Two Lucky

Week in review 

A friend recently pushed me to rediscover philosophy for answers. “Sometimes, it helps to look to others who have done the thinking for you,” he said.

And so I have, in the past weeks, read like a hurricane, with anticipation and keen reflection. I’ve finished three books: Discourse on Thinking, by Martin Heidegger; Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle; and Functions of Painting, by Frank Leger.

It’s a new perspective for me, to turn to philosophy when reality becomes too heavy to walk out of. Friends and family typically advise counselling or professional psychiatry, neither of which I’ve found to be completely fulfilling, or convincing.

I suppose I’d like to think there is an average intelligence such counselling is most suited for, but in truth intellect has very little to do with grief and its emotional aftermath. Our intelligent and emotional selves are always separate, and in competition, and that reality is perhaps what cuts most deeply - that I might fail to save Rusty, and fail to recover my sense of independent self when he dies, in spite of all my efforts, in spite of my mental ability.

Grief is a forcible, competent equalizer.

But while I am in the thick of living, Heidegger wants me to abandon my inclination towards calculative thinking, and aspire towards thought more meditatively. My frustrations, he says, comes from desire, the prospect of something, the waiting for. Yet it is not contentment he teaches. Instead, it is to learn patient desire, to live life with an openness to its mysteries, to remember that life goes on, independent of desire.

I haven’t written much because there hasn’t been much in terms of Rusty’s medical progress.

He is still weak from the surgery. He hasn’t walked outside in days. His appetite fluctuates. The vomitting seems to have stop, but the dry heaving isn’t better. We are waiting to hear back from Dr Kaufman when to go in for the next round of IL-2. In the meantime, we subsist by counting the hours.

Every day we wake in the night and sleep again when the sun is high. We eat sometimes, sometimes not at all. The minutes leak into hours, and the hours drift in and out of usefulness. We use time to tell when he’s ready for the next pill, when our favorite TV shows come on.

Otherwise, time is irrelevant as the sky.

“Water,” Rusty mouths to me, his eyes fading in and out of focus. I turn to retrieve my water bottle, but the nurse stops me. “Not yet. Let him wait a while longer. We don’t want him puking right out of surgery.”

The two-hour operation was performed this morning by Dr Susman of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a surgical radiologist who was specially brought in by Dr Kaufman to treat Rusty’s liver metastases.

Using a needle surgically inserted through Rusty’s back, Dr Susman was able to target the largest tumor in Rusty’s liver by delivering chemotherapy agents directly into the cancer. At the same time, he disconnected multiple arteries that were feeding the tumors and causing them to grow.

The procedure is a two-prong attack; even if it doesn’t destroy the cancer completely, it would weaken it substantially, making it more vulnerable to subsequent IL-2 therapy.

This is an uncommon treatment in the relatively new field of interventional radiology, since it uses a mix of radio-frequency ablation, or RFA, and liver embolism, the severing of arteries that feed cancerous tumors. Typically, RFA and embolism procedures are performed separately.

The surgery went smoothly, according to Dr Susman, who was happy that he was able to inject all of the chemo into the tumor, without complication. “Most patients don’t get the full dose,” he said.

In a few minutes, Rusty falls asleep in the recovery room. In a few hours, he will be transferred to the general floor, where he will stay overnight to be observed for any post-surgical distress: infection, pain, bleeding.

This is Rusty’s 10th surgery in the last two years.

I feel my eyes well up as I stand next to his bed, unable to salve even his most basic need - thirst. When he is asleep, I walk outside for a cigarette, and for a few short minutes, let my wet eyes fade in and out of focus too.

Week in review 

In New York, Rusty and I were having a rough time together.

In the last couple of weeks, we barely spoke to each other, and when we did, it was rarely pleasant. Much of it had to do with the stress and pain that had built up in recent months, particularly during his last IL-2 therapy.

When it was over, I felt tired, depleted, and loveless. He felt cheated, sick, and abandoned. We were both angry with ourselves, and with each other.

So while a vacation away from New York seemed like the perfect solution to two stretched souls, it also seemed to me the worst thing we could do for our relationship.

I needed to be away from him, and all that he had come to represent in recent weeks: medical appointments, pills, IV tubes… to be on my own was what made sense to me. I sought decompression, craved solitude. In part, I knew I had to recover my identity other than a cancer patient´s care-giver. Going on a trip together, where I would still have to dole out his pills, watch for his safety, and keep emergency numbers handy; in other words, continue to be so close to the cancer, didn´t seem like it would help.

We have been away for almost a week now. Nothing, and everything, has changed. Nothing, because I know that deep down, I am still angry and terrified. Everything, because I have recovered my strength; I no longer feel tired. It is as if the world had suddenly righted itself, found its gravity again.

The turn was immediate, unexpected, and perfect in its ordinariness.

We were sitting in the lounge, on separate day beds, each with our own books. He was reading Sarah Dunant´s The Birth of Venus, and I On Writing Well by William Zinsser. After an hour, Rusty asked me to come sit by him. I agreed. It was not long after that we were both lying in a comfortable tangle of limbs - his legs stretched over mine, my arms wrapped around his thighs.

Resting so, we continued to read, my head slack on his stomach as his fingers caressed the side of my head. Once or twice, he catches me biting my nails, and smacks me disapprovingly, but gently. We continue to read like this for two uninterrupted, beatific hours.

It feels impossible not to love the sea. Or to own it, somehow, if I could.

I have always loved it, since I was little. Some of my fondest memories were created to the cadence of the ocean lull. The first boy I ever kissed, I kissed next to the sea.

I am enamoured of its magnitude, its timelessness. What secrets hide beneath those rolling, giant waves? Whose messages of hope, love and despair does it carry to shore?

Standing by the sea, in front of this infinite, with my poor feet, and my stiff heart, I have been judged and found wanting.

Like the poet who must learn to carry his voice above the hurling waves, I, too, must learn to expand my heart to fill its cries. I must learn the sea´s patience. Lately, I have often opened my eyes to find myself in a dark and terrible place.

And so I fall into the sea´s arms, reaching and pulling my body into its watery embrace. I try to stand, but decide it is okay not to.

The sea is a stern parent, its children the rippling froth scurrying to shore. The arms of the sea are strong, muscular.

I can taste salt in my mouth. I can feel sand in my underwear. And the sun, the sun, the sea´s glorious, magnificent playmate.