Hi blog,
You may have noticed a couple changes in your look, I may have done a slight makeover and then had your name changed. Originally, you were named after my book, but that seems like a bit too much like shameless self-promotion, so after some brainstorming with Nick (details to follow shortly), I came up with your NEW title! "Surviving the Cure." Since this is a blog from a cancer survivor who has dealt with numerous issues stemming from his treatments that saved his life, it seemed very appropriate to come up with a title that related to that in some way. Several bad ideas later, I came up with this name and Nick immediately latched onto the idea. So this is your new name (until I think of something better, if I ever do), I hope you like it! Because there isn't a damn thing you can do to change it!
Okay, now I said "details to follow" earlier, so I'll get into that. Nick and I met yesterday for our weekly book-related meeting. I had tasked him with rewriting some of his rough draft and giving me ten pages of his best ever work for me to edit, and I would give him ten pages of my more recent stuff for him to edit. Both of us handed the other our ten pages (Nick gave me fifteen pages, but I only got through about ten of them for the sake of time) and I busted out my Red Pen of Death (people who have suffered my editing know to fear the RPD) and got to work. He finished in about twenty minutes, both of us very quiet as we marked and remarked and scribbled out and circled things on the other's paper. Although he had finished, I was only about halfway through his section, being the horrifically meticulous editor that I am, so he spent the remaining time of my editing working on his book some more.
He started with my work, pointing out some issues I had using a passive voice at times and correcting me on a few facts when it came to writing about him. The section I had given him consisted of a gruesome story about my neck and then another section talking about Nick's 100-mile run around the high school track to raise money for cancer research. Once he finished, I went and pointed out the single most confusing metaphor I have ever come across in my entire life. I was so confused that I went and showed it to my dad, thinking that I perhaps didn't understand it for one reason or another and that was a personal failing on my part rather than a rambling monstrosity that Nick put in. After a couple minutes, my dad looked to us and said, "Is this supposed to be a metaphor for something?" I busted out laughing, feeling vindicated. Nick had a hard time explaining it himself, so I told him to get rid of it.
The last thing we did was talk about blog management (hence the name change). We went over some ideas for putting stuff up on our blogs, which I shall begin instituting next week, so stay tuned to find some amusing and possibly interesting facts and posts. The session ended with my idea of posting up part of our memoirs that we've been working on so you get a sense of what we've been doing. I'll be putting up my section about Nick doing his 100-mile run around the track. Here's an article written about Nick's monster run:
Nick Hollon piles up miles to buoy leukemia-stricken pal
 |
| Nick is at the front of the pack, my dad center frame |
Enjoy this little blurb from the book! Your (mostly) benevolent overlord, Andrew
Excerpt from Life Has No Title (working title):
Nick and I were both running our own races. I was fighting for my life, and he was running to live his. Our starting lines were separated by time and distance, but at some point our routes merged and led us to the same path. We ran together, sometimes one of us a little ahead of the other, sometimes a little farther behind, but we were on the same track, always ready to rejoin with the other when they needed it. And while time is the great separator and destroyer of connections, and while there were many different routes for either of us to take that would split us asunder, we never ventured onto them. When you find someone like Nick, the last thing you want to do is diverge from their path, you want to run with them as long as your legs can carry you. A guy like Nick is one in fifty million, nay, fifty billion. In all of human history there may have been only one other like him, and I think I know who: the Greek soldier who ran from Athens to Sparta before the Battle of Marathon to ask for the help of the Spartans. The man ran 140 miles straight and arrived the day after he set off. That man's name? Nickademus Hollon the Elder. And it would be two and a half thousand years before Nickademus Hollon the Younger would walk this Earth, only to outdo his valiant predecessor in spectacular fashion.
I mentioned early on in this book that at our school we have a thing called the Senior Project, which involves a bunch of work that causes a great deal of resentment amongst the senior class, since we’re really the only school in the area that does it. For mine, I wrote a play. Nick decided he had to do one better than me, because he’s a competitive son of a bitch if nothing else.
When I was first diagnosed, Nick hadn’t yet decided on a project. He racked his brain, thinking, thinking, but nothing happened. After he came to visit me he felt like he needed to do something more. Like me, he sought purpose. It took him a little while before an idea planted itself in his mind and took hold like a beautiful weed, tenacious but wonderful, striking but stubborn. His love of running had been growing over the last few years, and the advice given to everyone on what to do for their Senior Projects was always: “Pick something you love.” Well, Nick loved running, so why not do something with that?
From there, it took him no time at all to work through the ideas. A 10k? For him, that was just an appetizer, a snack on the way to a larger goal. It wasn’t in his DNA to do something so insubstantial. We both liked acting, he thought about my own senior project and wondered if he could do a student written play and raise money that way. But his heart was leaving drama and shifting more and more into this primal desire to run and push himself. He had to do something with that.
What distance to do though? His original thought was 5000 miles, but breaking that up into a ten month period gave him an average of eighteen miles a day. He just had too much going on to do something so insane. After a bit of brainstorming with his mom, he came upon the magic number 3000. Nick liked that, he even came up with a name for himself. “Mr. 3000.” Catchy, clever, it might just work. With his running goal set, he now needed a monetary goal to aspire to. $10,000. Yes, that would do.
So while I was going through treatment and fighting to stay awake while bobbing along on the gentle waves of hardcore narcotics, Nick was pushing his body every day while riding a wave of endorphins, his own version of a high. Personally, I like his better. However, both of them are addicting in their own way. I tried to keep apprised of his situation, find out how he was doing, but I had become absorbed in my own issues and lost tabs on just about everyone around me, including the kid putting his body through hellish extremes on my account. He still came to visit, and I would ask him how the running was going and he would smile awkwardly and say it was fine. But as he left I always noticed that little limp, a stiff walk, a wince, something to belie the true pain he was enduring.
As great a kid as he was, as mature as he was, he was still a kid. Like just about everyone else who came to visit, he was uncomfortable with my situation. Who could blame him? It’s such an expected thing to be struck down out of nowhere, even worse when it’s somebody you know. I’d dealt with it a couple times in my short life already and it’s never easy. Yet despite his obvious discomfort, he would stay for hours at a time and talk and laugh and I could forget for a while just how shitty life truly was. Nick wasn’t ever one for letting people down, never has been, never will be.
I didn’t find out until the day of the event, May 17th, what Nick had planned to do. I had been a bet preoccupied with my own situation, the outside world didn’t exist too much except where it affected me. I had given up trying to make an effort to think about others, I just didn’t have the strength anymore. Hell, I barely had the strength to think about myself at that point. But Nick…man, I talk about him like he’s a saint, and in some ways he is. It may look like I’m playing up his good qualities, but in truth there’s no way to quantify someone like him, he’s above words, descriptions, metaphors, all of it. All you need to know about Nick is that he’s a runner second and a good person first.
It turned out that Nick had been struggling with his fundraising goal. It was hard for him to balance out everything and also talk to a hundred different people to get small donations that would take him a thousand years and change to hit his goal. He would need to do something big and brash, something to really grip everyone’s attention and draw them in to raise more money. A big run would do it. How big though? A marathon’s worth? Naw, not Nick. Twice that? Nope. A nice, even number to really blow people’s minds. A hundred miles around the school’s track would do it. It would be easy to watch, people could run with him, and the news would eat it up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I had no idea what Nick would be doing that, day, I was just going about my life as usual, being miserable and trying not to think about it, being drugged up, not breathing very well, all those fun things I’d come to completely despise with a hateful passion in the hospital. Then, that afternoon, my mom asked me if I wanted to talk to Nick. I was confused, why would I want to talk to Nick? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to him, but my mom had never really asked me if I wanted to talk to someone before, normally either that person called or I did. She explained to me what Nick was doing, a hundred mile run around the Poway High track. I was stunned, that seemed freakishly long, almost the distance from Poway to City of Hope. In my mind, I imagined Nick running all the way here to visit me, and a little smile played upon my lips.
“Sure. I’d love to talk to him.” I figured that she would hand me my phone, but instead she grabbed my computer and opened up a video call to Nick. My dad was holding up his computer and running beside Nick when he answered.
“Hey man,” Nick said breathlessly, his eyes only occasionally darting toward the screen. He was in the zone, breaking his concentration just long enough to come up with a response. “How ya doin?”
“Oh you know,” I said vaguely. I had swapped out my full face mask for a nasal cannula, which consists of a thin hose and two hollow prongs that sit in your nostrils to deliver oxygen in that way. It seemed better that way, I didn’t want Nick to see me with the full setup. I didn’t want to depress him at all, he had more important things to focus on. It was ironic to think that, because here he was, running to raise money for leukemia research, and I didn’t want him to see how bad it could truly get. We’re funny creatures. “I’m all right,” I lied. “How are you doing?”
“Good,” he said, a little exhale puffing out with each step. “It’s damn hot out though.”
“How hot is it?” I asked.
“Over 100. Hot.”
“Hell that’s pretty hot. You holding up all right?”
“Yea fine. I’m at mile…” He stopped talking for a minute until he passed some off-screen marker. “Just got to mile 80. Need to go. Gotta focus. Take care.” His last jumbled words to me faded away as my dad came to a stop and walked off the side of the track to catch his breath.
I waited for dad to hold up the screen again and he showed me what Nick was doing. I couldn’t actually make him out, there was a large group of people running with him. “Looks like he’s doing pretty well,” I mentioned.
My dad turned the computer back around and nodded. “Yep. He’s really kicking ass. I’m going to try and run some more with him. Love you buddy. Love you sweetie pie,” he said to my mom, and hung up.
“Well that was nice to get to see him run,” mom said.
I was tired just from watching Nick run, I had no idea how he could still be on two feet, or even alive. 100 degree weather? The kid was nuts, and he was only eighteen. There was someone going onto much bigger and better things, a flair for the dramatic, enraptured with the grandiose, never willing to give in and always willing to give something a try. “Yea it was.”
Nick ran through the day, well past nightfall before he finally completed his 100 miles. He could barely walk the next day, his legs were jelly, his body aching almost as bad as mine, but he felt an immense pride and self-satisfaction at completing his almost insurmountable goal. I was proud of him, he had fought his fight and won it. I still wasn’t through mine though, and my opponent still had one trick left up his nasty sleeve.
Over the last few weeks I've been thrust into the battle between my desire to move forward and my trauma trying to hold me back in a familiar place, rather than go out into the world and risk more hurt and difficulty. Even if I want to side with moving forward, it's hard to overstate the power of the trauma-induced fear in paralyzing me. It's one of those ugly truths about the whole experience of cancer, that cancer doesn't end with a pat on the back and an "Atta boy" when you get the beautiful news of remission. It stays with you, sometimes for the rest of your life. Whether it's an amputation or the scars of surgery or needing assistance or waking up screaming or crying when a memory is triggered, the experience tends to stick with you like a needy koala toddler to its mother. The last year has been especially rough, with the paralysis nearly choking the rest of my will to move forward to death. But, with a lot of work and both the desire and the need to push through the anxiety, I'm finally beginning to make headway in a couple areas. I'm hesitant about being overly optimistic, but I'm starting to think this might be the first few steps in the direction I have been wanting to go in for years now, it's just been that life is content to throw a googolplex detours my way.
Perhaps the most important thing, to me at least, has been the work I've been doing on my book. I mentioned before that I was waiting for my editor to get my memoir back to me, and only a few days later, she did. Her report and her notes on the manuscript itself were absolutely astonishing and very touching and meaningful for me in so many different ways. Personally, I believe that her kind words and belief in my story and my ability (the terror of wondering if her notes would come back as a mighty hand to swat down the pathetic insect that laughingly thought it could write kept me from opening her notes right away, but even before the end of the first paragraph I felt relief in a way that I don't think I've felt since...probably 2012, when I was the closest I've ever been to reaching that semi-normal life I've been craving) have been key in lighting a fire under me not just in working on the fourth and newest draft of my book, but also in other areas of my life. Getting a bit of confidence in one area seems to have been contagious, and it might be the first contagious thing I've been happy to catch. There's still a lot of work to be done. I'm a third of the way through her edits (plus edits of my own that I'm making after hearing her general thoughts on the book and what areas to focus on more or reduce) and hoping to finish within the next few weeks. After that, assuming the length is more reasonable than it is now (Currently I'm 20,000 words over the maximum "limit" for a memoir. Although there obviously isn't a real limit, the usual length for one ranges between 60,000 and 120,000 words), it's onto the marketing and networking. I've got a lot of trepidation about that, but the more success I have with the book and in life, the better I think I'll be at tackling these sort of problems. I believe victories in life help to give me confidence, especially when they've been so rare and tainted with bitter irony or followed up with crippling defeat. For now, that's not going to be much on my mind, I choose to focus on getting the edits done first. One thing at a time.
The other big thing I've been working on and have begun to find some success in is being more social. When I get overwhelmed I tend to shut down and shut away to decrease the amount of stimulation and unknown variables that my brain says will only make things worse. Even if I don't want to, the anxiety of having to face other living entities becomes a daunting challenge that my mind refuses to attempt. I've been wrestling with the comforts of reclusiveness for the last few months. It's comfortable for me, in much the same way I actually preferred being in the hospital after my ordeals with Graft vs. Host and the side effects of the bone marrow transplant. I hated the hospital, much as I hated reclusiveness, but there was a kind of serenity and comfort in them, they were predictable, and so there wasn't anything to be worried about. No real surprises, just maintaining a basic existence was about all I wanted to deal with. Simple things, things I could enjoy or that would pull me from reality and plop me into my head where the world couldn't get to me, that's what I wanted, even as I protested against it. It's been hard to drag my unwilling brain back into some sort of social mode, but I'm doing my best to force myself to contact people and hang out with them. I know that once I am spending time with friends, I enjoy myself tremendously, but in the days and hours and minutes leading up to that encounter, I feel the panic and the desire to call it off get stronger and stronger. Grappling with that is exhausting, but it's worth it when I finally get to see friends and I can forget about it for a time. The more I socialize, the less my brain protests, so it's been getting a bit easier lately, but I'm still wary and making sure I stay on top of the reclusive me so it can't surprise me and shut me back away again. I really do want to be part of the world, especially since the world has space and gravitational waves and Pluto.
