Greetings and Salutations

I have cancer. I've had it for a while now, and am fighting the good fight to get rid of it. At the ripe age of 42, it's not exactly what I was expecting at this point in my life. It's a $200,000 disease, though I have various kinds of insurance and cobras and medicaid or -care (whatever the one for people who aren't 65), disability (who can't pay me anything until May), and varied other arcane and obtuse varieties of social services. It has RUINED my credit. I'll be undergoing some stem cell transfusions, and additional chemo in March.

The chemo is to kill what's left of the cancer - one last rogue tumor, which is a phenomenal advance over this time last year, when I was delirious and in ICU. Most of the cancer is gone. However, previous chemo has left my bone marrow and immune system beat to all to hell; hence the need for the stem cells, which should jump start the rebuilding of my immune system. You certainly can't go walking around without an immune system!

This is going to turn me into a shut-in for up to a year - no movies, malls, churches, rock-n-roll shows, sporting events, work, dating, public transportation, or fun. No hanging around any large gatherings of people, which are nearly always guaranteed to include someone with something communicable. Of course, I'll be downing a fine pill salad of antibiotics, antivirals and anti-other-things long after I'm tumorless.

As the unstable but occasionally correct comedian Andy Dick once said: when life gives you tumors, make tumorade.

I was thinking about this while going through my photo albums here. My map collection, and book collection has grown considerably - I've been doing a lot of reading: lots of Russians (the classics), Latin Americans (the Magical Realists and their immediate influences), the Japanese (the modernists), the Chinese (the classics). Writing from people - cultures - who have been through a lot, historically speaking, have stories with some real meat on their bones, and a flair for expressing it all. Or perhaps exorcising demons as well.

The map collection, meanwhile, is my recluse's way of watching cities grow, peering into their history, seeing them in their awkward adolescence, and noting the difference between what they hoped to be, what they actually were, and what they ultimately became. There are certainly parallels with life here. It's a collection I can enjoy as I live the life of, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, for the next 9-12 months, with disability checks, loving family and the clean home of my youth (it would pass the white glove test) establishing itself as my new residence.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for me. There will be some rough times. Chemotherapy isn't what it was 40 years ago, thankfully, but it's still a bit like shooting up thermonuclear waste, feeling like a bus has run you over, and then attempting to find the comfort in knowing that this somehow is doing you a great bit of good.

What will the future hold? Perhaps I'll retreat into the dormered bedroom I knew well when I was half as old as I am now, and put the entire experience down on paper. As one stares down a life-threatening illness, and shows some kind of hope of actually coming through it, you become curiously open. Walls around you fall away. You become filled with insights, some or many of which may be banal, but they still belong to you, and they still want to find their way out.

Or perhaps not. We shall have to see.