Monthly Archives: January 2012

slippin’ into the future

My last radiation treatment is Friday. I continue on oral chemotherapy — which is not as sexy as it sounds — until I run out of pills, about two weeks from tomorrow.

Then it’s a big-ass vacation from treatment and hospital visits and doctor’s appointments until the 15th of March when I’ll get to see Doctor Paz again.

(His tiny hands continue to fascinate me.)

At the end of March, I’ll get the MRI that will guide the surgeons as they cut into my gut and scoop out the cancer.

Then, I guess, we’ll see.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make a living until then, during the minimum one-month recovery, and oh yeah, afterward.

Will it be my proposed closed-door Sunday brunch restaurant? (Juan Carlos, get off your drunk ass and ANSWER ME!)

Will it be teaching Argentines to write in comprehensible, colloquial English? Or do they even care they sound ridiculous?

Will it be getting the San Telmo Art Walk into Lonely Planet and then cruisin’ on the good press?

Will it…be?


i wish i were a dog

My former employer still owes me over 9000 pesos. That’s about USD $2,200. I’m not sure what he thinks I’m living on since it would surprise me if he even reads this blog. In any case, I’m not expecting to ever see that money.

When I get my emergency DNI, I’ll investigate whether or not I can sue him as an Argentine would be able to do. But you can’t get blood from a turnip, as my Mom would have said. Until then, I’m living on what trickles in via the Art Walks and my NSFW affiliate sales. That’s not substantial by any means. Not yet anyway.

My savings is gone and the donations I’ve already collected will run out shortly. I will not make it to the end of 10 weeks — the time I have to wait until I go into surgery to remove the tumors from my colon and liver — with money still in my pocket.

How I’ll pay for anything while in the hospital, I don’t know. My hospital stay is free but when I was in Rivadavia last year, patients had to buy their own hand soap and toilet paper and do their own laundry. I’ll be in a different hospital this time but I can’t imagine it’s much different.

After I’m out of the hospital? Who the fuck knows? I don’t trust my former employer to keep my room free for me. (The room was part of my salary and the fact that he owes me money is surely the only reason I’m not homeless right now.) I’m sure he wants to be rid of me. The only reason he hasn’t tried to kick me out is because it would cause him to look bad in front of his peers and the Argentine expat community.

Local expat kicks terminal cancer patient out into the streets!

Wouldn’t look good in a LinkedIn update, now would it?

I’m not so naive now as to think his forbearance has anything to do with pity or kindness. This is the same guy, after all, who hung up on Claire when she called him for help the night my colon split in two.

“What do you guys think? That I’m made of money?!” he shouted over the phone, and disconnected.

Money is morality, or rather, how it’s expressed or not. How could it be otherwise within a culture whose primary medium of exchange, compensation, access, interaction, distribution — EVERYTHING — is enabled by and conducted through money.

In fact, some people take a stand against giving away money that’s as strong as any moral position. Because it is a moral position.

And yet, particularly for Americans, it’s the one thing you’re not allowed to ask for freely or compel someone into providing. One’s money and one’s ultimate, unassailable right to it is sacrosanct in a way that not even the image of Mohammed is for Muslims. I’ve witnessed the faces of otherwise kind people twist into masks of defensive panic when asked for a loan or a contribution, of even the smallest amount. Every week I witness the richest people give the crappiest tips, or none at all, when I give an art walk, the chemo blisters on my feet making me hobble and my irradiated body screaming at me: Go to bed, you fool!

In hope of making almost 600 pesos, I skipped Friday’s radiation treatment in order to give an art walk for 6 people. 4 of them didn’t show up. But that’s how desperate I am.

I’m not afraid of working — it’s apocryphal by now how I gave an art walk in 90˚ weather with a distended stomach and two days away from death — and I know no one is going to feed me if I don’t but really, what more can I do in my disabled state?

I’ve tried to think of clever narratives that would make me look sympathetic and worthy of a small donation but I’m 49 years old and I still have no idea what motivates people to do anything really.

I’m not a young, attractive, working-class straight man with cancer raising children and shouldered with a $50,000 medical debt. Having children seems to be the key here.

I’m not straight. I don’t have children to support.

I’m not a cute lil’ bull terrier who needs a home. He raised $5000 on Kickstarter. Being cute, cuddly and needing to hike a leg to pee seems to help here.

I am not a dog. Well, not the four-legged kind, at least.

I’m not a conceptual art piece in James Franco’s Invisible Museum. How much has that raised? A million by now? Obnoxious irony works well here.

Fuck irony.

I’m just a guy who writes, really. Just someone who needs your help.

If you can’t contribute, please share this blog on Facebook, Twitter or your other favorite social networks. Thanks.


The late Christopher Hitchen whom Kate has never heard of:

One thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

zones of engagement

“Show me anal zone,” my cute, 24-year female oncologist said as she snapped on some latex gloves.

Lying on the green vinyl bed, I tried to unfasten my belt and slide my pants down, but instead I got stuck laughing.

“Sorry my horrible English!” she said, laughing as well.

“No, no, it’s perfect!”

For a second I had thought I was in a badly translated Japanese gay porno.

But, no, it was just another inspection of my very sensitive, radiated parts by another stranger.

She was a very friendly stranger, though, as was her colleague — a slightly older but still young woman who was one of the first doctors to see me when I was admitted to Marie Curie.

I had forgotten her and was a bit surprised when she greeted me enthusiastically with an Argentine kiss on the cheek. I’d gotten used to the hand-shaking, which I prefer.

“It’s been a long time!” she exclaimed in Spanish, looking like she was very happy to see me — happy to see me alive, I think.

The two of them assured me that 10 weeks between the end of radiation treatment and surgery was standard protocol, not a time frame pulled out of the ass of the head surgeon I talked to two weeks ago. Apparently, the sub-atomic effects just keep on working. Just like a microwave oven!

They also agreed with me that stopping the oral chemo — capecitabina tablets — was a good idea. They told me that the side effects I’d been experiencing were, in fact, high-grade: numbness of extremities; cracked, dry skin; limited motility; blisters; general fatigue. A good score! If the side effects interfered with my life then I should stop, they said. Being able to walk continues to be important to my life, for sure, despite the amount of time I spend on my ass in front of this iMac. I still have to shop for groceries and cook for myself.

At any rate, it felt good to be assured that the way I feel still matters.


70/30

No one wants to talk about my mortality but it’s almost all I think about.

Let’s face it, kids, the odds are that the metastases in my liver are going to kill me, probably some time in these first five years after diagnosis — which means in all likelihood I have 4 years left, maybe, on the outside.

If I make it to 5 or even 2 or 3, the odds are good that the cancer will come back after surgery, requiring more surgery and more chemo. That’s a given in everything I’ve read on the subject.

(I know most people are looking for “happy” cancer blogs. Well, that’s someone else’s job, I guess.)

So, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Adam, says in the cancer/buddy movie 50/50, constantly insisting that “everything’s going to be all right” and “you’ll get through this” is simply not helpful.

(On the other hand, as Adam’s best friend, Kyle, says, “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds!” That’s comforting, but only because Seth Rogen said it.)

Last week I met the surgeons who will be cutting me open – 6 surgeons in a room, all of them intensely interested in working on my ass. One of them digitally examined me, roughly and with two fingers. He was a hairy bear with a beard and under different circumstances it might have been hot. Instead, it hurt the rest of the day. Combine that with the sunburned, infected skin of my ass crack, and my butt just isn’t doing too well.

Because of that, the radiation doctor has stopped radiotherapy until my skin improves. I’ve unilaterally stopped the oral chemo, as well, without consulting the docs at Marie Curie. The hand-foot syndrome has gotten pretty bad. Even holding a toothbrush in my red, red hand hurts and often I can’t walk, I hobble. That dime-sized blister just will not go away. And, oh yeah, my skin around the head of my penis is red and blistered again. That’s a side effect I haven’t read about.

The head surgeon told me to get an MRI ten weeks after my radiation/chemo cycle ends. Then they’d schedule surgery. He seemed to pull that number out of the air, though, so I don’t know whether this is standard operating procedure or if March is the earliest they can get me in.

My oncologists had already told me that they’d keep me on oral chemo in the weeks before the surgery in order to curtail the spread of the metastasis in my liver. I just didn’t think it would be 10 frakin’ weeks to wait!

Right now, I don’t get the sense that anyone is thinking about my quality of life, not to mention the quality of my death. But if all I have left is 4 years then the quality of my life seems really, really important right now.

But, if I look — and I don’t even have to look hard — quality is really hard to find.

Juanele AR is done so I don’t have a steady income now. It will take a couple months to ramp up the next project I have in mind. (However, the surgery is in a couple months.) The Art Walk income is sporadic and if I don’t have the energy to give it myself then my take is cut in half. The affiliate porn business is very slow — who buys porn these days?

Without that benefit, I would have no cash at all.

To top it all off, last week, because there was a 2-day party in my flat, and yeah, this cancer patient needs to sleep (a party which, by the way, made no money for Juanele), I stayed at a hostel in San Telmo. And my backpack was stolen with my passport, my camera, my only jacket, a few t-shirts and cancer drugs inside.

I’m not an amateur traveler and managed to survive homeless in Prague with fewer thefts that you’d expect. However, it’s been a long time since I’d been out in the backpackers’ world where, really truly, you can’t trust anyone. I guess I lost my edge.

Time of your life, hey kid?