Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life (9 page)

“Great!”

Stevie is tall and thin with a jumbo-sized head of shiny black hair that rests on his head like a dead animal. Talk about a bad wig. This guy’s wearing a possum on his head that looks like it just came out of Earl Scheib.

“I’ll cut right to the chase. I’m a wig salesman.”

“Really?”

“Got my catalogue right in here.” Stevie presents the briefcase to me as if he’s offering me a box of candy.

“A wig salesman, huh?”

“Yep.”

“You got one for my dick?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” He opens the briefcase with a flourish and pulls out a plastic catalogue. He starts whipping through the pages, occasionally wetting his finger with his tongue for traction.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I say. “Cancer’s not enough. Now I got the dick wig sales rep in my room.”

“We don’t call them dick wigs,” Stevie says. “We call them merkins.”

“Merkins, huh?”

“Yep. Merkins date back to the Elizabethan era. They’re perfectly natural. They’re made of real or artificial hair, your choice, and they attach with either liquid adhesive or Velcro.”

“Fascinating. Do you sell a lot of these?”

“You bet. Many cancer patients are self-conscious when they lose their pubic hair so a merkin is a very sensible alternative.” Stevie lowers his voice, letting me in on a secret. “It’s virtually undetectable.”

“Yeah? I don’t have a single hair on my body and all of a sudden I’ve got a shrub between my legs and it’s undetectable? You don’t think someone is gonna see me naked and say, ‘So, yeah, I think we should . . . what the hell?’

‘What’s the matter, honey, you never saw pubic hair before?’

‘Not with snaps.’?”

Stevie snorts. I shrug. “Well, I guess a dick wig’s better than growing three long hairs and trying to comb them over the top,” I say.

“Merkin,” Stevie says.

“I’m just curious. How much does one of these cost?”

“As with any product, there’s a range. We have merkins starting at $44.95 all the way up to $3,000.”

“For three thousand bucks, my merkin better cover my crotch and whack me off at the same time.”

“I actually have a sample in my car, if you wanted to try one on,” Stevie says.

“No, thanks. I’ll pass.”

“Okay. But if you change your mind, here’s my card. I’m here at least once a week.” Stevie places his business card on my night table. “Have a good day, Robert,” he says.

“You, too,” I say.

Stevie leaves.

“Try one on,” I mumble. “Right.” I pick up his card, read it, stare at it, and actually say aloud to the empty room, “This has to be a joke.”

The card reads: “Wigs Unlimited” and gives a mailing address in Beaverton, Oregon.

Not a joke.

Sometime after my fourth session, the effects of the chemo start accumulating and begin battering me all at the same time. I feel like a crash test dummy hitting a brick wall in a Ford Focus.

First, the mouth sores. No matter how much ice I chew or asses I refuse to lick, the sores will not go away. And forget about keeping anything down. I can’t get anything
in.
For three weeks straight I live on orange lozenges, Jell-O, water, and liquid Lidocaine to numb my mouth. Prisoners at Guantanamo have a better meal plan.

Once the sores start to clear up and I return to solid food, I immediately throw everything up. Oh, and did I mention the headaches and dizziness? Every room I enter is spinning like a
dreidel
(to my non-Jewish friends, that’s a top). I close my eyes to get my bearings and the room spins faster. I force my eyes open to slits and try to focus on something to stop the bed from rolling, and, that’s it, I’m racing into the bathroom, hunched over like a comma, praying I make it to the bowl.

All of this adds up to extreme weakness. I no longer walk. I shuffle. It feels as if there are fifty-pound weights lashed to each leg. The headaches intensify, become as relentless and incapacitating as migraines, but without the benefit of the light show. Imagine the worst rap music in the world pounding in your head, blasted at a volume beyond red line. I’m waiting for my ears to bleed.

Then, to add to the fun,
hemorrhoids.
And not just a few. A mountain range. Popping out all the way from my ass to my waist. At least that’s what it feels like. Sitting on the toilet now takes all of my strength, courage, and will. I’ll be honest. Taking a good shit used to bring me pleasure. It now causes teeth-clenching pain. I cry during every crap.

I see Dr. Mehldau for a once-over. In his examination room, I mentally go over my checklist of horrifying side effects, the worst of which, without a doubt, are the hemorrhoids. They’re killing me. Everything else is minor. I’ve got to get some relief. It’s like Al Qaeda living in my asshole.

The door opens and the most gorgeous nurse I’ve ever seen walks in.

“You . . . you’re not Dr. Mehldau,” I say.
Oh, yeah. Mr. Smooth.

“He’ll be right in. I’m Meredith. I’ll be doing your preliminary.” She smiles, revealing a slight overbite.

Mannn.
Would I like to bang her. Yeah, right. In my condition I couldn’t find my dick if I had a G.P.S.

“Any side effects yet, Robert?”

“A couple,” I say. “You know. A few. Minor stuff. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“What are they?”

I swear she just puckered her lips. She’s unbelievable. She wants me. I’m all over this.

“Robert?”

“Huh? Oh yeah. Um. Well, my hair is falling out. Fell out. Everywhere. Almost. Some places still intact. A lot of virile hair still. And, okay, let’s see. Oh. I have bad headaches. And I get nauseous.”

“How often?”

“Let’s see. Well, pretty much all the time. Pretty much always.”

“Does it burn when you urinate?”

“Me? No. Not at all. Sometimes.”

“Hemorrhoids?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you have hemorrhoids?”

“No. None. Zero. Clean as a whistle.”

“Wow. You’re doing incredibly well. Nothing too horrible.”

“Yeah. Not bad. Piece of cake. I’m very lucky.”

“That’s it, then. Dr. Mehldau will be right in.”

She runs her tongue over her top lip, then leans over to give me a glimpse of her world-class boobs. She slowly sashays out of the room.

Call me,
she whispers over her shoulder.

Okay. I’m pretty sure I made up that last part. I’m so weak and delusional that anything’s possible. A few minutes later, Dr. Mehldau comes in frowning at my chart.

“No hemorrhoids yet?”

“I got hemorrhoids like you wouldn’t believe. Killers. It’s like there’s a whole city of miniature pyramids living in my ass.”

He looks up from the clipboard and stares at me, confused.

“You told Meredith you didn’t have hemorrhoids.”

“Have you seen Meredith?”

“I hired her.”

“Then you know I can’t tell her I have hemorrhoids.

‘Hello, Meredith. I’m Robert. I have a horrible case of hemorrhoids. But I’m horny. Wanna screw?’ I don’t think so.”

“Yeah. That might hurt your chances with her.”

I nod. “That’s what I’m saying.”

He smiles and shakes his head in what to me looks like amazement.

I leave Dr. Mehldau armed with a prescription for pain pills, which I fill on the way home—I actually wait in the car and play with the radio while Vicki deals with the pharmacy—then as soon as she hands me the bottle, I pop them like Pez. They work quickly, dialing my pain down from the level of water torture to something more tolerable, say, getting a cavity filled without Novocain. No side effects, either. Well, one.

Constipation.

There is nothing worse than having a case of terminal hemorrhoids and being constipated at the same time. I call Dr. Mehldau. And, yes, by now I have him on speed dial. He’s stuck somewhere at Mayo, his nurse says, but she suggests a laxative.

Which leads to an incident I’d rather forget.

The bottom line, no pun intended, is that I wake up in the middle of the night with a searing pain in my stomach and an overwhelming and immediate need to take a shit. I lurch into the bathroom, plop down on the toilet, and—

The next thing I hear is a siren’s
warr-warr-warring.
When I manage to wake up and force my eyes open, I’m strapped onto a gurney in the back of an ambulance. Two paramedics sit on either side of me. One cups an IV drip that dangles down from a portable rod attached to the ceiling and the other jabs the needle into one of the potholes in my forearm.

“Don’t tell me,” I say, my voice a hazed-out slur. “I passed out taking a shit.”

One of the EMTs laughs.

“Any shot we can keep that between us?”

I don’t hear any response, but before I drift back off to sleep, I make a mental note that it may not be funny now, but next week I’ll kill when I tell everyone about this in the infusion center.

Cancer beats the crap out of you. It pounds you with nonstop body shots to your ribs, chest, throat, gut, and head. You are left breathless, afraid to move, because even the slightest motion sends you reeling.

I am so weak that walking more than three steps leaves me winded, gasping for air. This actually motivates me to set a daily walking goal. I gauge the distance from my front door to the mailbox. I calculate that it’s thirty feet, more or less. My goal, I decide, is to walk to the mailbox and back. Eventually.

Day one.

“Vicki, I’m gonna get the mail.”

“Are you sure? It’s hot out there.”

“I got it. No problem.”

Twenty minutes later I’ve made it ten feet. My lungs are burning and I’m sweating like I’ve just run a marathon. I turn around and inch back into the house.

Day two.

“Vicki, I’m gonna get the mail.”

“Be careful.”

“I will. Today’s the day. I can feel it.”

I get about halfway to the mailbox and then I stop, desperately trying to catch my breath. I see the mailbox in the distance, a mirage on the horizon. I vow that tomorrow’s the day. Right now, I have to get back to the house before I pass out and end up back in the E.R. Man, I must be building up quite a reputation back at the ambulance shed.

I just pray that I don’t die from the hemorrhoids.

Day three.

I do it!
I make it to the mailbox! Takes me half an hour but who cares? I squint into the mid-afternoon August Arizona sun, leaning on the mailbox, as jubilant as the heavyweight champion of the world. I take a deep breath, flip open the mailbox, and reach in.

Mail hasn’t come yet.

“It’s all right,” I say to a cactus. “I never get anything anyway.”

I call Vicki to pick me up in the car.