Two Lucky

I was told today that Rusty has only three to four more weeks left to live. When the doctors pulled me aside (”May I speak with you in private?”), I already knew.

I was not surprised. I suppose, however, it is one thing to know it intellectually (Rusty’s disease prognosis fits neatly into the statistical majority), quite another to have someone in a white uniform bring you the news.

My reaction was visceral, in spite of fore-knowledge, and unexpected in that regard. I sat in the toilet and cried. For the first time, in a very long time, I believed I would not be whole again. I felt my insides wrenched from me. I howled. I was also confused, which only proves how one, notwithstanding one’s intelligence, can reject logic in the face of grief.

Even though I already knew the answer, I kept asking myself: Can this really be true?  

This afternoon I saw Josh Hartnett on Cooper Square. He was sitting in a pale-green sedan parked by the sidewalk, his hair perfectly coifed and chestnut, gaze locked in a distance in what seemed like a moment of actorly reverie. A small film crew worked a few feet away.

I stopped for a few seconds when I recognized him, and asked someone if he knew the name of the movie being filmed. “August,” someone said.

As the crowd grew, I walked away. I thought about Rusty. Thereupon, I wondered if one day later this year, or the next, I would find myself in a darkened cinema, waiting for the same scene to come on, with my hand on the empty seat next to mine.

Photo by Yen Feng

Rusty’s second post 

Hello all, it’s been ages since I have written anything on my Yenny’s blog, so here goes.

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty weak and tired, but honestly, I can’t complain. Mornings are the best - Yen makes me breakfast while I watch black trannies tear at each others’ wigs on Jerry Springer (My staple of trashy US morning TV, though I do flip to the BBC to come up for oxygen on occasion). Coffee and rice krispies cereal crisping in cold soya bean milk from Chinatown - you just can’t beat it.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been going to the hospital three times a week to get blood, and on these mornings, it’s a long 45-minute trek from our apartment in the East Village to New York-Presbyterian Hospital on the UWS.

By the time I make it back home, it’s already past 4pm. I am normally so exhausted from the chemo, or from the blood transfusions, that just making it up the one short flight of stairs to the apartment takes an eternity.

By the time I make it to the door, I feel like I’ve been beaten half-dead by a very heavy stick.

While I’ve been gone, Yen’s been busy transforming the apartment into a five-star resort.

When I step into the room, I smell faint jasmine. Incense is burning on the window-sill. I hear calm, musical voices in the background. There are fresh rainbow-colored tulips on the coffee table. A plate of cool celery and keen carrots.

What? A tall, icy drink of pina colada? (Virgin, my Yenny smiles.)

What Yen does to this place sets my soul at ease. I am now ready to take a nice, long afternoon nap. This apartment, this home, it’s my castle of comfort, my paradise.

Joey Feng, 22, 1st runner-up of Miss Singapore-Universe 2007, with our mother, Mdm Teo Mong Geck

I wish I could write and tell you all about it.

The lights, the confetti, the faces of my family at the television studio, and my sister, radiant on stage, when it came down to the final two in this year’s Miss Singapore-Universe beauty pageant.

As a writer, I want to wax eloquent about her win; as a journalist, my instinct is to whip out my notebook and start making calls.

But right now, right now, I am neither writer nor reporter, but a proud brother, beaming for the last hour, wishing I could be home to give my sis a well-deserved hug.

Click here to see Joey’s profile on the pageant’s official website.

Rusty’s birthday 

We are at the hospital again for Rusty to get his weekly blood transfusion. In recent weeks, his platelet count has kept falling; the last time we checked, it was 3,000.

The average healthy adult’s platelet count ranges from 150,000 to 450,000. If platelet count falls below 20,000, spontaneous bleeding will occur and is considered a life-threatening risk.

In a few minutes, Rusty will receive two bags of platelets and a bag of hemoglobin. The entire transfusion will take about five hours. As the nurse read Rusty’s personal particulars off his medical wrist-tag, she let out a little yelp.

“Patient 51777248, Rusty D, 4-16-… oh! It’s your birthday today!”

Rusty, newly 33, grinned, and even in the stupor of painkillers, managed an exaggerated wink. I smile proudly.

After the transfusion, we ride back home in our towncar for a quiet evening. I make dinner, a fresh couscous salad and cream linguini with bay scallops, rock shrimp and crabmeat.

Rusty has four small bites, and it is more than he has eaten in the last two days.

We eat with the television turned off, deciding instead to listen to the easy patter of rain outside. A few infrequent cars drive by, echoing faint solos of short, rumbly instruments.

Even with the windows closed, sitting inside, I smell the road’s wet tarmac, and the rain’s refreshing, crisp wind on my skin.

In a few hours, Rusty will ease into a feathery sleep, and when he does, I will turn down the lights, pull the covers over his body and kiss his forehead goodnight.

Then, holding his hand, watching the window, I will fall asleep too, thinking of the sun out tomorrow, and all the spring flowers waiting to bloom.

Becky surprised me again with her uncanny intuition for sizing up human emotion as I walked her to the door.

She said: “It must be so difficult for you, not to be able to spend anytime with Rusty alone, with visitors coming in and out all the time, and Peggy having stayed with you for so long.”

I do not want Peggy to leave, so perhaps I will go instead, for a few days, or just one day. I can sleep over at a friend’s apartment. I talked to Ma yesterday, and she told me I must not resent Peggy for being a mother.

It sounds paradoxical, to want to leave and to want to be alone with Rusty at the same time. Perhaps what I really want is just some quiet.

There is always someone in the room. All our friends and family members who lean over us with their kind words and deli-bought flowers. Even when I leave the room, I imagine their faces talking, looking at me, searching for a visual cue - a downward glance, the hint of a tear - to dispense a comforting word.

In the end, I hold myself together. I don’t cry, but instead tears brim on my fingers, my skin, and my feet. This wet sorrow. Meanwhile, the room teems with distracted, polite conversation.

Outside, there is an angry wind and grey skies. It’s April, but the trees are still bare. There is a little discussion on which umbrellas are more functional, compact or full-sized. We wonder aloud if it will rain or snow tonight.

Week in review 

Since the surgery, Rusty’s condition has deteriorated. He is so weak, in fact, that Dr Kaufman has refused to continue with IL-2 therapy; he said the drug’s severe toxicity may actually kill him.

So today, we sought the opinion of another doctor, a colleague of Dr Kaufman’s, Dr Sherman. His prognosis, simply, is that the tumors in Rusty’s liver are growing too quickly.

“You’re carrying too much disease. Must be 10lbs in there,” he said.

We grasp at straws. “What about a liver resection?” Rusty asks. Dr Sherman shakes his head. I push on: “Abraxane? Avastin? Gleevac?”

“No, no, and definitely no.”

This cancer continues to pick at our lives like a vulture.

At home, Rusty is in constant discomfort. He eats like a bird, yet vomits bagfuls every night. Walking down a block is impossible. Whether in the day, or at night, he drifts in and out of sleep, in a cycle of painkillers. 

I wonder if there isn’t a moment that he wakes up, and for a few seconds, forgets that he is dying.

For the survivor, forgetting is a difficult conundrum. In wanting to capture every moment, what one recalls in searing detail only renders the loss more acute. Though love and pain make poor partners, each is inextricably twined with the other. Love gives pain comfort. The latter legitimizes the former.

How do we forget one without the other?

I cried hard today in the town car on the way back from the hospital. It did not last long, probably for less than a minute. The tears stopped as suddenly as they had come. It happened soon after we got into the car, when Rusty took my hand and said to me: “I am so happy to be with you.”