How the Block Plan Prepared Me for Cancer

By IAN BLAKE NEWMAN '91
An immense, disagreeable elephant and a timid mouse share the same cramped cage at the zoo. One day the elephant, in a particularly black and truculent mood, looks down at the mouse with utter disgust. He trumpets, "You're the puniest, most pathetic, insignificant, weakest thing I've ever seen!" "Well," pipes the mouse in a plaintive squeal, "don't forget, I've been sick."
*******
Welcome to life with cancer. Have no fear. There are lots of eager beavers who can do your job even better than you can while you're sick - so take a guilt-free vacation. You won't be needing such a big, swank apartment anymore, so say goodbye to high rent. Travel expenses? How far do you think you can get, silly, with tubes hanging out of your arms? Food bills, you say? Well, with no dairy, oils, fats, sugar, caffeine, or preservatives allowed, there's virtually nothing to spend your money on.
These restrictions - along with the vomiting, morphine, and all the tissue they're excising - will really speed that diet. Why, the thyroid alone weighs half a pound. And who says you can't socialize anymore? Your comprehensive HMO means socialized medicine, my friend. One hundred and twenty five doctors' visits since last spring, three surgeries, two biopsies, one culture, 30 scans, 28 home I.V. treatments and a course of radiation, have cost you a mere 15 bucks co-pay a pop. Best of all, you are now free to utter clichés that seem straight out of HBO Lifestories: Families in Crisis: "I never thought it could happen to me," and so forth. So life could be worse. I'd say chin-up, but there's that nine inch scar on your neck-the "Colombian necktie" as your brother calls it - to keep discreet.
On the minus side, pity dates are overrated. Then there's the problem of what to do about friends who don't yet know. Do you wait for them to call eventually and risk their guilt for having "abandoned" you for so long? Or do you call them and spring it: It turns out there are only a few things in life one can say that will leave a listener speechless. And while "I'm getting' hitched" and "We're havin' a baby" amaze and thrill, and even "I'm gay" has some cachet in certain circles nowadays, "I have cancer," still does not.
Thing is, though, these are just pesky annoyances which pale in contrast to the one great challenge facing you now as you strap yourself in a hospital bed and embark on this Illiad of ills called the Big C: Information. You gotta' conquer it if you expect to survive. You gotta' learn a whole new language. Janus-faced "facts" must be interpreted. Indecipherable stats must be gauged and your course corrected accordingly before the frigid water sweeps your bow. Here's what's ahead: medicine, radiology, pathology, pharmacology, spirituality, ethics, nutrition - not to mention the small business side of your semi-catastrophic sickness - must be mastered from your ever-sinking craft. But here you'll have, as graduates of CC, a distinct advantage over the mere mortals from your ward embarking on this journey.
How is handling a cancer diagnosis like taking an academic block at CC? Glad you asked, fellow grads. Just read your Viewbook. I wrote a lot of that stuff as a freelancer for the admissions department after graduating. Now all that "time is of the essence / study is intensive / you can't retreat / bells won't cut off discussions or procedures" stuff sounds strikingly familiar to me again. From the day of my diagnosis, I felt especially engaged in my subject, and little else has intruded into the exclusive area of my study. Just like the old days, I'm on a course that might convene three times a day or more. I have to set my clock for midnight to record statistics I can't get from any text book. And as at CC, I've met a diverse band of others on the plan, and the shared intensity of time and depth of effort will likely cause life-long intimacy, however long that may be. And, of course, just as at CC, final exams are a bitch, and make-ups are rarely allowed. Results will go on my permanent record.
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Block 1: Infiltrating Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma Originating in the Thyroglossal Duct. (Limit 200 cases in world literature since 1915). Designed for students not majoring in health. This course helps students gain an appreciation for not having cancer. No prerequisites.
That's right - there were only 200 cases of my disease catalogued. The rarity of the diagnosis necessitated - thankfully, I feel - much research on my part, as I couldn't rely on the limited knowledge of well-meaning doctors stabbing (sometimes literally!) in the proverbial dark.
Like a developing Polaroid, after awhile the blur of a cancer diagnosis begins to coalesce into a discernable picture. You start to see it - oh, no, it looks like a shot of ME with CANCER - and it's a minor relief to be past the blessed denial phase. But it remains hard to stay focused on this picture for more than a second or two at a time. You're on your seat in the shower, let's say - or gasping woozily in the recovery room - and you keep wondering, okay, I see it, but what does it mean?
I learned from a smirking Barry Sarchett, in his Lit. Crit. class, that "meaning" can be as maddeningly slippery as a bloody tumor. But when it came to dealing with my diagnosis, "What does it mean?" didn't refer to the difficult definitions of histiocytes, vacuolated cells and nuclear groves. No, what I wanted was a context into which I could slip my situation and gauge its relativity. I wanted some authority to tell me what I had was worse than two broken legs but better than a heart attack. I wanted to be certain I'd live past 30 but probably not past 35. I wanted to know this would be the worst thing that would ever happen to my family. I wanted a promise that if I survived this next surgery and the next I'd be spared some random act of violence in a convenience store later. I wanted to know which of the things I'd done had rendered me deserving of such punishment, and what I'd done to have been spared the far-worse fates suffered by others - even children - who were saints contrasted to me. I wanted a black and white picture.
Strapped on a gurney and trapped inside a whirring whole-body scanner night after night, I hear another voice from CC loud and clear. Rochelle Mason, the director of minority student affairs, is saying, don't let those jokers forget there's a guy inside that instrument, behind the chart, still alive. It's so awfully important to live one's life - no matter how coarse the world can get - with dignity, she said.
But then every so often it's even more important to scream bloody murder until they stop the whirring and pull you cramping out of that MRI - or that uptake scanner, that pinhole collimator, that static viewer, whatever damned machine it is today - for just enough time to look into your eyes. Before surgeries, I always insist on meeting in person the folks about to handle my organs. I only get about a minute, naked on that cold table - before the sedative kicks in - to say, "I'm Ian. My parents and my dog, Tuey, and someone special named Jayson will sorely miss me if you happen to slice my jugular when you take out that hyoid bone." I like to think this goes a long way.
*******
June 25, 1997. So they told me through the door this afternoon the worst is past. It's hour 54 behind the lead walls in an isolation room at Long Island Jewish Hospital, my third stay. Someone's quietly slipped the latest People under my door, not wishing to wake me. I'm awake. My body lay shocked by a massive radioactive iodine ablation treatment. My skin is sticky-hot but I shiver from the core under heaps of blankets. Nearly all my sense of taste has been numbed, but I can taste the iodine. The wall, the floor, the phone, everything in the cell is covered with special paper they'll burn when I leave. Nothing taken into the room may leave the room - except, hopefully, me. For the next two weeks my urine, my saliva, my sweat could all hurt my unborn niece, my darling students.
It's midnight, maybe. Maybe 4 a.m. I want to throw up. I guess it's the worst right now, this loneliness and lack of hope. It's the inevitable "why me?" time I've been waiting for and dreading while I made jokes and tried not to dwell. While I promised my sixth graders I'd be back with a bite in September, expecting them to know how to spell by then, and know the difference between "much" and "many."
"What an opportunity," everyone exclaimed. "You can write without distraction. No appointments, no scans, no visitors allowed - nothing to do for days on end."
Tonight I think back to when I was granted the blessing of Jim Yaffe's fiction writing workshop (after my third application!). I remember the well-rehearsed warning lecture Jim delivered from a wingback chair the last day of that miracle time: his what-separates-the-men-from-the-boy-writers speech. On this day, after showing (not telling) us conscripts the joy and honor of writing, he recommends to members of the workshop that they follow more sensible, practical pursuits. Accountancy. Public Service. The Rodeo. Or plumbing. It's not just that only one in a million of us will ever "make it" as a writer. Jim showed us there's a huge gap between writing and being a writer, living a writer's life.
I hear him. But he's not addressing me with this rouse of his. I know Jim and I both share an imperative occupation. We both know what it means to have to write. Not that it's ever exactly easy, or fun, or necessarily any good, which is not the point. The point, I remember as now I hear only the gurgling of my inhalations and the I.V. drip, is to be saved by our writing and each other's.
So at least I've killed an hour recollecting a remarkable half-decade at CC. And I guess I know this troubled time will pass just as that glad time passed, and soon enough I'll find myself in a whole other place I'll have to explore from the inside out. Yeah, by the way, there are no statistics on whether or not I'll be smashed by a bus tomorrow, but I'm given to understand now that my death from cancer will not be forthcoming. So I think I'll be there on the night of my tenth reunion - there with all my hair and no spare tire, there with copies of my latest book in a backpack at the table. That night will come. But it's not tonight. Tonight's been such a long, tedious, four month night, and I want so desperately to fall to painless sleep.
I just can't close my eyes. There sitting in a surgical steel chair in the corner of my room, Jim Yaffe devours an Oreo cookie, smiling. I'm happy for the company as long as I'm awake. But with crumbs tumbling, he merely motions to the night table drawer in which my notebook lay neatly folded, nearly empty. And tonight he says just one word in that inimitable voice. He says my favorite word, in fact the only word behind every word he's ever said to me. Tonight he says: write.
Although Ian was unable to get back to teaching this year, he continues to write, and has recently started a newspaper job. His prognosis is excellent, but he'll still greedily devour get-well mail at 3 Greenridge Way, Spring Valley NY 10977.
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