health

Why I #blamedrewscancer, pt. 2

July 24, 2009 by krisis

It is Saturday, at 2:30 in the afternoon. After a brief flight, our plane has reached its apex.

Now it is time to dive out of it.

The friendly chatter of the BlameDrewsCancer team falls away as the tiny cabin bustles with activity. Each of our tandem partners checks to make sure we’re completely winched together.

Then, before I realize it is happening, the plexiglass door over the hatch is slid entirely open, and Chris and his partner are duckwalking to the very edge of the floor. They tip out, into the blue, quickly disappearing from sight.

Drew is sitting next to me. I look him in the eyes, but I don’t think it registers. He will be the next to jump.

I find that, unexpectedly, I am completely calm.

On Monday, June 29, I met Britt outside of our office, and we took off for New Jersey to meet with Drew.

I had read up on the BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon, but I couldn’t say I completely understood the point of it. All I knew was that Britt was in charge of this mysterious Blame-a-Thon event, and that I had volunteered to take notes for her so she could stay focused on her dialog with Drew.

Otherwise, I was in the dark. Blame Drew’s Cancer was just a meme to me. I had never even sent an @-reply to Drew.

We converged on Applebees for our meeting. Me being me, I had never been inside of one before, and wasn’t entirely sure what sort of food they sold. I advertised the fact to Drew, a stocky, tattooed, slightly-imposing man in a baseball jersey.

Great, I thought. Way to endear yourself to the intimidating guy with cancer by advertising your never-ending weirdness.

Thirty minutes later the five of us – Drew, his friends Chris and Mikey, and Britt and I – were seated and eating. The following exchange kicked-off our meeting:

Britt: I brought charts!

Drew: I brought cancer!

This, I learned quickly, was par for the course with Drew – and a running theme of BlameDrewsCancer. Drew was sick of cancer being an unspoken “c-word.” He talked about his cancer loudly and without reservation, and welcomed questions.

Drew was fresh from chemotherapy, and Britt quizzed him on the details over salad. Yes, he had a permanent port in his body for the chemo, so the drugs wouldn’t burn his skin. No, it wasn’t too uncomfortable, but he wasn’t allowed to get any more tattoos while he was in treatment.

As we got into the thick of the meeting I took furious notes on the scope of the event. It would be huge. 24 hours of party, half of it at Philly’s venerable North Star Bar. We would need to coordinate live video streaming of the entire event. The band Stroke 9 was reportedly working on a Blame Drew’s Cancer theme song. Drew was now an official partner of LiveStrong, in a story set to break later that week on outlets like AOL and CNN – until then the news was embargoed.

In Drew’s words, we should “Think big.” When Mikey jokingly fired back, “Big like Tom Hanks,” Drew responded, “Sure, if you think you can get in touch with him.”

It was at that moment that I began to understand what Drew – and, by extension, BlameDrewsCancer – was actually about. It was about a no-holds-barred rebranding of cancer as something you could talk about, get support for, and live through. Really live.

Drew was only intimidating in that he had ideas with no boundaries, and he was looking for people to help realize them. By the time we headed back to our cars, I knew that I wanted to be one of those people; I had to be involved with Blame-a-Thon in a capacity more meaningful than just taking notes.

I did not suspect that “involved” would involve jumping out of a plane.

“In the beginning, it is always dark.”

November 22, 2008 by krisis

Have you ever watched The NeverEnding Story? You know how the book seems to bleed into Sebastian’s life, with him running afoul of frightening taxidermy during an encounter with G’mork.

Today my life is something like that.

Ever since I I first transferred from Blogger to WordPress in the midst of the first NaBloPoMo (a feat I still can’t believe I engineered), I’ve also been moving backwards though the almost 3000 posts that came before, categorizing them into tidy chunks that tell the stories of my life.

I’m determined to at least categorize back into the year 2000 by the end of the month, and in my surge of personal excavation I’ve become firmly entrenched in the “Behind the Music” portion of my life – recording a seminal album while going through a horrific breakup and a nearly deadly illness. Flirting with potential entanglements Oh, and drinking a lot.

That old, unhappy, unsure me seems so alien in the present day. To catch all of the themes in those old posts I’ve had to do more than read them – I’ve had to put myself in their place. How else to remember that I hatched my plot to break up with Selina as an allegory of why I shouldn’t pull an all-nighter?

In the process of getting into character I feel like those old posts have been slowly transforming my present day life. I Trio “Will It Ever Come,” telling the story of how it was written, and then find myself re-reading the post about recording it in the studio. Yesterday I re-read one lamenting that it was hard to tell if you have a fever when you’re under a spotlight, and last night I replayed the experience at our benefit show – half sick and half in-the-moment.

This evening I have a tickle in my chest that’s scarily reminiscent of the beginnings of my legendary bout of bronchitis and pneumonia that I’m about to be rereading.

The coincidence is starting to become frightening, if only because I’ve now crossed the threshold into the worst month of my life – the torturous rehearsal process for Good Woman of Setzuan, nearly failing classes, the depths of my relationship, deaths in the family.

If this was really The NeverEnding Story I would be able to reach back into the plot to shake me out of the stupor. I remember being five and jumping up and down on the bed in my father’s hotel room, screaming unintelligibly along with Bastian as he inserted himself into Fantasia, first interrupting Atreyu’s conversation with Morla, and later by naming the princess “Moon Child.”

Or, maybe I already have – without knowing it – and the only reason that younger me broke free of his darkness was because I am sitting here, happy and healthy, willing him to get on with his life.

Not In The Face

November 7, 2008 by krisis

Elise and I recently discussed that her choice to marry me was evolutionarily wise, as I am clearly bred for survival.

I am quick-witted and have a fast metabolism. I have perfect vision and a keen sense for danger, as exemplified by the fact that I have yet to experience a mugging on the streets of Philadelphia. I am relatively agile and have good manual dexterity, traits that serve equally well in the wild as onstage as an indie rock star. And, I have no major physical ailments other than allergies, which I probably wouldn’t have if I had spent my youth hunting and gathering.

Essentially, I am the perfect man. Yes, if not for nearly a half-decade wearing braces I would not be as strikingly handsome as I am currently. But, evolutionarily, buck teeth aren’t a deal-breaker. Otherwise, really, I’m a catch.

Or, at least, that’s my “I know I don’t do dishes all-that-frequently, but really we should still get married” platform.

However, perhaps connected to the above lack of youthful days spent out in the sun hunting and gathering, in my post-quarter-life dotage I am increasingly less a person and more just a walking collection of leper-ish skin conditions. Due to a handsome pre-existing combination of dandruff, eczema, and psoriasis, a few years ago I was moved to see a dermatologist. She combated the terrible trio handily with a series of prescriptions, but she was more interested with helping me with a problem I wasn’t even there to complain about: I had an irritated red patch next to my nose that didn’t seem to want to be moisturized away.

I had suspected it was the result of mainlining Biore pore strips every other night. My dermatologist, in her professional opinion, did not concur. Instead, she diagnosed me with the charmingly titled seborrhoeic dermatitis – “sebderm” for short – which in my opinion sounds like a sexual dysfunction that involves seepage more than a skin condition.

She put me on a fantastic little creme called Elidel, the red patch went away, and that was that. I discovered that I had been self-conscious about the patch, and was happy to see it gone.

After over a year of relative remission, in recent months I developed a new, even more charming issue on my face – scaly red blotches floating above the edges of my mouth, like some misbegotten fruit-punch smile.

They started out subtle, and I convinced myself it was the combination of my rakishly deep laugh lines and my current proclivity for facial scruff. (I also secretly feared it was herpes, mostly because now that I only make out with Elise I have precious few reasons to invoke my irrational fear of herpes.) Yet, I put off visiting the dermatologist, thinking I could make the patches disappear with Elidel, more frequent shaving, and the power of positive thought.

That plan did not work. In fact, in my procrastination the patches got angrier and… well, woundier, if we’re being frank. They edged a little bit too close to herpes territory for my liking. I also developed worse dandruff than ever before, possibly because I was constantly stressing out about my face, and I tend to massage my temples incessantly when I am stressed out. The flakes were as big as granola. It was deadly stuff.

This is my face, people. I might not launch ships with it, but I’m about to launch a fucking multi-thousand-dollar photography package with it on my wedding day, and I am really hoping I am not going to have to buy some sort of Michael Jackson-approved pancake makeup kit to cover up my various flaws.

(Also, do you trust someone to tell you about how awesome your new marketing campaign is going to be when his winning perfect smile is adorned with two possibly herpes-based open sores, and who creates a tiny blizzard of flakes every time he turns his head or rearranges his hair? And, that’s to say nothing about how incredibly compelling it is to watch a songwriter who looks like he wandered offstage in his biblical leper costume from a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar.)

Back to the dermatologist I went, secretly crossing fingers and toes that I had not caught airborne herpes from the skeevy lady who used to make my morning smoothies.

Happily, that was not the diagnosis. No, it was a newer, deadlier version of my sebderm, and it meant business. My face and scalp were put on hard-core, expensive, non-formulary drugs – steroids that warned that I might experience visual hallucinations, a shampoo that could strip chrome off a bumper, and a foam that explicitly reminded me not to use it on my genitals, lest I be tempted.

Well, folks, I am here two weeks later to report that my dermatologist was right again, and her newer, more aggressive treatment knocked the reddened and/or precipitous fight out of my head. My laugh-lines are back to their rakish selves, even with scruff, and today I pawed at my hair at-length like I was in a 90s-era Herbal Essence commercial and produced nary a flake.

Yet, with progress I have paid a price: due to my temporary run of steroids I am now proudly bearing the complexion of a high school wrestler.

Seriously. And, not just little pimples that you can contain with face-washing and salicylic acid. No. Serious acne, which I have never in my life previously experienced.

While I am happy to be rid of my red patches, my prior issue was hell of a lot less conspicuous than the current alternative – which lead one of my coworkers to ask me if someone had punched me, because the area around my right eye is so puffy and red.

Yes, that is totally progress towards the photography package.

Elise, bless her heart, has been incredibly supportive, and through this process has endured all manner of facial applications, including ones I must wear only in the dark, and others that bleached an entire set of our sheets. She also believes that doctors should be trusted implicitly, which I know to be false. Though she has gamely pretended that my outbreak is no big deal, ultimately she agreed with my diagnosis that I ought to stop the steroids a day or two before I started regaining other high-school traits like having crushes on red-heads or writing songs about how I am not actually gay.

Why? Because she loves me? Perhaps, perhaps. However, I choose to believe that it’s because – despite recent appearances to the contrary – she has a biological imperative to stick with her evolutionarily fit man.

I am Peter’s beleaguered abdomen.

April 15, 2008 by krisis

I have a whole litany of things to say about Lyndzapalooza, Arcati Crisis, and Amy’s new section of the newspaper, but today I’d like to keep the attention on my abdominal section.

Separate from my (now infamous) teenage anorexia, I was also a sit-up addict. I don’t know why – I wasn’t especially interested in any other sort of fitness. In fact, I wasn’t even seeking a six-, four-, or two-pack. I just wanted tone.

I think part of the reasoning was, “food goes to the stomach, so abuse the stomach.” Also, I think one time I saw an anorexic girl on Oprah talk about doing 300 sit-ups a day and thought, Hey, that sounds way better than bulimia as a convenient companion to my anorexia.

Seriously. Fun times.

In any event, I left both the anorexia and the sit-ups by the wayside in college when I discovered things like all-you-can-eat cafeteria mac’n’cheese.

Fast forward a decade past my multi-hundred sit-up prime and my entire abdomen is a joke. And, not a laughing-with-it joke, either.

No, they are definitely to be laughed at.

When fiancee introduced a simple, nightly crunch regimen to get into absolutely drool-worthy shape for her trip to Australia I simply watched – sometimes while eating ice cream – because my abs, they are no longer. Even a standard set of crunches gets me huffing and puffing, and that doesn’t even get into the pure horror of any sort of side crunch that attacks the love-handle area.

A bit insulting, perhaps, that my future wife is in tip-topper shape than me with barely any effort, but it’s not really injuring my pride. After all, it’s not as though I’m spilling out of my clothes here – I’m just weak in the mid-section. I still eat better than ninety percent of the population of America. I still walk three miles or more a day from spring to fall. I just don’t cause her whiplash when I walk by with my shirt off.

However, what did add insult to injury was Elise’s younger brother.

He’s already a better singer and actor than I was at his age, which I can at least rationalize as due to his vastly superior genetics (I mean, we are talking about Elise’s brother, here). Yet, on top of that last year he out-of-the-blue started working out daily.

I was skeptical. I made all sorts of resolutions in high school, but the only two I actually stuck with were playing guitar and try to subsist solely on water and Altoids.

For a while all he had to show for it was endurance for the boredom of jogging and an altogether terrifying skill at Dance Dance Revolution. Now he has actual muscles! Abs, pecs – you name it. And, not just while impressively flexing – he has muscles even while at rest!

When I played DDR in front of him over Christmas I felt like a cow skipping rope. Oh, and did I mention that their father runs marathons, and that when he deigned to run my company’s ten mile race last year he posted the best time of everyone I know? And her sister, the non-fitness-nut, is currently serving out the remainder of her Fulbright Scholarship teaching English. In Taiwan.

I’ll be a legally bound part of this family in a scant nine months, and the peer pressure is starting to mount. To date I’ve skated by on the account of being an academic-wunderkind and a singer-songwriter. Then I had a few months of grace on the “wow, that’s a nice hunk of diamonds you bought for my sister/daughter.”

I’m going to have to step up my over-achievement, lest I become permanently tagged as the fat, lazy, dumb member of their family. (And, theirs is a beauty contest that I am never destined to win (unless I plan several thousands of dollars of plastic surgery (and this is not a post about my need to compete with my own mother))).

My grad school indecision is about to continue into it’s fourth year, so I don’t see a Fullbright in my immediate future, and – let’s face it – I’m not planning on running anywhere anytime soon. (Being the longest-running blog in Philadelphia has so far won me no respect.)

My most realistic aim in this impending crash-course in sibling (and parental) rivalry is somewhere between the fitness levels of my fiancee and her brother – more than a nightly crunch routine, but less than a military-like regimen that causes high school girls to forget how to breathe.

Really, I’d be happy with enough to get Elise to gawk at me when I walk around the house naked, which rises in frequency as the weather improves.

A Long, Painful Weekend

April 13, 2008 by krisis

I woke up on Friday at 6:30 without my alarm.

On any other weekday I’ll be thrilled for this god-send of an early rise, likely to deliver me into my cube an hour early.

Except, I had off on Friday. And, I had awoken not because I was well-rested. No. No, not because of streaming sunlight interrupting my quiet repose, either.

I awoke because of the pain.

It was an unspecific, fuzzy ache even with the very bottom of my sternum. I generally have a high tolerance for specific pain and a low tolerance for general discomfort, and this split the two uncannily well.

Probably a stomach thing, I thought. I had overeaten to the maximum limit the day before … four donuts, three sections of tuna hoagie, two veggie burger pitas, and one delightfully large dose of peanut butter before bed. Probably all of the eating.

I walked around for a few minutes, checked WebMD but grew frustrated with its persistent braying about the possibility I was in cardiac arrest, and went back to bed.

I got up again at 7:28.

This time the pain was much more insistent, and it had no intentions of letting me sleep in. Or, really, of letting me sleep at all. Or do anything else for that matter, including walking outside or singing or going out to dinner – all things I might like to do on my day off.

Yes, insistent it was, and persistent too. I would up beached on the couch for the majority of the day, sitting alone and miserable while Elise headed out for the night rather than going to dinner at Striped Bass as we had plan. The pain was omni-present but far enough below my threshold that I would feel patently silly going to the ER to do anything about it. How could one day of overeating – three-fourths of which was entirely healthy and non-toxic – cause all this misery?

It wasn’t until the next morning that I finally put two and two together by stepping back further from my donut binge.

You see, prior to the donuts I had my typical fistful (600? 1200? really, who can say?) of ibuprofen on an empty stomach. Well, not entirely empty, because the evening before I had another typical fistful before bed.

That prior fistful wasn’t on an empty stomach, though. It was on a veggie burger and a number of beers.

I had an uncharacteristic mid-week night out to scout out Just Like Me at the Khyber on the behalf of Lyndzapalooza, and afterwards the already uncharacteristic night turned super-unusual when I wound up having a bit of a guys hour with two friends from my former a cappella life. Between the Khyber and our eventual visit to my official designated spring/summer bar, National Mechanics, I had a fair number of beers.

(This doesn’t really figure into the story, but I saw another terrific band – Parker House & Theory – who I have a major crush on at the moment. Their CD release is this Thursday in Boston. I’ll maybe remember to post about them separately, but we all know how those promises go, so best to mention them here.)

Now, mind you, this was still a work night, so I had been cautious – those beers were ingested over the course of several hours, and I did a bit of dancing and walking in that time, so by the time I got home I was only slightly inebriated, and with plenty of time to sleep prior to work. Still – mindful that I am typically a cocktail drinker and hoping to having a productive morning at work – I took that first typical fistful of ibuprofen as a preemptive strike on any possible morning fuzziness. When I awoke said fuzziness was nowhere to be found, but I took another fistful just to be sure (and, as it happens, had quite a upbeat day at the office).

Now, I’m not too much up on my general medical diagnoses – last time I was in the hospital I was convinced my appendix was exploding, but I in fact had an irritated bowel. However, even with my basic knowledge I know that alcohol, NSAIDs on empty stomachs, and sugary sweets can all contribute to an ulcer and, as it happens, I had ingested slightly higher than average quantities of all three in exactly that order .

Yes, it was certainly an ulcer.

With a better-than-dubious home diagnosis in place Saturday and today proved to be much more pleasant than their predecessor. I loaded up on medical and homeopathic remedies, and my stomach has been converted from thunderdome to a plush, well-lined (though sparsely furnished) bachelor pad.

For the record, to achieve that you want to stick exclusively to my personal variation on the Bananas, Rice, Apples, Toast diet (BRAT) – which omits apples and fulfills the rice requirement with a combination of sushi and Rice Dream ice cream – all while ingesting some combination of OTC Prilosec, Evening Primrose Oil, and Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice (DGL), the latter of which has perhaps the highest foul-taste to efficaciousness ratio I’ve ever encountered in my life.

(Seriously, it tastes like black licorice blended with mashed up aspirin and garden soil. Its label cheerfully suggests “it’s chewable, because saliva enhances the effect of DGL’s natural compounds,” which is worth pointing out because chewing it up and swishing it around in your mouth goes strictly against your natural impulse, which is that it is poison and will surely kill you. But, truthfully, it knocks out any flare of symptoms in about ten minutes flat.)

In any event, I feel fine now, except for I feel like I was in a time warp for the last 72 hours, and that rather than heading to work in the morning I should just now be gearing up for my glorious Friday off from work.

On the plus side, I can now add “cultivating an ulcer” to the list of things I am really good at doing without even trying.