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.
I'm staggering today, the result of the hormone injection and also Flomax [increases urine flow] that relaxes the smooth muscle walls of my vessels and arteries. Sometimes when I stand too fast or rush up a stairway, I get a stunned feeling and my temples feel pressure. First time I thought I was having a stroke. Now I stand still until the feeling passes.
The writing is not going all that well. I have many periods of fatigue, a side affect of radiation treatments when I feel completely uninterested in writing. All I want to do is sit and watch TV. Even reading seems too much effort. Still I get some writing done and exercise at the Firstenberg Community Center, and believe it or not, the effort seems to overcome fatigue for a time, but first I've got to overcome the fatigue and make myself get going. I've been craving McDonald's "Egg McMuffins" for lunch, and my vegan diet suffers, but I crave the feel of solid foods in my mouth. Chewy stuff. Something to get my teeth into. I still have banana, spinach, strawberry, apple with grape juice and soy milk smoothies for breakfast.
At 3:15 I go into PeaceHealth for my 5th low dose radiation treatment. Not long after that, Mertie comes home from work, and we begin another weekend together. Long live weekends with my wife.
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.
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.
