My topic? Writing Through the Hard Times. I spoke about how my cancer memoir (”I Survived Cancer but Never Won the Tour de France“) came to be written and how I was able to get it published despite many obstacles. I also shared some poetry from my books and spoke about the stories behind a lot of my health-related poems.

My goal was to encourage the audience. For I was well aware that when a person gets cancer, he or she is confronted by the reality of their mortality. They often become reflective about life, and, as a result, so many want to share their stories. So I hoped to encourage them to share those stories in whatever way they could, through writing or otherwise.

My talk was well received, but as it so often happens, I was the one who found myself being encouraged. For part of my talk involved telling the audience about my current situation, my stage four cancer and poor prognosis.

Person after person approached me in the hours after my talk. They told me stories of how they had been told they had weeks to live, but were still here years later. They told me about all of their surgeries, chemo sessions, and experimental treatments, and many of them had been at it a lot longer than me. 

“Never give up,” they would say, smiling, with wisdom and tears in their eyes.

It had been a difficult week, to put it mildly, another doozy in the annals of a crappy year. I had entered the conference hoping and praying that I could just hold it all together. But by sharing my story and listening to theirs, I found enough strength to make it through once again.

My doctor in Houston indicated there could still be some positive results, although he expected any such results would likely be minimal at this point. And my doctor in Bartlesville says the common protocol is to do a PET scan at twelve weeks in order to determine what the final results are.

Right now, I’m six weeks out, which is only halfway there. So I guess we’ll have to wait awhile longer, hoping the next scans are a little more encouraging.      

That being said, I’m in bed right now, recuperating from my 36th chemotherapy session this last Monday. (That’s right, 36th!)  My nausea has been good, but the drugs have really sapped my strength. And for right now, continued chemo seems to be the only option I have.

Normally, chemo knocks me down for three or four days and I’m ”dead in bed,” trying to eat and drink and get my energy back. This is followed by a couple of so-so days, when I’ll feel good for stretches, then suddenly bad. But after that, I normally start feeling pretty good again.

Eight good days, two so-so days, four bad days.  That’s been the normal routine.

Not the greatest way to live, but doable. More good days than bad, after all.

After the radiation procedure last month, however, my energy was noticeably down. The radiation would remain in me and be detectable for thirty days, which means it only ended yesterday. And radiation does have this way of sapping one’s energy. Plus, during this time I’ve had chemo twice.

As a result, I’ve only had about six or seven good days during the last thirty, less than one good week out of the last month.

The hope, of course, is that this is a temporary setback; that we did the radiation procedure, sirtex, with the hope that it would buy me more time.  Good time. I’ll find out the answer to that question next week when I’m in Houston.

But it has given me a rather scary glimpse into my possible future. That is, what it’s like when a terminally ill patient crosses over that slippery slope of hope and begins having more bad days than good.

Can’t say I’m a big fan.

Truth is, it’s much easier to keep a positive attitude when you’re still having more good days than bad. It’s definitely worth it, to trade four bad days for eight good ones and a couple of in betweens.  But when you start trading three bad days for one good day, yikes!

I catch myself talking about how crappy I feel all the time. (No one likes being around people like that.) Rather than tackling some projects that need some resolution, I find myself in a chair watching bad TV. Instead of writing, one of my very favorite things to do, I procrastinate or curl up in bed.

Anyway, I’m now thirty one days outside of radiation, and three days past chemo. In a couple of days, I hope to be feeling good again. Just in time to head to Houston for big news.

The project was supposed to be done in November of 2008, I believe, for I remember the signs saying something to that effect. However, not knowing whether or not I would make it to November of 2008, I was a little miffed. It didn’t seem fair that I would have to deal with the nuisance of road construction for the remainder of my days.

A year came and went, and I was still alive, somehow. But the road construction was still alive too, and thriving. There seemed to be no end in sight.

As 2009 rolled around, I couldn’t help but wonder which of us would outlast the other. Would I live longer than the road construction project or would my funeral procession be driving through gravel and orange cones?

These are the crazy little mind games one plays when facing death.

In mid January things were looking pretty grim for me, as a long-shot medical procedure failed to give the hoped-for results and cancer spread from my liver to lungs. Meanwhile the road construction seemed to be nowhere close to being completed. Arrgghhh!!!

But then, lo and behold, the tide started turning. I made it to mid April with no further progression of the disease. Meanwhile, several phases of the road construction suddenly ended. I had a real shot, it seems.

This week, after recuperating from another surgery, I finally had sufficient energy to head to work. And what to my wondering eyes should appear? Four brand new lanes and real sidewalks, my dear.

Eureka! I’d done it. I had lived longer than that mile of nonstop traffic, tractors, gravel, and dust.

I was thrilled.

Until I hit I-35. Road construction is due to be completed on that project in June of 2010.

I wonder…

The surgery was done by Dr. Coldwell, a Dallas surgeon who comes to Bartlesville one week out of every month, primarily to do this particular surgery on people like me. He’s an extremely nice man, and it’s clear the hospital staff loves him. He is one of the country’s leading experts on this particular procedure, which is quick, but rather tricky.

I arrived in my old hometown on Monday night. Can’t claim to have been in a good mood, however. I was pretty down, really, for me, and I spent the time alone, reflecting on everything that’s messed up in my life.

After this pity party, I tried to get some decent sleep, for I was due to arrive early at Jane Phillips Memorial Hospital on Tuesday at 6:30 a.m. This is the same hospital where two of my sisters were born, by the way, and it’s about a mile from the house where I grew up.

On Tuesday I would have a “pre-procedure” with the actual procedure to follow the next day. For the pre-procedure, Dr. Coldwell would inject a dye into my liver to make sure the radioactive spheres would not travel to my stomach, which would cause an ulcer, or my lungs, which could kill me.

As I left my hotel room, a thunderstorm was brewing up. The sky was green, churning and swirling, and I expected the tornado sirens to go off at any moment. This was fairly ironic, for my fascination with all things weather began in 1980, when I watched from my bedroom window as a tornado dropped down upon Bartlesville and then lifted right over Jane Phillips Memorial.

I made it to the hospital, of course, and ran inside just as the rain began pelting down. Before too long I was chatting with Linda, a kind nurse who also had colon cancer that spread to her liver. She’s had a liver resection and seems to have beaten it, for now, but we spoke a lot about the ongoing emotional battles people like us face.

They soon wheeled me into the surgery room and gave me a drug “margarita” through my port. The drugs would prevent me feeling pain, but would not knock me out entirely. Two nurses, age 29 and 45, were helping with the procedure. One brought out a trusty electric razor and began shaving my groin, while the other assisted by adjusting my gown from time to time while speaking to me about her back surgery. Yikes!

I got fairly loopy at some point, apparently, and began reciting poetry. I’m a total wimp when it comes to medication, so I slept through most of the procedure.

Everything went well, I’m told, and I was dismissed from the hospital at about noon. My parents picked me up and we went out to eat at Outlaw’s Chophouse, a nice restaurant owned by my old high school buddy, Rhonda Bailey Parnell and her husband Dave Parnell. Then I went back to the hotel and crashed.

My family arrived late in the afternoon. We went to Dink’s Barbeque, our favorite Bartlesville restaurant, then caught a movie.

On Wednesday, it was the same procedure all over again, except this time they injected the radioactive spheres, rather than the dye, and the nurses shaved the left side of my groin rather than the right. I didn’t recite any poetry this time, to my knowledge. Instead we chatted about movies and restaurants.

I left the hospital in the middle afternoon and went back to the hotel. My family headed back to Norman, for they had appointments. I crashed hard and woke up hours later, feeling fairly miserable. My chest was sore and bloated, so I sat in bed trying to drink something and feel better. But this didn’t help much.

A group of my old Bartlesville friends were gathering that night.  Jim Bishop, who was the best man in my wedding, and his wife Melissa were staying at the home of our good friends, the Harrisons. Dana Brock Cross and Jennifer Williams McKissick were there too, and the Tucker’s daughter Kim would arrive after an OK Mozart event she was attending. They wanted me to come over if I was up to it, but I was feeling pretty lousy.

So I had a choice to make. I could sit in my room and feel lousy or I could go join my friends, feeling lousy but making a memory. For me, a decision like that is a no brainer, for friendship is about 80% of what matters in this world. I joined my friends, and I’m really glad I did.

In my hopelessly mixed up world, certain songs are so incredibly bad that they’re actually rather good. It’s difficult to explain how this works, but it seems to take a weird combination of catchy pop music, horrible lyrics, bad taste, drippy sentimentality, and unapologetic sincerity for a song to make this delightful leap from bad to good. 

Maybe it was just the times, but many seventies songs fall into this category. Convoy. I Think I Love You. Kung Fu Fighting. Dancing Queen. Torn Between Two Lovers. Rhinestone Cowboy.The Night Chicago Died. 

The list goes on and on. King Tut. The Streak. Y.M.C.A. Telephone Line. 

Curiously, some bad seventies songs were never quite able to rise above their inexplicable awfulness. They were bad then and they just stay bad, forever. Songs like Disco Duck, The White Night, Having my Baby, You Light Up my Life, Love Will Keep us Together, Escape, Muskrat Love, Reunited, and I Write the Songs. (By the way, as a general rule, all songs by Air Supply, Andy Gibb, Hall and Oates, Helen Reddy, and Barry Manilow fall into this category.)

Speaking of Andy Gibb, the string of pop hits by his famous brothers, the Bee Gees, are not so easy to categorize. Anything pre-Saturday Night Fever is potentially on the hurt-so-good list, songs like Fanny be Tender, Nights on Broadway, and I Started a Joke. But anything after Saturday Night Fever is pretty much bad. Tragedy and Too Much Heaven, for instance.

And what of the songs on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack? Well, they are forever on the bubble, it seems. We could debate their worth into infinity.

One of the best ways to move over from the bad list to the so-bad-it’s-good list is to actually have someone die in the song. That’s why songs like Billy Don’t be a Hero, Run Joey Run, The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia, and  Rocky all qualify without any great argument. I’ll even throw The Blind Man in the Bleachers in, although it’s a little shaky. Even Copacabana, a Barry Manilow song, sneaks in under this exception.

Seasons in the Sunis probably the greatest of all the cheeseball seventies song, especially those dealing with death. It is wonderfully catchy, weepy, and, well, awful. I love it! It is pure pop music, yet it deals straightforwardly, almost happily, with one of the toughest subjects of all. It contains some of the worst lyrics and in-your-face sentimentality of all time. And yet, it can, at times, seem almost wise, even profound. (”but the wine and the song like the seasons have all gone.”) The really good bad ones have this sneaky tendency.

In the song, the songwriter is dying. We don’t know why, because he never tells us. The only hint we have is that “it’s hard to die, when all the birds are singin’ in the sky, now that the spring is in the air” repeated thrice, which, if I’m not mistaken means our tragic protagonist won’t be seeing summer.

So from the outset Seasons in the Sun requires listeners to suspend disbelief and just accept the fact that our hero is a dead man walking. We can argue about alternative therapies, magic potions, medical trials or prayer all we want, but this would be beside the point.

Interestingly, the singer chooses three people to whom he would like to say a final farewell. Why three? Well, this is pop music, after all, and a three minute song has no more room for goodbyes.

The first goodbye is bestowed upon the protagonist’s “trusted friend,” a person he had known since the two were “nine or ten.” We don’t know if this trusted friend is male or female or whether their friendship ever moved beyond that point to something more scandal-worthy, but there are certainly a variety of interesting interpretations. Be that as it may, the pair had apparently sewn their wild oats together, for beyond climbing hills and trees (these are possible metaphors, by the way), they had ”learned of love and ABCs” (but hopefully not in that order). Later, we get a bit more of the picture, when the protagonist admits the pair had shared physical and emotional pain (”skinned our hearts and skinned our knees”), before parting with a not-so-random observation that “pretty girls are everywhere,” even as he is about to die. Ouch! No matter what interpretation you take, that hurts.

After saying goodbye to his trusted friend, the protagonist moves on to “Papa,” with the emphasis on syllable two rather than syllable one. Our dying hero has a lot of guilt and regret pertaining to his father, apparently, for he immediately asks Papa to pray for him, before describing himself as the “black sheep of the family.” Papa had tried in vain to teach our protagonist right from wrong it seems, but like the Prodigal Son our young man had chosen “wine and song” instead.  It’s possible, then, that he is dying of liver failure, but that’s only conjecture. However, if true, it might explain the rather cruel suggestion our hero makes when he tells Papa to revisit his death over and over each time he sees a small child, for they at least are unspoiled and have not succumbed to the enticements of the grape.

We move on then to our third goodbye, which is saved for “Michelle, my little one.” Michelle could be a girlfriend or she could be a daughter. We’re not entirely sure, but for purposes of the song it doesn’t really matter. (By the way, I refuse to examine those lingering Alice in Wonderland theories that keep surfacing. Have you no shame?) Michelle, whoever she was, reportedly gave our hero love and helped him “find the sun,” which is pop music code for overcoming clinical depression. Indeed “every time” our hero was down, Michelle would apparently appear out of thin air and help him get his feet “back on the ground.” I guess it is possible, then, that Michelle is a guardian angel, a fairy godmother, a wood nymph, or a licensed psychiatrist, but my gut says she’s a girlfriend with a rather small frame.

Anyway, beyond all this silliness, Seasons in the Sun asks a very probing question, the only one that has any relevance to this series: If you were dying who would your trusted friend, Papa, and Michelle be?

It’s not pretty.  

Had my stomach pumped twice as a kid for eating medicine that tasted like candy.

Tonsillectomy as a kid.

Won’t count the rabies shots, which hurt like hell, or the warts I had burned off my foot, which hurt even worse.

Two shoulder surgeries in high school, the result of a football injury.

Three knee surgeries, the aftermath of a lawyer’s league basketball game.

Five surgeries on my right arm, including the, gulp, amputation. God, I hate that word.

And then, those breast implants. No wait, I decided against those.

A surgery to install a port for chemo.

A surgery to install the titanium pump and remove my gall bladder.

And now, the new surgery, which is apparently my 16th!

It’s called sert, and it involves injecting radioactive spheres from an artery in my leg into the tumors in my liver. It’s sort of like those radioactive beads they give to prostate cancer patients. Here, the radiation is fairly low, but concentrated in the tumors themselves. It’s an outpatient procedure that only takes about an hour. Will likely make me nauseated for a couple of days, but no worse than chemo. And the outlook seems fairly promising.

So say a prayer for me, if you pray, or send out good thoughts if you don’t. I plan to keep fighting this thing.

On May 31, I was out on the beach, writing, when I suddenly remembered it was my anniversary.

We have so many anniversaries. First and foremost, we have wedding anniversaries; my twenty-second is coming up in July. My parents just had their fiftieth. We also have work anniversaries. I will have worked at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals for twelve years this November, and in July I’ll begin my fourteenth year as a worker for the state of Oklahoma, knock on wood. Birthdays are an anniversary of sort. I’ve had 45 of those.

There are anniversaries related to the time we first met someone or went on a date, anniversaries of how long we’ve lived in a certain city or house, and anniversaries of a big event in our lives, like graduation from high school or, for me, the publication of my first book (November 2006, by the way).

Not all anniversaries are happy ones. Each April my family grieves on the anniversary of my sister’s tragic death from a car accident. There are many anniversaries like this. September 11. The anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. I had a dear friend write to me a few days ago about her anniversary as a widow, her husband having suddenly died eleven years earlier.

Cancer patients often have more anniversaries than they can shake a stick at. I just “celebrated” making it twenty months since being diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. In September it will have been five years since my arm was taken. (Please, spare me the “give me ten” jokes.)

And on May 31, 2009, while sitting on a Mexican beach, I became an eight year cancer survivor. That is, it had been eight years since I first discovered something was not quite right with the triceps muscle of my right arm. A lot has happened since then, more highs and lows than I could have ever imagined. But, even though I’m receiving chemo as we speak, I’m still ticking and hoping to see many more anniversaries, whether they be anniversaries of triumphs or tragedies.

Well I did, thank God, and I have firm plans to see many more happy events in the future. I think that’s probably a better plan than the one that views each big event as possibly the last one. Cup half full, right?

Nevertheless, even when I try my best to “keep it positive,” life can still be so bittersweet. During Maddye’s ceremony, I sat next to my fifteen year old son and couldn’t help but think of his graduation day. Plus, I had my own ghosts to battle. It had only been 27 years since I received my diploma, and I found myself wondering where the time had gone. After graduation day it was college, then law school, then a couple of jobs, then my thirties (aka the ”lost years”).

And after that? Cancer.

I found myself wanting to run up there and add something to those graduation speeches:  a little Dead Poet’s Society “carpe diem”. That is, a challenge to seize the day, make your time count, and laugh whenever you can.

Or, as we have said in this series, to make a memory every day, because life is real.

Anyway, the pump was used to inject chemo directly into my liver for a few months. Unfortunately, it didn’t give us the outcome we wanted and now it just sits there, dormant.

The thing causes me fits at the airports. I set off the alarm every time, of course, so that means I have to be put in one of those special rooms and then wanded and frisked like a common criminal. Oh the airport people are always nice and respectful and careful with my curious right side, but it’s a bit embarrassing and it takes so much time.

Plus, they always ask me to raise my arms, and then they don’t quite know what to do or say when I only raise the one. “Sorry, that’s all I got,” is my typical joke. Freaks them out.

And I also set off the alarms at the State Capitol Building, where I work. Frustrating thing is that the people who are stationed there change all the time. Most of them know me, and tell the police officer on duty that I’m okay. “He’s got a pump,” they say. And usually the officer nods and says, “oh,” as if this bit of information explains anything. So most of the time I sail right on through, although one officer wands me every time, as if hoping to catch me if ever I try to  sneak in with something I’m not supposed to.

But others don’t know me from Adam, and they may wand, frisk, and/or ask me a series of semi-probing questions. “So, what’s the pump for?” “Is it, like, beneath the skin?”

The pump did come in handy last week, however, when some drunk girl at the Norman Music Festival mistook me for someone else and then slugged me hard, right in the stomach. Her fist landed right on the pump, and she yelled, “Dammit! What the hell was that?” (It’s a direct quote.) 

At this point, she saw that I was not who she thought I was and began slurring a horrified apology, while shaking her hand, which was apparently in some very real pain. I never answered her question; just smiled, said I was okay, and walked away.

The punch didn’t hurt me at all. In fact, for a brief moment, I felt like Superman.