Exactly two weeks since my last post. I have not written nor rewritten anything creative in that time. I've been so exhausted by lack of sleep and debilitated by the intensifying painful side effects of the radiation treatments that ended a year ago this month that my mind is a dull blank day after day. I feel I've tumbled rudely into a tangible fragile old age. Frankly, I'm frightened by the prospect before me.
However, I do have a plan. For the foreseeable future, I will set my writing aside and attend to my health, forgetting all else. I plan to exercise as much as possible and stretch my muscles and go to the gym, lift weights, walk as much as I can until I stabilize and improve my condition. I do also have an appointment on August 31 to address my current ill health with a urologist, exactly one year to the day when I received my last cyberknife treatment at PeaceHealth Hospital. I will make blog entries from time to time and hope I can complete a few more creative projects before my health stops me altogether.
This is me in the external beam irradiation machine at PeaceHealth. I got Deana one of the techs to snap the photo. The big round head looking down on me is the piece that shoots me with radiation. To its left on the diagonal is one of the arms that takes x-rays. The other x-ray arm, a square, is peeking out below the table. The x-ray arms are retracted at the moment. The techs go into another room and extend those x-ray arms. The entire unit circles my body, then the x-ray readings of the location of my prostate with the implanted fiducials is fed into the computer and the table I lie on makes the final adjustments, then I'm zapped. The process takes about 20 minutes. Compared to the 40 minute Cyberknife treatments, it's fast. I tell the techs with a laugh it's a "zip... zap... zoom..." process. I'm hopeful and tranquil enough about everything.
Mertie and I went into Portland to see Cafe Society, Woody Allen's latest. We weren't as impressed as by Paris Nights. We aren't alone in our judgment, but the film was interesting enough.
The rewrite on The Porn Writer still moves along nicely, but as I said in an earlier entry, I'm giving myself permission to let the writing go hang if I feel stressed. Mainly I need to stay rested and get in some exercise and run necessary errands and prepare or serve [already made meals] when Mertie comes home from work. Nine more treatments. Will be done a week from this coming Friday. Though I haven't been sending out many things, I still have about 15 items out being looked at. The queries for my novels are falling behind because they require more work. I try to make my query letters fit the agent I'm sending them to. I imagine I sense things about them from looking them up on Google and from the presentations on their websites.
Today in a couple of hours, I get my first treatment with the Cyberknife. Exercised early today at Firstenberg Center and have tried for several hours to get some writing done on poetry collection Up Your Ass and later on my novel about dysfunctional relationships The Porn Writer. I see that I'm unable to concentrate very well so I'll just go home and get a shower and take it easy until I have to set off for PeaceHealth Hospital in Vancouver. I'm told I will have to lie perfectly motionless for half an hour while the procedure is completed, but, even if I do move, the roboticized arm stops and recalculates the position of my prostate in order to continue to treat the cancer with high doses of radiation. I recall when we Americans were all in a tizzy about Strontium 90 drifting into America from Chinese atom bomb testing. Now, I'm hoping that radiation will kill the cancer cells that threaten to kill me. Nothing ever changes except change.
Ten days I've let pass without an entry. Sorry, but I'm keeping busy. I just began the sixth [or 7th] rewrite of The Porn Writer, and I didn't finish the 5th [or 6th] rewrite. My friend poet Geoff Peterson is visiting from Tucson, and it was his comment that caused me to return to "go" and start again. He made some sense about the history of an MFA in my narrator's past that made good sense. So I began again, and I'm happy with it. I had begun the novel with the idea Frank held an MFA then took it out because I thought the idea was cliched. Now I'm putting it back in again. Geoff's considerations had to do with potential audience, then, for other reasons of authenticity, I saw a good reason for it's remaining in the novel, because the real center of the novel is "dysfunctional relationships" that are divorced from the MFA considerations. The MFA is in it only to add to his sense of failure and inadequacy that have plagued all his relationships.
Reason for relief above. As for the aggressive prostate cancer that threatens to lengthen the odds for my succeeding in my lone bucket list item to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine: I finally begin radiation treatments this coming Monday, July the 18th when the Cyberknife will shoot a first heavy dose of radiation into my cancerous prostate. It's only taken from April 25th when my primary doctor found the nodule on my prostate till now....
The photo is of my radiologist specialist, M.D. Faisal Siddiqui.
Hanging in there. Got only an hour of rewrite in yesterday, July 6, on The Porn Writer. Now midway into "Chapter 19 - The Tender Trap" after spending the morning and early afternoon getting a scan and an MRI in preparation for irradiation of prostate and lymph nodes. I've been tattooed...three red dots on my stomach for radiation machine alignments. I felt very vulnerable in the hospital setting yesterday. Usually, I have little trouble walking through tests and paperwork and listening to instructions, but I felt shaky old yesterday some of the time.
As for my bucket list item. I think I've fallen down on submitting my novels to agents. Will have to knuckle down on that part of the process. I like the sound of that word, "knuckle".
Yesterday also I put in an appeal to Kaiser Permanente to overturn their negative ruling on the Cyberknife. This morning I called Kaiser to see if they got the paperwork. Yes, they got it, but the appeal won't be looked at for 14 days. What? I'm sitting here with my prostate showing perineural invasion. [In pathology, perineural invasion refers to cancer spreading to the space surrounding a nerve. It is common in ... prostate cancer and....] Those little terrorists can and probably are escaping into my flesh and bones as I write this, and Kaiser wants me to wait two more weeks? I yelp loudly, then Kaiser tells me they'll have to see if my situation "QUALIFIES" for a 72 hour evaluation and it'll take 72 hours to make that decision. What the hell!!
POLITICAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS:
For all those Republicans who hate the Affordable Care Act and who also ramble endlessly about "death panels", I have an answer for them. My prostate cancer treatment option that includes the Cyberknife has not been approved. Kaiser Permanente declined the Cyberknife part of the treatment, even though my reading suggests the Cyberknife will more effectively and with more powerful and focused radiation add to the kill ratio of cancer cells in my high risk cancer prostate while causing less damage to surrounding tissue, thus increasing my chances of living longer. My insurance plan is not purchased through the ACA nor is it Medicare. Thus the Permanente doctors on Kaiser's "death panel" have spoken and their decision has nothing to do with the ACA or Medicare. It's a decision based solely on saving the Kaiser Permanente HMO money. As I've tried to explain to hate filled Republicans, "death panels" have existed all along. The poor have routinely been allowed to die and insurance companies make daily decisions that allow people to die, and those decisions have never had anything to do with the ACA. A good friend of mine watched his wife die because they didn't have the money to purchase the treatment that would have saved her, and their insurance wouldn't cover it. That was decades ago and had nothing to do with the ACA or Medicare either. My doctor will try to get the decision reversed. My fingers are crossed.
A story of mine was just rejected by Glimmer Train. Nice rejection letter though. On the other hand, the fatigue lifted today as I worked on The Porn Writer. You know? At the moment I'm troubled more by the Glimmer Train rejection. I do not understand myself at all.
It's been 10 days since my last posting and that's too long a span of time, but nothing much has changed as far as my bucket list item and the forces of nature working against it. Am including two pictures I scanned. One of a poem I wrote several weeks past and the other of the nice illustrative drawings Dr. Siddiqui did as he explained my options to Mertie and I.
Mertie and I had our second opinion meeting today with Dr. Faisal Siddiqui who performs radiation treatments at Peacehealth and also the more focused radiation treatment called the Cyberknife. His recommendation is against surgical removal of the prostate in the same terms as Dr. Jason Smith. The best looking option appears to be a two stage radiation treatment. First 5 weeks of irradiation of prostate and lymph nodes with 40-45 on the grayscale (power rating), then 5 treatments of a nearly double amount of irradiation on the prostate alone. After our talk with Dr. Siddiqui, Merie and I felt very hopeful about extended life expectancy. The details of the after care are too involved to put in here. Oh ... I've already commenced working toward my transition to breasts and hot flashes. Dr. Siddiqui prescribed Bi-ka-loo-ta-myd, one a day. He says it will immediately block or slow spread of cancer cells in prostate while Mertie and I decide on course of action. Will need to put plenty of vitamin D and calcium additives into play.
As for writing. One rejection of 3 poems returned this past week, and the rewriting of The Porn Writer has been slow going. I'm sure there's a subconscious blockage between me and my imaginative powers. I feel, I think I'd call it, "preoccupied". Good beginnings for poems about the cancer come to mind constantly, but the impulse to complete them doesn't follow.
The odds shifted in favor of my getting something published by someone other than myself before I die. In our local paper a feature length article appeared about the CyberKnife at PeaceHealth our local hospital. It displays good success at destroying troublesome and moderately aggressive prostate
cancers with little to no side effects. No remissions reported in three years of use. I'm always happy to throw my lot in with science and technology. Well damn, I just realized on rereading that prostate cancers with highly aggressive natures aren't mentioned. Ah, I'll just stay positive until the biopsy results come in on the 25th.
On the writing side of the ledger, I finished the longer than expected rewrite of my story "Haunted By Henry Miller". The story line remains roughly the same but the tone is altered. In the rewrite before this one, I tried to eliminate names for the characters, referring to them by what they did in life or by their age. You'd read a sentence that began "the young teaching assistant". I was going for an anonymity that I thought intensified the cruelty of the main character, but that strategy has changed. For the better I hope. I learned something about
me and writing because of the rewrite. I tend
to write characters most like me as unsympathetic and cruel. So much for childhood baggage. Now it's back to the rewrite of The Porn Writer.
Another major change is in the title of another novel that I just sent out to an agent in Seattle. The novel has passed through several title alterations. It's gone from Children of God, to The Road To Difference to Angie's Choice. Now it's become A Desperate Decision. I place some emphasis on the effectiveness of titles. The Seattle agent is the first agent I've mentioned the bucket list strategy to. Let's see how that plays out. If at all.
