Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life (6 page)

Cut to today: my marriage wrecked, my body wracked with cancer. Should’ve realized that not being able to break that glass was a giant biblical sign.

It’s early Tuesday afternoon by the time I get to my apartment. I’m feeling drained and dizzy. I wander through my apartment, a zombie, tossing the few remnants of my life in L.A. into my suitcase: some books and CDs, a couple of shirts, sweatpants, and framed photographs of my kids. One picture is of Derek and me. He’s sitting in my lap. I’m smiling and he’s laughing, no doubt at something silly I’ve said. He was always my best audience. I really believe his sense of humor helped him through his cancer treatments. It’s stunning when I think about it. Derek was happy most of the time. Even through the worst of it, the most debilitating and painful procedures, he managed to keep upbeat. I learned so much from him. So much. I caress his face in the photograph.

And then I dial the phone.

Melissa picks up on the second ring. I barely wait for her to answer. I speak breathlessly. I let out my words as gently as I can, but I know what I’m saying is striking her, hitting her like a bomb. For me, it’s yet another explosion in twenty-four hours of nonstop explosions. I hear myself acting, trying to make her believe such half-truths as “I’m too old for you,” “I’m not being fair to you,” “I want to try again with Vicki for the sake of the kids,” and the most bullshitty of all bullshit reasons, “I need space.”

After I spew out my long goodbye, Melissa says nothing for what seems like an hour. Then she says, “This doesn’t even sound like you, Robert. I’m coming over.”

Before I can argue or stop her, she clicks off. I stand stranded in my bare-bones living room, a stranger in my own skin, feeling beyond horrible, feeling suddenly sick, spent, exhausted. Within seconds it seems, my intercom buzzer echoes through the empty apartment.

“Robert, let me in.”

“Melissa, please understand,” I say through the intercom.

“I have to end it. I have to.”

“Why? I don’t get it. You’re not telling me everything.”

“No, I am. I really am. I have to move on with my life and you have to, too. Let’s just leave it at that. Please.”

Everything I say sounds so hollow, so full of crap. No way Melissa’s buying any of it. I feel like such a heel.

“What did I do?” She’s desperately trying to figure this out, trying to make some sense of it. “Did I do something to you?”

“No, no, you didn’t do anything.”

“Robert—”

She’s crying now, sobbing. I can’t leave her like that in the lobby. I buzz her up. Time now shimmers and all I know is that she’s upstairs with me and I’m holding her, smelling her hair, and her tears are streaming down her cheeks onto my shirt. I can barely find my voice, but inside I’m silently screaming,
It’s not about you. It’s not about us. I have cancer. I need to be in Arizona with my kids, my parents, and, yes, Vicki. I need to fight it there and you can’t be part of that fight. It’s too much for you.

And I suppose if I were being truly honest, I would have to add,
It’s also too much for me.

And then there is silence as the two of us look at each other, look right into each other’s souls. Then we turn away. This, too, this end, is a kind of death.

“What am I supposed to do?” Melissa says. “Just walk out of here and forget about you?”

“You have to,” I say and mean it, but then add in a canned, tinny voice: “You deserve somebody better. A younger guy.”

She glares at me, her eyes tiny blue dots of rage. “You are so full of
shit
.”

I can’t say anything because she’s right. I am full of shit. I’m also full of heartbreak, loss, guilt, regret, pain, and terror. Plain, simple, unadulterated
fear.
With a capital F. Not the fear of dying, believe it or not, at least not at this moment. The fear that I have made the biggest mistake of my life. And the realization that I can do nothing about it.

“I’m gonna go.” Melissa stands straight as a sergeant and then her face creases. She suddenly looks very small and very sad. “Can I at least call you?”

“It’d be better if you didn’t.”

She nods, her eyes welling up. And then time slows. There is a quick clumsy hug, the door opening but not closing, and the sound of her footsteps clattering down the stairs. I teeter, feeling dizzy again, certain that I will fall. I reach behind me and lean against my rented living room couch for balance. I sit down slowly and exhale massively. I feel a sudden sharp jab in my chest as if I’ve been knifed, then I gasp for air, caused by the newly formed hole in my heart.

Back in the air.

L.A. to Phoenix.

Winging to my first chemotherapy support group meeting tonight at seven. This should be a hoot.

Okay, just for fun, let’s run through my recent little life change one more time.

In twenty-four hours I’ve gone from a sitcom star on Fox to a cancer patient in Phoenix. I’ve switched from trying to begin a life with Melissa to trying to save my life at Mayo.

Talk about whiplash. My head’s spinning like Linda Blair’s in
The Exorcist
.

And I’m feeling—

That’s really it, isn’t it? That’s what being alive is.

Right now I’m feeling numb. In a trance. My head throbbing. As if someone’s swatted me across the skull with a tire iron.

But even in this zoned-out zombie state, even as I literally deal with death, I know that my attitude about life has changed.

I feel liberated in a way. But mainly I feel that I have to keep going. I’m going to beat this. I have to. I want to spend time with my kids. I want them to know me. And not just for the next six months. For years to come. I want to watch Jacob and Aliyah grow up and I want them to watch me grow old.

And I’m going to beat this because I want to reconnect with Melissa. Somehow, some way. Maybe we’re meant to be. Maybe we’re Fated. My head is foggy, but that’s not why I think that. At heart, I’m actually a goofy romantic. I cry at Cialis commercials. Especially when the guy thinks he’s about to get laid and his grandkids show up. What a bummer. But thank God he’s using the dick picker upper that lasts for thirty-six hours. Because if he’s using the four-hour one, it’s a whole other story. He’s got to get those kids out right away or explain why Grandpa’s got a baseball bat in his pants.

Thinking about my life now, it boils down to this:

I have to make a comeback. A comeback from cancer.

So where do I start?

Might as well start tonight at the chemotherapy support group.

I don’t know what to expect. Don’t really expect anything. I just know that the people there are my kind of people—cancer patients—and in my newfound determination to learn everything and anything I can about my disease, I want to go in open-minded.

I am going to face my cancer head-on.

A nondescript room in the back corner of Mayo. People straggle in slowly, heavily, find spots on folding chairs. Nobody bounds in like they’ve come to hear exercise tips or investment advice. It’s a different kind of vibe, an odd combo of hope and despair. A lot of nervous coughing and laughing. I scan the room, trying to get my bearings. I do a head count, which isn’t easy because almost everyone is bald. I keep counting the same heads over again. I finally come up with eight, including me. I expect a group leader, but there isn’t one. We introduce ourselves and call out our respective cancers. One guy, testicular, tells us that he was diagnosed five years ago and now he’s skiing and snow-boarding and skydiving. I choke up when he speaks. I vow that that’s going to be me. Minus the skiing and snow-boarding and skydiving.

Then another guy says in a flat dead voice that he too has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was out three years, everything was cool, and then—

He turns his head and shows us a massive jagged scar, right out of
Planet of the Apes.

“Yeah,” he says. “It came back.”

Oh, God,
I think.
That’s gonna be me
.

I want to get out of here. This was a bad idea. What was I thinking? The panic is starting to stir in my gut—

Somehow I fight it. I beat it down. I can’t go there. I can’t do the
what ifs
and the
I’m not gonna make its.
I
can’t.

The woman next to me whimpers and starts to cry. The
Planet of the Apes
guy has sucked the life out of the room. He’s like a Hoover. I have to change the energy in here. I have to turn it around. I have to do the only thing I know how to do.

Make them laugh. Even once.

“I have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, too,” I say tentatively.

“But that’s a walk in the park compared to going through a divorce. I can beat cancer.” A group giggle. “Cancer goes into remission. Divorce lawyers never stop.”

Big laugh. The mood shifts, lightens. We open up. We talk about getting the news, how shocked we felt, how helpless, how we refused to believe it, and then how we gradually accepted the truth because we had no other choice. Cancer is part of us now. We talk about the earliest tests we’ve gone through. I tell them about my first CAT scan.

“The nurse asked me, ‘Are you allergic to squid ink?’”

I hold. They laugh in anticipation.

“How do you know? Seriously. Is it on my birth certificate or do I have to drink squid ink to find out?”

Squeals of laughter now. Testicular Cancer Guy is roaring. I’m hoping he doesn’t blow out his good ball.

“They give you iodine in the CAT scan,” I say. “Then the nurse says, ‘You’re gonna feel this sensation. You’re gonna taste it, smell it, and then you’re gonna feel this warmth go through your body. It usually starts in your head, then travels all through your body. You’re really gonna feel it in your crotch.’”

The laughter is rising, going where I hope it will. I hope I’m reading this crowd right.

“Then the nurse says, ‘You’re gonna have the sensation that you’re peeing in your pants. But you’re not really peeing in your pants.’ And I say, ‘What if I really do pee in my pants?’”

A communal roar. I keep going. “‘What’s that gonna feel like? What kind of sensation is that?’ She says, ‘No sensation. I guess you’ll just find out later.’ Great. So it’s like a wet dream without the sex?’”

They’re gone. Howling. They need this. They need the distraction, the change of pace, the release.

And, honestly, so do I.

My first chemotherapy session.

I walk into the infusion center at Mayo, a large, drab room that feels like the inside of a tomb but without the charm. There are a few beds and several chairs arranged near the center, pretty much scrambled together. Behind the cluster of beds and chairs are doors leading off to private rooms where patients with compromised immune systems receive their treatments. The air in here is thick and smells of Lysol. People trudge to their seats as if they are underwater.

The first thing I notice when I walk in is a poster on the back wall of the evolution of man. Except I imagine it in reverse. The
first
image is of a healthy man, walking erect. In each successive frame the man becomes more and more bent over and decrepit. I see myself morph into the poster, becoming over the next eight months the man in the final frame, once strong and healthy, who now looks like a human skeleton.

I scan the room and the images in the poster become suddenly, frighteningly real.
Everyone
in here is the man in the last frame. All the people I see are hooked up to IVs and everybody is either bald or has patches of hair missing. The door to a private room swings open and a man appears in the doorway. He can barely stand. His skin is chalk white. He is bone thin, a walking corpse. He shuffles forward, nods to a nurse, and I think,
I hope to God that was his
last
treatment.