Two Years - Guest Post #1 (Max Jennings)

Hey folks!

I've decided to seek out some of my favorite writer friends to post about interesting experiences in their own lives. I think we're tentatively going to call this "Friendly Fridays," but for today it's going to be a Max Monday, for my first guest poster, Max Jennings. 

Me, Max, and My Adam's Apple
(a quirky NBC sitcom starring The Trolly Deschanel, Ben Foster, and Jay Baruchel) 

He's an extraordinary essayist from my writing program who, two years ago yesterday, learned something life shattering (that, astoundingly, had nothing to do with poop!)

On that note, please be advised that this is a far classier affair than my usual poop jokes.

In all serious though, this is an incredible essay about a truly emotionally trying time in someone's life. I remember many of these events from my limited perspective, but nothing can match what Max was actually thinking and feeling. 

So, without further... 

(Plussheep)

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Two Years

I remember sitting down with pizza and my housemates to watch the Superbowl. The colors on the TV were a little off, so the 49ers were almost orange. The sound was up loud in order to figure out what was happening on the small screen, so I closed my eyes and listened, pretending the television was a radio, and I was thirteen and my dad was listening on the old Sony cabinet-mounted radio to the Timberwolves during the Cassell, Sprewell, Garnet run to the Western Conference finals.

I am in the doctors office, seated on the examination table, watching a middle aged doctor named Dennis make a long series of calls. 

I run my fingers over the lump that began this rush to get tests.

My mother appears on the curb at LAX. We detour to the beach. Sitting on the dry ridge leading down to the flat wet sand near the water, we watch the marine layer build on the horizon as the pale sun falls towards the endless steel blue of winter on the Pacific.

It has been two years since that first doctors visit. I have been fighting metastasized cancer for closing in on ten percent of the time I have been alive. 

A few days ago someone began an unsolicited conversation with, “you had cancer right?” 

Caught slightly off guard, I said yes.

The rapid-fire follow up question was just as short. “Did you beat it?”

I reflexively said yes again, and we both moved on about our day.

There are few visual cues to the beating my body has taken over the past twenty four months. There are scars you can see if I point them out, but the damage exists most in what is now gone.

I have made countless plans, and seen just as many torpedoed by a second diagnosis, and then a third.

My papa wisely opted to pay a little bit more for a private room for the hospital stay after my second surgery. 

The incision ran eight inches from just below my sternum all the way to my beltline. My abdomen pumped full of CO2, the surgeons searched 45 lymph nodes for cancer and found it in four. Sixty staples later I was some facsimile of myself, but quickly it was clear something was wrong. Each morning began by a nurse or two pulling me out of bed and weighing me. Four days out, despite not eating, I’d gained almost five pounds a day.

My memories of that time come and go in bursts around the delivery of pain medication. The pump would hiss and beep, and a bit later I would be able to sit up again. 

It was finally deduced that some of the staples had slipped and my lymph system was leaking into my abdomen. A week later I was 180 pounds and looked like I’d swallowed a basketball. The pain was overwhelming, so they decided to inject morphine because I couldn’t keep pills down. 

The drug put me somewhere in between stupor and sleep, where I saw strange things and said even stranger. 

The relief when they finally drained the fluid from my body - nearly six liters of it - was a bright spot in that cold, dark February. 

A CT scan last June turned up a node in my neck which had more than doubled in size since the end of chemo. The scan was consistent with a possible failure of chemo, and I began think about the end of my life.

The surgery to remove and biopsy the node could not be scheduled for a some days. I remember sitting on a bench with my father above a Minnesotan lake, looking down on the water. Big tears rolled down into my beard.

"What are you thinking?" He asked.

I paused, not sure I could, or should, vocalize what was in my mind.

“I’m going to die.” The words felt oddly neutral, and didn’t give me the release I’d hoped they would. I’d half expected to chicken out.

“We will do everything to make you better, you know that.” He said, too calm.

That node was successfully removed, but there is a significant chance the disease will return somewhere, to kick off another round of search and destroy, my body the battlefield. 

I am doing my best to keeping living a full life, sadly the evil that has crept relentlessly through my body does not seem to care.

I still hurt too much for it to be a new normal.

At some point not being healthy, especially compared to your peers, begins to feel like a personal failing, something you should be able to fix on your own if you were just better somehow.

In a week, my quarterly trip in and out of the white ring of a CT machine will tell me if this stage of my life grinds to a screeching halt once more. Most of the time I can ignore the coming tests, but sometimes they catch up with me and for a few moments, I lose the control I have been working on building for so long.

A few weeks ago, I woke in the early hours of the morning when the lodge is quiet but for the occasional knocking of the radiator. I climbed down from the top bunk in my four leaf clover boxers, and walked down the dark hallway on bladder driven autopilot. At the bathroom door, I heard the sound of water running into the sink. Not wanting to see another person, I continued out on to the back deck.

I took the stairs three at a time to avoid the cold on my bare feet. Out in the middle of main street, I looked up at the sky. The cloud choked valley I'd gone to sleep in was gone, and the sky was a strip of stars, ringed by the dark mountainsides. 

For a moment, I thought about lying down, but the hard packed ruts of the road digging into my feet dissuaded me.

As I walked back towards the lodge, I stepped on a sharp piece of ice. Pain shooting up my leg, I stopped and picked up the offending chuck. It was heavy, dense, almost completely solid, its heft felt good in my hand. I wound up and threw it as hard as I could into the darkness of the forest. Somewhere out of my sight, I was rewarded with a dull crack as the ice found a target. 

"I'm sorry," I muttered to the now shattered ice ball, and returned to bed to dream of the endlessless of space beyond the soon to break morning.

“Time" Tennessee Williams says at the end of the Glass Menagerie, "is the longest distance between two places.” 

It is the one aliment for which we cannot yet prescribe a treatment. I suppose I’d better get on figuring out what to do with however much I have left.

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If you would like to read more by Max Jennings, a train and trip enthusiast, you can see his blog: 

maxs-train-trip.tumblr.com.

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