February 2004 Archives

We've moved on. We've kind of moved on to a different stage in the game. Chemo stopped dripping a couple of weeks ago, a lifetime ago, the last of those f***ing bags pushed aside to make room for more antibiotics. And I know that it's not the very last bag I'll ever get, because you don't just go into the hospital once and everything is cured. Dr. Collins has explained that we'll have some follow up rounds later in the summer, consolidation, but for now, for this round, the chemo is over.

If the first stage is chemo, then the second stage is recovery. We don't know how long this next stage will last. We have expectations. We have estimates. But it's not like the bags of chemotherapy that we can control, stopping when we want to. This is a waiting game. This stage is all about waiting for things to come back, and we're on pins and needles.

Nobody uses these words with me (or maybe they do and I just forget), opting instead to share this information only after a few years have passed. "Hanging by a thread" is one of the favorites. "Nip and tuck" is another. Sometimes Mom will just shake her head and get all quiet when we have these discussions, years later. "If only you knew," she will say, another popular phrase, her voice quietly trailing off.

We don't talk about whether or not the chemo has worked anymore. We know that it did. Hell, yeah it worked. Of course, you've got to narrow your definition, be precise about what you mean by "worked," otherwise it's too easy to worry about other things. When we're talking to friends or relatives, we'll say that the chemotherapy "worked" because now I'm in "remission." I don't get into details. I don't explain that, well, technically, my bone marrow isn't actually producing anything (yet, we always parenthetically yet), so that's not necessarily the best thing.

But I'm in the second stage, okay, I am recovering, which also means -- and don't you forget it -- that I am now cancer-free.

So let's move on.

Let's get this recovery thing done so I can get back home. I'm going to be turning twenty-one at the end of the month. I've been pretty accommodating so far. I haven't put up much of a fuss. And I understand that circumstances dictate one's actions as much as anything else, that nobody expected I'd be in the hospital in the first place, so we all adjust our expectations and everything.

But let me be clear about this: I am absolutely not going to be stuck in this room for another five, six weeks, whatever, missing out on the chance to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. I will not have balloons and cake and party guests here in this clean, well-lit room.

I will not f***ing celebrate my twenty-first birthday from inside a f***ing hospital.

There will be bars and beers, and even if the bouncers have to double and triple check my ID -- reconciling the shaggy head in the picture with the bald dome I'm sporting -- at least I'll be out of my bed, actually wearing clothes instead of these damn pajamas all the time. I'll be with my best friends. We will celebrate an important milestone together, as many of us as possible, with as much normality as we can muster in these extraordinary times.

Laura stops by to visit after donating platelets. She breezes into my room. I'm always happy to see her, and not just because her platelets do a great job of bumping up my counts. Between her and Mom, I continue to get the best boosts. They would take turns. Mom might start it off, going three or four or five days in a row until she needed a break. Laura would then pick up the baton and run with it for another handful of days. Then Mom again. They did it for weeks, months, whatever. They did it as long as I needed the platelets.

There's usually not much to tell about the whole process. Laura spends a couple of hours at the blood center before driving to the hospital for a quick visit. The platelets arrive shortly after she does. They come by ambulance.

"Hey," she says. "I've got to tell you something. Kinda funny. Kinda gross."

"What's that?"

She laughs, pulls her chair up closer to my bed. "I'm at the blood center, you know, hooked up to the machine."

That's how you get the platelets. I've never actually seen the machine, just heard it described many times before. It's like an arm chair. You're sitting down, one arm extended, needles and tubes. Because you're only there to donate a very specific part of your blood, not whole blood, the tubes lead first to a machine.

It's a "spinning machine." Different components of blood have different weights, different densities. The tube extracts a certain amount of whole blood before it fires up. The spinning causes the blood to separate. There's another tube attached to the machine at the point at which platelets are known to separate, and a small plastic bag slowly is slowly filled. Good news is that you get the rest of your non-platelet blood back.

Once, when Mom was donating platelets, the blood bank hadn't spun off enough of her blood from the platelets. The mix wasn't quite as pure as it could have been, and I ended up having a reaction. Red spots on my arms and legs, an almost immediate rash, a good, high temperature spike. After that, the blood bank took extra care to make sure that the platelets were well-spun.

Blood to machine. Spin. Separate. Blood back to body. More blood to machine. Spin again. Separate again. Return again.

This continues for an hour or so, until the smaller bag has been filled.

"Usually I just read," Laura says. "But I happen to glance at the machine, once, when I turn the pages. There's something different about my blood this time. It's collecting there in the machine and it looks wrong somehow. I ask one of the nurses for help."

"What was it?" I ask.

"Just wait.

"The nurse comes over and looks at my machine. She taps it a couple of times. I'm not sure how to describe it, but there was this additional layer -- some kind of clear liquid -- that I've never seen before.

"'Eat lunch recently?' the nurse asked. 'McDonald's? Burger King?'

"It was Jack in the Box. I was running late for the appointment, so I just grabbed a cheeseburger and rings from the drive through. You know how she knew?"

"Don't tell me."

Laura nods.

"All the fat in my lunch was getting collected, too. It was still in my blood. You should have seen it. All that cheese and grease. It was seriously like the grease jar under the sink, except that this was coming from inside my body."

"Mmm. Tasty. Hope I'm not getting any of that with my platelets later."

She laughs.

"Nope. I got it right back after the platelets were spun out. I asked if they could spin the fat out, too, but they wouldn't, or couldn't, so it's right back inside me."

She shudders, briefly, her whole body shivvering once, like she's really cold, or she's just swallowed a gulp of the wrong drink from the wrong plastic cup at a crowded party, Jagermeister instead of Amstel Light. She sticks out her tongue.

"If I never eat fast food again," she says, "it will be too soon."

It's not a game, but it should be. We should have a contest. How high do we think my temps will run today? How many times will I need some demoral to keep my teeth from chattering uncontrollably, to help me find any kind of warmth under the stacks of hot blankets, piping hot, steaming, like a Robert pancake.

Or what about guessing the other numbers that we're constantly monitoring: my absolute dearth of any measurable blood counts. Will they be coming back today? Which ones? We'd like something.

Polys would be fantastic. They would be perfect, in fact, the best line of defense against elusive infections, but we don't want to get carried away. Some of my own platelets would be cool, too.

Hell. Anything.

Any new blood counts would be outstanding. Any little blip on the chart to demonstrate that my bone marrow is waking up again -- still woozy from those mutiple sharp blows to the head -- shaking off the pain, slowly, slowly finding a way to get up off the mat, preparing to hit back.

I always open mail from Carleton first, so many cards and letters, so many get wells and wish you were heres. They're comforting. They help to keep my eye on the prize, on getting better, quickly, so I only end up missing one term.

The manilla envelope is light. The hand writing is most definitely Gates.

Finals are wrapping up. If they haven't already, everybody's left campus for spring break. I don't expect anybody to call or write these days, either too busy studying, or too busy partying, so the thick envelope comes as a surprise. You know it would suck if it was cookies or something. If Gates and KQ had decided to stay up one night, walking down the hall from their dorm room (the two of them had landed a nice double in Sevy for their senior year) to bake cookies in the lounge. I'd try to eat them. If they'd made some cookies for me, I honestly would have tried to get them down.

Fortunately, it's not cookies.

It's a video tape. The spine reads We Miss You, Robert! Each letter is a different color. There's also a blank piece of paper with the same message spelled out in large letters (all blue this time), signed by Aaron, Gates, and KQ. Little hearts and cute smily faces and everything.

I am so excited. Cards are great. Letters are fantastic. Aaron and Brady have also put together a few mix tapes for me, which are also most outstanding, popping them into my Walkman, eyes closed, trying to pretend like I'm back on campus and we're deejaying a party in Evans, dancing on coffee tables, couches, wherever. These things are all good, all wonderful.

But nobody has ever made a video tape for me before. I don't have any idea what's on it. I can't wait to watch it. We pop it into the VCR.

There's no introduction, no fancy titles or soundtracks, just the tape popping and hissing to life, then a jarring hand-held view of friendly, familiar faces. Tor and Brady and Aaron are all in Gates and KQ's room. Melissa is there, too, my smiling, black haired, black-leather-jacket-wearing future wife. They're talking directly to the camera. They're talking to me, filling me in on important things (like the fact that Tor and Gates have been *gasp* dating), and not-so-important things (like the strange kung fu noises Brady made the night before last while walking back from a party at Hill House).

It's twenty, twenty-five minutes long. Karen and Linda share camera duties. They start in their room, and give me a virtual tour of campus. They walk outside in the rain, stopping at the Library, and Laird, moving to Nourse, then Evans. They stop people I know -- and sometimes complete strangers, asking if they know me -- demanding that they mug for the camera.

I'm crying and I'm laughing and I'm holding my breath, waiting to see who they might happen to bump into across campus. Gates and KQ do a goofy skit in Nourse Little Theatre where they both profess their undying love for me. Periodically they will break into a variation of Paula Abdul's hit song -- We take two steps forward, we take two steps back. We miss you, Robert. We really want you back.

It is the best kind of medicine.

It is instant healing.

I loved living there, okay, loved living with Tor and Ken and Adam, with Linda just across the hall. It was like a virtual quint, the amount of time we'd either spend with her in her single, or she'd spend with us in our quad. We had two rooms. We put all the beds into one room. In the other, in our main room, our "entertaining" room, we'd made this fake fouton out of a turned-over bookcase and an extra mattress. It was up against the window.

Spring term, Linda and I would crank the stereo. Fine Young Cannibals. She Drives Me Crazy. We'd jump up and down on the not at all bouncy fouton, shouting at the top of our lungs. We'd open the window to let the fresh smell of spring into the room. We'd yell out the window.

Our other spring term project (although it was probably started during the winter) lasted much, much longer than I think any of us expected.

All of the halls in Musser were lined with white tile. Like a bathroom. Not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing architecture, most certainly not the dorm featured in all of the campus literature. The one saving grace was that there were half a dozen large bulletin boards, a good four feet tall, five feet long, three on each of side of the dorm. Between various door decorations and whatever people decided to put on the bulletin boards, it wasn't all that bad.

Well, actually, it was.

The boards were a nice idea, but people crapped them up pretty quickly. I mean, even if somebody decided to cut out a whole bunch of photos from the latest J.Crew or Benneton catalog and pin them up, you wouldn't be surprised to see mustaches or other graffiti by the end of the weekend. It wasn't like the dorm was this horrible broken down place. It's just that people didn't really care. You live there for a year, do your time, then move on to a better spot on campus.

I'm sure it was Linda's idea. We maybe came up with together one night, casually, all of us in our room, drinking whatever cheap case of beer we could pick up at the Muni. There was a board across the hall from us. We walked past it every day, every day thinking how much it sucked. We're sitting on the floor, or on the "fouton of luuuv," picking at the beer labels.

We could do something cool. Something different. We could do something that nobody has ever done before, that would be cool, and that drunk grafitti writers could respect, and it could be all artistic and everything, and I'm absolutely certain that if it wasn't Linda's idea, then she was largely responsible for it's implementation.

We wrote a letter to the appropriate campus groups. We used Linda's Macintosh, printed the letter in a clean New York font, requesting building maintenance to remove all of the crapped up scraps of paper that tattered our board, and then please, please, paint it white. A solid four by five rectangle of clean, unblemished whiteness.

From there, we stopped ordering kegs of beer for our parties. Bottles only. We wanted variety. We wanted any number of different brands of beer: Pfeiffer, of course, because it was a staple, but also MGD, Kiran, Budweiser, Old Milwaukee, Coors, St. Pauli Girl. We started looking for cases of beer based not on the price per bottle, but on the colors and shape of the label.

Saturdays and Sundays we walked our black plastic garbage cans down the hall to the shower. We filled them with halfway with lukewarm water, then brought them back down to our quad. Homework was done on the fouton, or in the chairs lined up next to the bookshelves. Linda did much of the work. Empties were added to the garbage cans, left to soak for thirty minutes, an hour. Labels were carefully peeled off, laid out along an empty bookshelf to dry. Some labels were more difficult than others. You had to be patient.

When the labels were dry, we'd glue them to the board. Patterns were formed. A Pfeiffer border. A large swirl of MGD labels. A checkerboard of Bud and Bud Light. We didn't have any kind of master plan as we began to glue the beer labels to the board, but we recognized the patterns as they began to take shape. It was a work in progress. We'd drink and soak and paste.

Nobody touched it. Nobody defaced it. This was a surprisingly brilliant, completely accidental strategy. Drunk college students living in a crappy dorm tend to break shoot. But when they'd stumble up the stairs to third Musser, turn right, look right again at the collage being created, they were humbled.

It's beer, dude. It's beer and it's art, and, f***, dude, it's f***ing beer.

We'd drive down to the Muni. Linda was the only one old enough to buy. Before we'd left, she'd stood in the hall outside of our rooms. There were too many people involved, now. We'd all stand there, all of us, Ken, Adam, Tor, Aaron, Dave, Gates, KQ, and we'd survey the patterns, an eye on the decreasing white space, and we'd think about how many cases we'd need, what brands to look for, as we invited more friends to another spring term party.

Help us, we'd write. Help us finish these cases of beer. Help us finish the mural.

On the bottom left, Brady carefully cut out the Pfeiffer wording. He filled the space with each of our names, hand-drawn to match the red script, something you probably wouldn't even notice unless you were looking for it.

It's been awhile since I've visited Northfield, but the board was still there at our five year reunion, and I'm pretty sure I remember it there at our ten year reunion as well. Who knew it would last so long?