Unreliable narrator

Chemo as an Oulipian constraint?

Once I found out about the cognitive loss through chemotherapy, to write became a way to keep a history of my cognition.

Anne Boyer, The Undying

Some blog, right? Bursts out of the gate then goes dark for months. Lame.

I’ll tell you what it is; I’ve plenty of material, inspiration even but when I sit down to write I find myself not quite up to the task of fashioning it into a readable whole.

The work of successfully moving from one image or idea to another always requires a bit of heat; writing isn’t done in tranquility. Back in the day I would drink coffee and smoke cigarettes to stoke the furnace. Eventually you figure out that isn’t absolutely necessary.

Lately though, several chemo sessions in (ten down, two to go), I go through the various rituals of procrastination but then pluck myself down at the computer feeling optimistic. I mean there is no hint of writer’s block, no fear of spoiling the blank page. My mind is happily, if warily collecting and inspecting the various ideas and connections that have been rolling around in my brain in preparation for this moment. The heat starts to come in beginning to see how it might come together. You don’t want to force that, but there is a start and a couple signposts you’ll be plucking down along the way. And if you are lucky, when you are done, you’ll find that you have chronicled a journey, perhaps one that lead to a new insight or deeper appreciation of the mystery or wound back to where you began in a satisfying way. If you are really lucky, you have done it in such a way that a reader might find it pleasurable to follow along: you might make a connection.

So, right! Optimism. Plenty of ideas…and I start writing. Immediately something is amiss. I just need to get from this idea to that one. I mean the connection is there, it’s obvious even, but that second idea that a moment ago was just down this leaf strewn path is now quite aways off beyond some craggy rocks, or is it rocky crags or are all crags rocky, do I need to look this up? Wasn’t there a cartoon called Cragglerock? Focus!

It is dark now, well past dusk. There is no longer any path at all, just this craggy rocky stuff. It looks like I am going to have to do a bit of wandering or meandering to find a way around and back to that idea.  I head off in a direction, admittedly in a direction away from my goal, but full of hope that it will fruitfully wind its way there.

Damn it is dark.  Trees have grown out of this rocky, barren stretch and, though they are leafless, sometimes that idea I am trying to connect with is obscured. Now it is behind me, now to the left up quite a hill.

I’ve been meanderwanding for a long time. Too long?  Have I lost my reader’s patience? Okay where am I? What am I trying to do?  I look up and back toward that idea and realize I am not going to make it there.  I took some wrong turns; the attempt exhausted me and the side path I hoped would wind round to the idea took me miles from my goal and deposited me at a dead end.  It would have to be discarded entirely.  Square one.

Day after day it was like this and it became clear that I was witnessing and experiencing evidence of undeniable cognitive decline.  My mind was struggling and failing to do something that was moderately challenging.

I was fairly sheepish about this diminishment and a bit ashamed that I wasn’t able to finish and post anything.  Finally, I mentioned this in a text to my daughter, Tyler; it was she that set me up with this newsletter.

In response to my lament, she sent me the quote from Anne Boyer and this text in response.

Couple things here. It’s “Eat weed and dream”, not: “Eat, weed and dream.” She wasn’t encouraging me to do chores. Fortunately.

Secondly, here is one of those moments when I can’t quite pull the threads together to pull off a joke. Help me out, I want to comfort the reader who has just been thrown off balance or even dashed to the pavement by their first encounter with post-modernist literary theory references. And this from a self-professed queer. It can be a bit much all at once.

The joke I want to employ to regain their - your - confidence is to reference the movie Airplane and specifically the gag where the two black men are ordering their inflight meals and having difficulty being understood. I want to be the woman in the scene that saves the day. To everyone’s relief she announces, “I speak Jive” and translates, except in my case it’ll be “I speak Sarah Lawrence.”

Well Tyler’s response freed me.

The cognitive decline that I am experiencing needn’t mean the end of writing and posting.  Instead, it is now a factor, an external constraint if you will, silently shaping what and how I write, the result a measure of my cognition.   I’ll do the best I can when I write of course but the cognitive decline is now embedded in the text, baked into the cake as it were.

I didn’t really see this coming. Chemotherapy drugs are famously nasty of course and it is a banality to say they are bound to kill you if the cancer doesn’t get there first. There too is the litany of unpleasant side effects that hint at the damage to nerves, tissues, cognition, the heart.  In my case I skimmed the multiple pages spelling all of this out – missed the part about cognitive decline. Nevertheless, the drugs diabolical nature was spelled out to me in a sort of funny way after my first treatment. 

With the chemo treatment specific to my diagnosis – stage four colon cancer – I go every two weeks to Florida Cancer Specialists where I join dozens of others sitting in lounge chairs as the drugs are administered drip by drip.  I am usually there for about five hours. When I am done, I am fitted with a small pump attached to a port installed in my chest that will continue to administer chemo drugs for another 46 hours. After my first chemo session I was attached to the pump and handed this.

This is an “Acute care/Hospital chemo spill kit” and definitely qualifies as the most absurd case of overkill I have yet encountered. 

The nurse explained that if I accidently cut the tubing from my pump while gardening or cooking this was the kit to deal with the spill.  It comes complete with Fluid impervious shoe covers, chemo rated gown, protective goggles, 16 gallon! Chemo waste bag and on and on. 

Given this, you would think that a pressurized garden hose was dispensing the drugs and, if cut, would careen wildly, spewing toxic fluids and burning the flesh off of anyone in the spill zone until brought under control.  But the gauge of the tubing attached to my chemo pump is smaller than that attached to the pump in your home fish aquarium.  If it was cut, a tear drop or so would trickle out and disappear before one had time to don goggles, set up the hazardous drug spill sign and apply the liquid solidifier. 

Nope this kit will never be used for its intended purpose, if indeed cleaning up a chemo spill was ever its intended purpose. I suspect its real raison d’etre  is to communicate to all those like myself who skimmed the side effect label – “attention this is really dangerous shit, requiring this equipment to ensure that no one ever accidently comes in contact with it.” 

“And now we will pump it into your body.”

Well cognitive decline be damned – I pledge to post weekly from here on out.

Cheers,

Kent