bloodwork and worry feverishly until the results come back.

And Joyce, of course, holds me together in the meantime, reminding me every day of the wonders of life, of the miracle of love.

Summer Camp

Vesper Spot
Camp Christian, Ohio

I see a few FB posts these days about kids going to summer camps of various sorts. The photos of some reveal a variety of emotions, emotions shared one way or the other with parents.

I went to summer camp a few times when I was a kid—church camp—Camp Christian down near Delaware, Ohio. It’s still in business, I see (link to website for the camp). I started in junior high when I was in Chi Rho (a Disciples of Christ youth group), and I attended a couple of other years when I was in CYF (Christian Youth Fellowship).

I generally had a good time because lots of my friends went, too, though the camp administrators, apparently, scattered us around among the cabins so that we’d experience “fellowship” with kids we didn’t know.

I found this alarming—and funny. Alarming because there were Big Kids who did what a lot of Big Kids do in junior high: be threatening. And funny because there were some Wackos there—odd-bird little kids who said and did the strangest things.

Example: In my day there was a place called the Vesper Spot where we would go before heading for bed. It was a lovely place off in the woods, and we were supposed to be absolutely silent there. One evening, in line heading out there, one of the wackos, a kid named Jerry from another town, was right behind me, and as he entered the clearing, I heard him whisper from behind me: “And somewhere, from out of the gloom, ....”

I cracked up. It wasn’t that funny—but it was so unexpected that I couldn’t  help myself. Everyone looked at me as if I’d just committed a mortal sin.

The counselor in charge spoke some sharp words—I didn’t dare tell him that he was supposed to be silent. I think I had to do some odious chore the next day in atonement.

But I generally enjoyed the camp, even though I learned two difficult truths: 1. I sucked at crafts (my lanyard, woven, looked more like a hangman’s noose); 2.the pretty girls were not very interested in me.

But I was something of a whiz in the Bible classes: My grandfather and uncle and father were all ordained Disciples of Christ ministers. Take that, Jerry!

Leap ahead a few years. One of my best friends in high school was a kid name Paul Misch (sadly deceased now). I was telling him the story about the Vesper Spot and Jerry.

He perked up. 

“Jerry [the same one from Camp Christian]!?”

“Yeah, why?”

And then Paul told a story about when he’d once been in the hospital; sharing his room was Jerry, who had a long piece of knotted string with which he would snap Paul now and then. And Paul couldn’t do anything about it: His leg was in a cast.

Despite Paul’s direst threats (and he was a tough kid; Jerry, not), Jerry kept snapping until he went home the next day.

Paul never got his revenge, as far as I know.

Unless, you know, he’s done so ... Down There.

Another Persistent Night Visitor

 

It’s happening to me more and more these days: I wake in the night, my head thrumming with a song from my youth, a song whose lyrics I can only partially remember. Whose performers remain hidden by the night.

Good-bye, sleep.

It’s usually not until morning when I can consult Mr. Google to dissipate my frustration.

Last night it was the song “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters (see pic at the top of this post), which topped the charts in February 1958. I was in eighth grade (link to the performance of the song).

As has been the case with all of my similar Nocturnal Song Visits in recent years, this one brought back memories of Hiram School dances and sock hops. The awkwardness, the enormous importance of who was dancing with whom—it was very popular then for girls to dance with girls (I have no idea if it still is).

I’d taken dancing lessons back in Enid, Okla., but they didn’t “take” very well (as Joyce would discover at our wedding reception).

Anyway—as has also been the case with these Night Visitors—I could not remember the performers, not until, as I said, Mr. Google woke up.

As I listened to the song on YouTube this morning, I was struck by the simplicity of it all—by the innocence (is there a better word?) of it all. The 1950s were such a simple time in popular music—lyrics that were all G-rated, all emerging from the lips of singers in perfectly understandable fashion. Friendly guitars and other instruments. Nothing too roiling and boiling as I recall.

As the decades went on, that became more and more difficult—at least for me. I couldn’t understand the words of many songs, and guitars seemed to slice and attack.

(Just an Old Guy talking.)

I’m actually happy to receive these nocturnal visits. It’s as if part of my brain has loosened up, allowed me access (well, partial access)—or perhaps my brain is simply leaking memories, and it’s the leakage I’m pursuing into those dark recesses that are low on words, high on images.

LYRICS TO THE SONG

Well
Sugar in the mornin'
Sugar in the evenin'
Sugar at suppertime
Be my little sugar
And love me all the time

Honey in the mornin'
Honey in the evenin'
Honey at suppertime
So by my little honey
And love me all the time

Put your arms around me
And swear by stars above
You'll be mine forever
In a heaven of love

Sugar in the mornin'
Sugar in the evenin'
Sugar at suppertime
Be my little sugar
And love me all the time

Well, well

Sugar in the mornin'
Sugar in the evenin'
Sugar at suppertime
Be my little sugar
And love me all the time

Honey in the mornin'
Honey in the evenin'
Honey at suppertime
So be my little honey
And love me all the time

Put your arms around me
And swear by stars above
You'll be mine forever
In a heaven of love

Sugar in the mornin'
Sugar in the evenin'
Sugar at suppertime
Be my little sugar
And love me all the

Now sugartime (sugartime)
Is anytime that you're near (that you're near)
'Cause you're so dear
So don't you roam (don't roam)
Just be my honeycomb (honeycomb, honeycomb)
And live in a heaven of love 

Sugar in the mornin'
Sugar in the evenin'
Sugar at suppertime
Be my little sugar
And love me (love me)
All (all all all)
The time

Sugartime
Sugartime

Walker

 

My son and his family bought me a device (very similar to the one in the pic) a few months ago. I use it a lot—though generally not inside, where I can grab or lean on familiar things as I move through the house.

Outside, though, all the time. Most of my "outside time" is taking a trip to a Dr.'s office. I don't drive anymore, so Joyce loads the device in the car, I wobble out, holding onto the car till I get to the passenger side and ease myself into the front seat. Then when we arrive, she sets it up for me—and off I roll to find out things I don’t want to find out.

PAUSE

I wrote the previous two paragraphs just before lunch, and as I headed out of my study, I fell. When I fall there’s no Oh-I’m-falling! Instead, it’s Oh-damn-I-fell!

It took awhile for me to get my equilibrium back—for Joyce to struggle to get me to my feet. She did, and then she was able to help me into the family room, where I flopped on the couch for about fifteen minutes, at which time I was able to help a little with lunch.

Fun.

RESTART AFTER LUNCH

I’ve noticed now, being mildly disabled, that not everywhere is “user-friendly” for folks like me.

Public restrooms, for just one example.

Some are fine—wide, automatic doors, plenty of space once I get inside. Bars to hang onto, etc.

But others—like the one I had to use this morning—are nightmares.

No automatic door is the worst. Using a walker, I have to kind of force my way in, hoping my balance will not desert me.

Occasionally, someone will see my situation and help me out. But rarely.

But that leads me to another observation—a more positive one. Lots of people are kind. They hold a door for me, let me go ahead, ask if I’m all right, etc. And I can’t tell you how comforting that is. Even more: how necessary most of the time. Sometimes I can’t avoid a tear ... or ten ...

I never thought I’d be like this—dizzy all day except in a chair or lying down.

Why would I be? I’ve worked out most of my life—I eat only healthful food. I neither smoke nor drink (having dropped both activities decades ago). I’m one of the Good Guys, right?

My body doesn’t give a damn.

And so here I am—wrestling with restroom doors, hoping a kind stranger (and, as I said, there are many) will give a guy a helping hand, the hand that Joyce employs, 24-7.

Getting Out of Date

At our Father's Day celebration yesterday, I learned from my grandsons (and son) that kids don't use email anymore—or text messages. Instead it's Instagram (or one of those platforms I don't use or know much about).  And that, I realize, is why they seldom reply to those out-of-date ways I send messages to them. I might as well have written a letter—or sent a telegram—or sent smoke signals.

There are lots of other ways I'm sort of expired in this world, but one of them struck me again this morning when I was reading a 2004 memoir by a celebrated writer. (I'll mention nothing specific about the book—or the author's name.)

In the first 100 pages I've read a few things in her agile, eloquent prose that were definitely no-no's Back in the Day. She made a who-whom error; twice she has said one another in situations where I was taught one should use each other; she wrote “feel badly.”

Now, I realize that grammar/usage rules are continually changing. I know that we made up our "rules" before we even knew what grammar and usage were. They evolved gradually before they were ever codified.

(I just broke one I'd been taught, a particularly silly one: Don't use the passive voice.)

I learned many/most of those rules because of the home I grew up in. My mother was an English teacher, and she was constantly teaching us—if sometimes in a less-than-genial manner.

When one of brothers or I would make a mistake, her custom was to repeat a version of what we’d just said, with an emphasis on the correct way.

Danny: Me and Jim are going down to the park.

Mom: Jim and I are going down to the park.

I would never follow with You are? That’s why I’m still alive today.

Other rules I learned in later classes—and many I learned when I was teaching—some I’ve learned recently.

I’ve also lived long enough to watch them fade away. When I was a kid, the teachers tried to show us the differences between may and might, between will and shall, between may and can, between like and as.

Now, many of those are gone—or going.

Here’s one I’ve seen professional writers use: He’s a wiser man than me.

I would still write wiser man than I because I learned long ago that this is what’s called an elliptical construction: wiser than I [am]. So when you drop the am, you do not drop the I.

The differences between who and whom, I know, are heading south. Some people incorrectly use whom (this is called a hypercorrection) because they think whom sounds more correct than who in some constructions—even though it ain’t.

Accelerating these changes, I’m sure, are social media, which, I believe, diminish the importance to the writer (and the reader) of “correct” English.

Sometimes, for stylistic or humorous reasons we make mistakes on purpose—like the ain’t I plopped into the previous paragraph.

For the same reason many writers do something I often do: write intentional sentence fragments. Like this one.

But I confess I’m still surprised to see formations that I’d learned were errors in the otherwise flawless prose of professional writers—not in dialogue, of course, where anything goes.

When I was reviewing books, I saw such things more and more frequently.

And my response, generally, is not the grammar-Nazi sniff of disgust and disdain and superiority. But instead the Dylan (Bob) line “The times, they are a-changin’.”

As they ever will ...

"Many a tear has to fall ..."

In the fall of 1958 (I was starting 9th grade), Tommy Edwards, a performer whose name (until a recent Google search) I'd totally forgotten, released the song "It's All in the Game." (Link to video.) It was, of course, popular around the country (reached #1), not just at Hiram High School (where it was often played at our school dances and sock hops).

That song popped into my head recently because I had noticed that I'm a bit more (okay, a lot more) weepy than I used to be.

When I was a kid, running around, I rarely cried—just when I hurt myself or in a sad moment in a movie. As for the latter, I fought fiercely against my in-a-movie weeping: not manly, you know?

But I couldn’t help it. Pinocchio became a real kid, Cinderella married a prince, Davy Crockett died at the Alamo, etc.

Books, too, made me weep. Bartholomew saved himself from death by wearing 500 hats, Davy Crockett died at the Alamo, etc.

Later, I still wept in films (Midnight Cowboy, Camelot, Much Ado About Nothing) and in so many books I can’t begin to remember them all.

Lately—as I drift daffily into that good night—I find myself weeping almost every night as Joyce and I stream shows in bed before we drift into darkness. At the end of one season of Schitt’s Creek, the principal characters are gathered in a bar, celebrating; at the end of another, Moira shows up at Alexis’ high-school graduation unexpectedly. And in another show, The Cafe, we’re streaming—and loving—the two of us weep almost every night.

Tonight we’re going to watch the final episode of that one, and we will definitely have tissues in bed.*

In another way, I often wake up crying at night—a dream, or thinking about my parents (both gone now), friends who are gone, former students and colleagues ...

And, of course, I weep as I think about the losses that lie ahead. It’s sometimes unbearable, such thoughts. I know we all have our turns—I’d just like to skip mine, if I could. Which I can’t.

Shakespeare knew it, of course, as he reveals movingly here in one of his sonnets, the last line of which is a dazzler.

Sonnet 64 

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

*This show, by the way, like many others, was recommended to us by our friend Chris Cozens.

Humility: A Personal Journey (Part Nine)

I was going to end this Humility series yesterday—with the post about the humility my teaching career gave me. I knew perfectly well that there was a much more obvious and powerful source of it—but I’ve written about it a lot on this site, so I thought I’d give it a pass.  Found out I couldn’t.

Age and Health.

I’ve been lucky in my life: Throughout much of it—most of it—I’ve been healthy and able to do the things I’ve wanted to. Until I started into my 60s I never had a debilitating illness or injury, just the occasional common cold, flu—that sort of thing. I did have the childhood illnesses: measles, mumps, etc. But that was about it.

But then came my sixties with a sequence of medical problems that are now clearly winning the competition between living and not.

Bell’s Palsy was first. Then, in late 2004, the diagnosis of prostate cancer that has resulted in a prostatectomy (removal), two rounds of radiation, immunotherapy, and a sequence of increasingly potent medications that have greatly diminished my physical life. (We’ll return to this.)

Some skin cancer and surgery—oh, my careless boyhood in the Oklahoma sun!

The last handful of years it’s some kind of weird neurological disorder that has stolen my balance—multiple tests and specialists have not discovered what it is. All they know (knowledge that has been obvious to me) is that it’s getting worse.

As I said, the cancer meds have gotten more and more powerful—with more and more odious side-effects.

As I’ve progressed through the sequence, the medical choices have diminished. My cancer is metastatic: The cancer has moved into my bones, and I am what I never thought I would be—incurable. All the meds can do is delay the inevitable.

I’m currently on one called Xtandi, which has been working (for the nonce), and when it no longer is effective, I will move to the final drug available (I forget the name). When its effectiveness declines, all that’s left is chemotherapy.

I’m not sure I’ll pursue chemo. It won’t save my life; it will just diminish it some more. I don’t really see the point.

So ... humility? Nothing quite like medical issues—especially incurable ones—to teach you that final lesson—to administer that final proficiency test that everyone fails.

Well, on that happy note I’ll close this series, grateful that I’ve done it, grateful that I won’t have to do it again!

And, meanwhile, I’ll enjoy my time with my son and his family, with my friends (most of whom I see only remotely now), and, of course, with Joyce, that remarkable woman whom I met—quite by accident—in Satterfield Hall in the summer of 1969 at Kent State University. Neither of us wanted to be in the class we were in—but the others were closed (and they weren’t the same). This December 20 will be our 52nd anniversary.

So how can I possibly complain about the arrival of something I knew would show up done day? Something I’ve ignored for as long as I could.