Shlomo E left a comment that I stopped writing just as things were heating up. I can honestly say that for one of the few times in my life nothing was happening. I was an unholy mess. I couldn’t sleep lying down and I couldn’t sit in the Lazy Boy. Thank God Shuie carried up another recliner and I was able to get some cat naps. I couldn’t have slept more than 3 to 4 hours a day. The pain was still so intense I couldn’t even go down the stairs. Friday night came and it was time to go down for the Shabbos meal. I still couldn’t take more than 5 or 6 steps. Shulem, who was home for Shabbos came up with an idea. He realized the pain I was having was due to the weight of my arm pulling on the muscle in my side. He took a pillow case and fashioned a sling to support my arm. As Fern said it was a Nachas to watch the tender way Shulem took care of me. I guess the lifeguard training really paid off.
May 7, 2011
Last night I walked to Boro Park and back (about 40 minutes going and 50 coming back). The plus side of that walk was that one year ago, almost to the day, I was going out for my first walk outside after the surgery. I almost walked two houses with Ari there to help me. Thank God I’ve come a long way. On the other hand I still have a way to go. With about 20 minutes left to go before we got home my right leg went numb again oh yeah I almost forgot to tell you about it but after my surgery my right leg was numb. When I told the surgeon he responded, “That doesn’t bother me.” Let me tell you it bothered me. Dr. Halmos being the mensch that he is told me that it was probably from the epidural they gave me in my spine before surgery and with time it would probably wear off. It did; 9 months later. It came back Friday night. The rest of the walk was pure willpower. Enough kvetching. Aside: One of the benefits of the numb leg was that one of the shots I had to get in the hospital every 4 hours could be given in the stomach or the upper leg. I took it in the upper leg because I didn’t feel it anyway, ha I fooled the system.
Ronin Clark, my nurse:
Thinking back to those shots reminded me of my nurse in Columbia Ronin Clark. What a mensch. He knew more than most of the doctors and was a caring soul. Before I left the hospital he said, “L”shana habah b’Yerushalyim (next year in Jerusalem)”. To which I responded Erin go Bragh.
Being the guinea pig I was during the surgery, after they filleted me and carved out half of my chest, (the left side the one with the heart?) the doctor decided to try something new on me “HOT CHEMO”. Yum! I Googled it and it didn’t give me the warm fuzzies. The way it worked was they make two holes on the side of my chest, one about nipple high and one about the height of my last rib. Two tubes were put in both holes. They then BOILED a very strong chemo cocktail and while the solution was bubbling hot they put it into my chest through one tube, rinsed out the whole area and sucked the crap back out of the second tube.
I think the theory was twofold, firstly imagine what regular chemo fed intravenously does to the cancer (and the rest of the body), imagine then chemo poured directly onto the affected area. Now on top of that imagine the chemo BOILING HOT. It SHOULD (almost) definitely kill the cancer. The second part of the theory was, if the hot chemo didn’t kill me nothing could!
Getting back to Ronin, I was filleted on a Thursday and by Tuesday they were talking about letting me home on Wednesday. All was going well. Tuesday afternoon when Ronin was about to leave for lunch he told Fern to keep an eye on me, he had a hunch “Something was brewing.” About a half hour later Fern noticed a red inflamed spot on my side near the hot chemo hole. To make a long story short it seems the BURN from the hot chemo got infected and I had cellulitis. In a few minutes my fever spiked up over 103 degrees and I basically passed out. I remember waking up semi-delirious and Ronin was there next to my bed with a damp cloth stroking my head with such gentleness. It was one of the kindest things I ever saw.
He was funny too in a dry understated Irish way and quite smart as well. We hit it off. I have been back twice already with a gift for him, a framed TEFILOS HAROFEH (the prayer for a physician written by Maimonides hundreds of years ago). With the prayer I wrote a note, “You don’t have to be a doctor to be a healer.”
Lets see what topic do I want to tackle next?
Radiation
Doctor Sonnet sent me to Doctor Burri who was to be my radiation oncologist. His office is in a dungeon in the bowels of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. It was scary just going down there. After waiting for about 15 minutes and then spending another ½ hour filling out forms again they finally took me in to an office and Doctor Burri’s resident, who looked like he was a sixteen year old kid, came in and asked me a bunch of questions and then of course came the blood tests; again. They must have taken enough blood from me this year to feed an army of vampires for a decade. It’s a wonder I have anything left. Then doctor Burri came in. at least he didn’t look like a sixteen year old. However I am sure if he ever goes to a bar they would card him. He looked over my file, which was a crock. He knew my case cold. Columbia has something called the Tumor Board. Doctor Sonnet and a gaggle of other doctors who practice in fields of medicine pertaining to cancer meet once a week to discuss “interesting” cases. I was one.
The first question Fern asked was if they got all the cancer out of my body why did I need radiation? Well, Doctor Burri explained, after they finished the surgery they scraped tissue from all over and they found “microscopic” cancer cell all the way up in my shoulder. It might never grow but they thought that the radiation would kill them to make sure they didn’t grow.
Anyway he told me I would be getting the maximum radiation. 17 zaps each time, 5 days a week and 32 treatments. They would weigh me and I would have to maintain my weight, plus / minus five pounds, whether I wanted to eat or not. They were going to tattoo me on my chest in three places so they would know how to line up the zapper and if I lost too much weight the lines would move and they would zap the wrong spot. That’s all Fern had to hear, her Yiddeshe Mamma instincts kicked. Anything and everything I wanted to eat was mine. They wound having to do five tattoos because my body is “weird”. Go figure.
Pink Elephant Sperm. Warning not for those with a weak stomach
As promised I will now discuss the pink elephant sperm. As mentioned before my friend’s father had difficulty swallowing due to the radiation. At our first meeting the doctor told me not to worry it probably wouldn’t happen. Let me tell you something, if that was the case, they wouldn’t have given me the Pink Elephant Sperm. What, you may ask, is Pink Elephant sperm? Well I’ll tell you. When I went for my first actual zapping session the nurse, Andrea, handed me what looked like a urine specimen container or a sperm specimen container (not that I know what a sperm specimen container looks like, I just read a lot). In that container was a viscous pink solution and a lot of it. Hence the name: Pink Elephant Sperm, no one but an elephant could have filled that container. The name stuck and the nurse now refers to the solution as Pink Elephant Sperm, granted only to a select group of patients. I was to rinse and gargle before eating so my throat would be numb and I wouldn’t choke as easily. The radiation causes the throat to swell if one is zapped anywhere near the upper body.
I really thought I finally got away with one side effect. It was already two weeks after my last zap and while I had suffered from fatigue, loss of appetite, radiation burns and vertigo (more on vertigo later) I hadn’t choked even once. Ari was in from Mexico on business and we went out to eat at Club Café around the corner from my office. In middle of the meal I suddenly couldn’t swallow and I started spitting / throwing up. Ari ran and got me some napkins, unfortunately they were cloth napkins. They were ruined. I dumped them somewhat surreptitiously in the garbage on our way out. I say “somewhat” because choking is really an attention getter.
Well anybody who knows me for a long time knows that over the years I have had issues with swallowing (no comments Shlomo) so I figured this latest issue was part and parcel of my old issues and would pass rather quickly. I was wrong again. The swallowing was so bad that I was choking on my own saliva and that caused me to keep on retching. Ari finally convinced me to call the doctor.
Ari spoke to Dr Halmos and he said to come down to the Columbia emergency room. Remembering what the EMT told me earlier about having to wait for hours at the Columbia emergency room, I told him I’d pass. However he insisted. He told us that he was about to leave for home and instead would meet me at the emergency room and expedite the process. What a guy!
Sure enough the ER was a zoo but Dr. Halmos was there to help me through. Now I know I didn’t mention this earlier but Dr Halmos is the spitting image of Steve Martin. To top it all off he is from Budapest so he sounds like FRONK from the movie Father of the Bride. He hated it when I pointed it out to him, go figure. Anyway he came into the ER waiting room and took me back to the ER proper. I felt a bit guilty cutting ahead of all those people, some had gunshot wounds, stabbings etc. the usual stuff, but that didn’t stop me from telling some cops, “Look its Steve Martin!” they all started saying “Oh my God it IS him.” That was the only time I saw him grumpy.
To be continued