The Quickening

There is a moment in a certain type of story where various seemingly or actually unrelated strands start to come together. Soon it becomes clear they are revolving around a common center of gravity, and as the orbits become faster and tighter, they press towards a singular, inescapable outcome.

The name I give to such a moment is "the quickening," though this usage has little or nothing to do with the Highlander movie or TV series from two decades ago that I have borrowed the word from. But the word is right -- the pace accelerates, events concatenate, little springs and brooks combine into streams that then surge into a mighty river.

And it may even right from that older meaning of "the quickening" that gave us the expression, "the quick and the dead." One life --or a path in a life already started-- becomes viable; others branch off, are quickly lost from sight, and fade into nothingness.

That has been my life for the last three weeks. Once the cancer diagnosis had been confirmed, it became a mad dash --or perhaps military campaign-- to get to The Treatment. The confirmation via biopsy was the beginning of The Quickening.

The Quickening itself involved dentists; dental surgeons; three kinds of oncologists with their respective administrative and support personnel (technicians, nurses, doctoral students, already doctor residents and Physicians Assistants); a kind of surgeon known as something like an interventionist radiologist and their Operating Room team and their awesome Jamaican music soundtrack; nutritionists, speech therapists, social workers, pharmacists, psychiatrists and parking attendants [of course! How easily we forget the most basic things!].

Leaving completely aside for now my work [as in "employment"], disability and medical payments side of things.

But since the end of May, every day or two has been loaded with either a biopsy, CT scan, PET scan, tooth fillings, molar extractions, doctor's exam or getting ready for the one on the next day.
That's why I haven't written.

There's been all that, and, Oh Yeah, my daughter's non-custodial parents financial statement for her financial aid next year because her 1500+ SAT dad (1500 plus when the max was 1600) saw that it said "College Board" at the top of the page and could not find an address and sent it there. Instead of her college. And then tried to figure out how to explain to Carmen's college that everything on the form was absolutely true, even if many weeks late, but nothing on there was now particularly relevant, as I had been diagnosed with cancer.

So it is not surprising that what I had to do three days ago didn't stand out: just go to the hospital Thursday afternoon and get a tube stuck into your stomach through which to pour nutrients and water in case (almost guaranteed) the radiation therapy makes your throat so sore you won't really be able to get a life-sustaining ration down your gullet the old-fashioned way three or four weeks from now.

Wednesday, the day before I got the Tube, I had been in the underground, not the political "weather undeground" of my youth but the physical T for Tumor underground. They call it the "T for Tunnel" level at the facility where I am being treated but that's just dissembling.

That's where they zap you with radiation. They've put all the heavy-duty medical radiology equiment underground because that's the cheapest way of shielding it. The "tunnel level" isn't particularly a passageway to anywhere, as the word "tunnel" might be taken to imply, save an early grave if the treatment fails or the rest of your life if it doesn't, but that usage --"tunnel" is mostly metaphorical and if there's one thing that us cancer people no longer have time for, it is metaphor.

"Cancer people." The words just came out, without even thinking about it. But that is what this post is about. Becoming a "cancer person."

Wednesday afternoon after work they put a plastic mesh on my face that quickly hardened to become a skin-molded mask. To do it I had to shave. Completely. For the first time in 20-some years, no beard. But they want to make sure I glow in the dark in only the right places.

And, you know, I'd used the journalistic gallows-humor phrase --"glow in the dark"-- so much the last few weeks that I didn't even think about it when I used it with Carmen. Except Carmen isn't someone at CNN en Español where I work; she is my daughter, and, it seems, quite resents daddy's journalistic gallows humor. She asked her mom, who just happens to have spent most of her life --or as close to as makes no difference-- as a pediatric oncology nurse. Who dutifully told Carmen daddy was just trying to be funny. Radiation therapy doesn't REALLY cause people to glow in the dark. Not that Carmen REALLY believed me for a second. Like I said, she IS my daughter. Has been her entire life.

So on Thursday I had Carmen come to my house to pick me up to drive me to the hospital --"payback" I joked, for all the hours I'd spent with her when she was learning to drive-- and then played a trick on her, surprising her with my shaved me, a person she's never seen before over her 19 years and a couple of weeks of life.

And it was surreal, for as she came around a corner and up the steps in my house to see me, I saw her, but not as she is but as she was a little more than 19 years ago, as she was being born a little after 3PM in the afternoon of that Wednesday in May 1990. And the look my 19-year-old daughter had on her face for just an instant, a flash, was the first look she ever gave me --I swear to God.

It was this half outraged, half bemused "WTF?" look, the same one she had on now. The same one she has on, not most of the time, but at least most of the time when the look on her face expresses some clear meaning. The "Carmen" look.

My friend Sal has the pictures --we were just looking at them today-- showing that I let my beard grow out in our last months in Nicaragua, during the waning days of the Sandinista Revolution. So, for sure, Carmen had never seen THIS me, beardless.

So that was Thursday pre-hospital.

Late Thursday was a smaller thing, just a little plastic bypass into my stomach and the rest of my alimentary canal in case my throat wasn't working. Like if my neck --but not the rest of me-- had been magically transported to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

But now I find I'm no longer the person I had been say, on Monday.

Tuesday after work (remember, I work 2AM-10:30AM) I got an almost miltary-style haircut and a beard shave. Except the barber didn't shave it, she just did it as close as naked clippers could make it. It looked like I hadn't shaved for a day or two, that's all, except for that pasty tone skin acquires after being permanently buried under a beard for decades.

Wednesday morning at work I was joking with my compañeros that I'd gotten home from the barbers, gone to the bathroom and almost called 9-1-1, seeing some complete stranger looking back at me from the mirror. But that then I hesitated upon realizing the stranger looked amazingly like my brother.

It was me, of course, which everyone immediately realized except Sal (my best friend) when I told her later. She thought it might really BE my brother who had somehow come to Atlanta, snuck into my house, secreted himself inside a bathroom and was there to surprise me. I'm being unfair, since, as I was telling the story, I really didn't give her time to concentrate on details like someone getting into my house or into my bathrrom. But if you want to know what Sal is like, that is probably the best description of her I could give. She is the person who would totally believe that I came home to find my brother there, because that is EXACTLY what she would do for her brother or sister. Or for our kids. Or for me, though we haven't lived together for more than a decade. Or --I hope-- what I would do for her. Because she deserves so much more.

Of course, if I AM to look like one of my brothers, I would want it to be my distinguished, even somewhat patrician older brother, Gustav0, the poet who is the David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, and has a dozen or so sch0larly and literary books on his CV -- including a journal from his own cancer battle now almost a decade ago.

But --needless to say-- I look instead like the spitting image of my younger brother. Whom I will not further characterize out of deference to family privacy.

So Thursday they poked a plastic tube into my stomach. And with that alteration I think I have crossed a frontier. I no longer *feel* like a regular person. I n ow beklong to the species cancer people.

"You assignment, Mr. Phelps" I can almost hear the Mission Impossible tape saying, "is to stop being a cancer person and instead become a regular human being once again." As if it were that easy.

* * *

If you happened to read this post Saturday night, there was even more to it then. Took it out, decided this was already way overloaded, and that other stuff can wait. But sooner or later it will be back.