My Hospital Adventures, Part I

A lot has happened since I last checked in. At the time of my last post, on March 8^th, my surgery was still nine days away and the real dread hadn’t yet set in. But when it came, it came gradually and then rapidly, kind of like this:

The hours just before surgery were the worst.

The procedure, even in its abbreviated form—RPLND—sounds awful. All those letters. The full name is worse, of course. Retroperitoneal Lymph Node Dissection. “High risk,” according to my surgeon and everything I had been reading on the internet. Six hours on the table, an incision running from my sternum to below my belly button, scalpels (and whatever else they use) slicing around organs, nerves, and two major blood pipelines—the aorta and vena cava.

I checked in at 5:30 on the morning of the seventeenth. Outside the hospital it was dark and quiet; inside the hospital, the only activity was from the few of us scheduled for surgery. Me and Shannon, an older couple, and two women. It was easy to identify which person in each group was headed for the table; told to wear “comfortable clothes,” we all opted for sweats and slippers. After we handed over our insurance cards and got tagged with wristbands, we shuffled over to the elevator and headed up to pre-op.

Prepping for surgery entails getting naked, being hooked up to machines, and waiting.

When you’re waiting to do something unpleasant, time does funny things. It’s both longer and shorter than usual. At one point I lay there for what seemed like an hour to see that only ten minutes had passed; another time, the clock had jumped from 6:30 to 7 seemingly in the blink of an eye. During all of this, I was visited by various people—all kinds of nurses, members of my surgical team, anesthesiologists.

At a certain point, you just have to give in and see yourself as a piece of meat to be poked, prodded, moved around, cut open, and put back together.

Close to 7:20, they wheeled me into the OR, put an epidural into my back, and not long after that I was asleep.

I blinked myself back into awareness in the recovery room. People were calling my name. I made no attempt to move, and nobody asked me to. I couldn’t have even if I wanted because of a few new tethers—two more IV lines (though they weren’t attached to anything), cables on my chest, an oxygen line under my nose, leg massagers, and a catheter.

They didn’t have a room ready for me, so I lay in recovery for a few hours, over which time I became vaguely aware of a dull ache down my middle. I had two triggers for pain—one upped the epidural and the other Dialaudid, a painkiller. While I was there, they continued to wheel people in from the operating room. The only one who made an impression on me must have had some serious sedation based on her anesthesiologist’s half of their conversation, the only half I could hear:

“MICHELLE! Wake UP!

“MICHELLE!

“MICHELLE! Can you raise your right hand?

“MICHELLE! Raise your right hand!

“MICHELLE! Wake UP!

“MICHELLE!”

  

The first day was all about immobility, and only partly because of my huge incision. The drugs from the epidural had not quite distributed themselves evenly, so my right side was way more numb than my left. I couldn’t, in fact, really move my right leg at all.

I was in the first bed of a semi-private room. My roommate was a gravelly voice on the other side of the curtain. I asked him how long he’d been there, and he just said, “Long time.” Other than that, I only heard him say “No” (in response to the nurse asking if he wanted to get out of bed), “Pain meds” (in response to the nurse on the other end of his call button), and “Nausea meds” (in response to the same).

When lunch came that first day, the voice croaked out, apropos of nothing, “You should get the baked fish. I get it every day.”

“They’re not giving me anything yet,” I said. “Not even ice chips.”

“The baked fish is good. I get it every day.”

“They said I might get some liquids tomorrow.”

“Y’oughta try that baked fish.”

Okay, I thought. Please stop saying “baked fish.”

Shannon brought the boys to visit on Tuesday afternoon. I wanted to at least be on my feet for that, but nothing doing. Instead, a nurse’s aid helped me into a wheelchair and rolled me out to a lounge area, where I had the energy to visit for about a half hour.

On the ride home, Shannon told me later, Tony said that he didn’t like how everyone could see my butt. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my catheterized wingwang had also been on pretty prominent display.

The next day they removed the main dressing and I got the first good look at my scar.

The days unfolded in long stretches of nothing punctuated by short bursts of intense activity—a nurse appearing to check my vitals and give me a shot, a resident stopping by to look at my incision, my phone ringing. This would go on through night, too. I’d be lucky enough to slip into some pocket of deep sleep, only to wake up as a nurse velcroed a blood pressure cuff on my arm.

And everyone asked the same question—Have you passed any gas?

I slowly shed my tethers—first the EKG cables, then the oxygen, and then the epidural. I wanted to start walking, and my main inspiration was my roommate.

I never really found out what was wrong with him, but he never had any visitors, and I overheard his nurses talk about moving him to a care facility. I thought he was pretty old, but one night, there was an Emergency marathon on the retro channel that he never seemed to shut off, and he said that he watched that show as a kid.

Holy shit, I thought. I watched that show as a kid. He couldn’t have been more than fifty.

He was in a bad way, but it was also clear to me that he was playing a kind of game with his nurses. During a shift change, I heard his nurse tell her replacement that he could move all of his limbs but refused to get out of bed. And at least twice a day, when his nurse suggested that he get out of bed and sit in a chair, he’d respond, “Nice try.” Once, he even warned the nurse, “I’m going to spoil your day today.”

Near the end of the week I was free of everything but my IV (the catheter came out Wednesday, and it was not a pleasant experience). I worked hard to get out of bed and into a chair by myself. To do that, and to then get myself out of the chair, I had to focus on using just my arms and legs. This is harder than it sounds; we use our abs for nearly everything. But whenever I’d use mine, a lightning bolt of pain would rip down the front of my body.

Once I could get up and out, I would amble, turtle-like, around the halls outside—first one lap at a time, then three, then as many as I wanted. There was a magnetic board with little cars on it in the hallway where patients could keep track of their laps (twenty-six equaled a mile, apparently), so I commandeered a green pickup truck and started keeping count. 

Every time I walked past that board and the sign next to it—“Bed is the patient’s #1 enemy”—I thought of my roommate, and how the nurses were now working on a new problem with him. He’d been constipated for four days.

“Ya better bring the dynamite!” he told them at least five times, inexplicably cheerful.

I’d hear this and think, Oh, hey, here’s an idea, Mr. Beddy-Bye: get up off your ass and stop packing your gullet with baked fish.

I couldn’t hang around that room. I walked lap after lap in the hall, and then I’d venture outside the ward and into the hospital proper. I kept track of the NCAA tournament games on my phone, and when a close one was winding down, I’d slip quietly into my room to catch the end.

Discharge came a day early—Friday instead of Saturday. The charge nurse removed my IV, went over instructions with me, and asked if I wanted to be taken downstairs in a wheelchair.

I didn’t. I worked hard to get walking again, and I wasn’t about to be wheeled out. Before I left, I wished my roommate luck. I felt bad for him. Life in a bed is no life at all. I had no idea what led him there or what was keeping him there, and I didn’t want to know. I hope I never know.

Leaving that hospital, I was happy to be heading home, and I felt a lot better than I had on Tuesday.

What I didn’t know at the time was that things were going to change over the weekend, and that in a few short days I’d be readmitted.

False Peaks

When I biked across the country, my single worst day came pretty late in the trip. I was crossing from Tennessee into North Carolina on Highway 165, which is known around those parts as the Cherohala Skyway. My new friend Lawson—whom I’d met about a week earlier in Clarksville, Tennessee—told me that it was beautiful country.

And it was. Or I guess it was. It was kind of hard to pay attention because soon after I started out on it, I was climbing.

Obviously, at that point of my journey, I had done my share of climbing with a loaded touring bike. I’d already made it through the Lagunas in southern California, the Rockies in Colorado, and the Ozarks in southern Missouri. But the Appalacians—the mountain range I was crossing here—presented a different problem. Even though they’re not nearly as high as the Rockies, the roads are cut into them much differently—steeper and more winding.

I also had no real idea where I was. My phone read NO SERVICE almost as soon as I started up, and on my map, the road was little more than a squiggle through a big green field. No markers, nothing.

And then there were the motorcycles. Hoards of them passed me in both directions all day long, their motors chopping the air in rising fits until they’d appear either in front or behind me. I came to hate that noise, those thick tires, all that shiny chrome. I came to hate their riders, too, with those ZZ Top beards, leather vests, and thick, hairy forearms.

Okay, I didn’t hate them all. The ones who threw me a peace sign or a thumbs-up or a few quick taps on the horn as they passed, they were all right. But the others had to go. And so did their engines, which did all the work for them.

But the worst part about that day were all of the false peaks. I climbed for six hours, twisting and turning up and up, telling myself as I rounded a bend—panting, sweating, ready to fall over—that this had to be the last one, this had to be the top, the road had to level off here and start to drop.

But no. Each time I would curl around a wall of rock and trees only to find that I was still going up.

This day came back to me two weeks ago, when I met with a surgeon to go over my latest scans. After my fourth and final round of chemo, my doctor scheduled a PET/CT scan. The PET part of things checks for cancerous activity, while the CT would provide a picture of the tumor sites to see how they compared with the scan I had back in October, at the start of it all.

The PET was clear. No real surprise there; my blood had been free of tumor markers since the second round of chemo. The CT, however, was a different story. Not much change from before. The specialists involved—my oncologist, my urologist, and my surgeon—were in accord on two points. First, that the tumors were more than likely benign, and second, that they had to come out. Surgery. A big one, as it turns out.

The procedure is called a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection, or RPLND for short, and I’d been putting it far out of my mind since my initial forays onto the internet back in October. It’s an invasive, complicated, and, yes, risky procedure given the proximity of the tumors to a few important innards, like my aorta.

As my surgeon ran through the finer points—six hours on the table, maybe close to a week in the hospital, a couple of other details that didn’t make it through the blood pounding in my ears—I kept thinking about that road that climbed forever. I felt like I was on it again. Just when I think I’ve crested, just when I think I can start to cruise a little bit, I turn the corner to find another false peak, that there’s still some climbing to do.

It started to feel like too much for me.

And then I remembered how that day on the Cherohala Skyway finished up.

Things came to a head late in the day. I was on hour six of the climb when I saw a little grassy area with a picnic table off to the left. That was it for me. I’d had enough and pulled over to camp for the night.

I leaned my bike against the picnic table and changed out of my soaking jersey. Feeling a  little better, I unhitched the bag containing my tent and sleeping pad from the rear rack and let it drop to the concrete pad with what I thought would be a definitive thump, but it caught the edge of the table and rolled onto the soft grass with hardly a sound. The only place to pitch my tent was on a narrow gash of lawn that almost immediately became forest. A quick rummaging through my handlebar bag revealed the contents of my larder: a few almonds, dried blueberries, and a pouch of tuna.

It was overcast and cool as the day headed into dusk. A blanket of trees defined the contours of the rolling mountains, and pockets of mist were starting to form in some of the indentations. These were the same woods that lay just beyond the picnic table; I could walk into them and within ten feet the road, these tables, and my bike would all disappear. In a few hours the forest would come alive, its inhabitants looking for food.

I remembered reading that bears could smell food up to eleven miles away.

The road had been empty for a while. Did the police patrol it at all? Maybe a state trooper would rouse me from my tent in the middle of the night. Better that, I figured, than a bear looking for my nuts and berries and tuna.

My phone still read NO SERVICE. If something were to happen, I had no way to call for help. And under a thick blanket of night, even with my lights, escape might be more dangerous than staying put.

At that point in my trip, I should have been more immune to the indecision of the road than I was. I walked to the edge of the grass trying to make something materialize in the forest, some clue that would tell me if I’d be safe that night, but there was nothing.

I picked up my bag, not sure what to do.

I’ve got to get out of here.

I’ll be fine if I stay.

No, I’ll die if I stay.

It was six-thirty. With rows of mountains behind me, the sun was already invisible, and its remaining light was being swallowed by the long shadows spilling from the forest. In another forty-five minutes or so, those shadows would roll right over me.

I decided to go for it.

And what did I find? The summit of those Goddamn mountains that I’d been climbing all Goddamn day was slyly waiting for me barely a half mile up the road. As I crested the top, I took a deep breath before hurtling down—beating the bears, beating the dark, beating my own bonked out, noodle-like legs—to a little town called Robbinsville.

So I’m hoping that this surgery on the 17th isn’t another false peak, that there won’t be any complications, that I won’t have to go through another round of “insurance” chemo. I’m ready for this road that I’ve been on since last October to start to level off.

But if it doesn’t just yet, I know what I’m supposed to do. Keep pedaling.

Nuts and Bolts

Last week I received a package in the mail—a medium-sized box with the return address of the Illinois Farm Bureau. I knew right away that it was from my buddy Kevin, who’s worked in their educational programs department for a number of years.

Kevin and I were—and are—fraternity brothers; he was a year ahead of me at the University of Illinois, but he joined our house the year after I did. Our house was small, and it followed the general rule of any group: 10% of the people did 90% of the work. Kevin immediately became—and remained—one of the heavy lifters, despite several commitments elsewhere (he was a manager for the Illini basketball team). This hasn’t changed; despite working full-time, serving on the local school board, being heavily involved in his church, and raising three kids, Kevin has also been active in our fraternity on both the local and national level. For him, it’s not about staying busy or being a workaholic. If I were forced to reduce Kevin to a single sentence, I would have to say that of all the people I know, he’s the one who most embodies the spirit of community. He knows that we’re all in this together.

No doubt his upbringing had a lot to do with his attitude. He grew up in downstate Illinois (of course, “downstate” is a relative term; to a suburban kid like me, anything south of I-80 fit this category). It was a small town where people didn’t lock their doors at night and the local high school’s graduating class numbered somewhere from ten to fifteen. I saw all of this myself one year when I had Easter dinner at Kevin’s house. He drove me and another of our brothers around his town (it didn’t take long), pausing at various houses to tell us about the people who lived there.

I have to digress here and tell the most memorable story from that visit, which has nothing to do with Kevin. It’s about his father, who on that weekend happened to be fixing a leaky underground pipe. When he mentioned that he’d found the leak with a divining rod, I smirked in the way that only a know-it-all Chicago suburban wiseass can. He invited me outside to give it a try. The “divining rod” was actually two pieces that looked like sections of a wire hanger bent into “L”s. Kevin’s dad had me hold each one loosely at the bend, the short ends pointing down and the long ends pointing straight ahead. He moved my hands about twelve inches apart and told me to start walking. As INSERT PREFERRED DIETY HERE as my witness, when I came near the area where he’d been digging, the two pieces of metal moved in my hands. Actually moved. The long ends pulled towards each other and crossed, and I jumped, my face registering wide-eyed shock. Kevin’s dad just smiled and said, “Bet they don’t teach that in Chicago.”

No, they didn’t. My knowledge of small-town America came mainly from reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. Until, that is, I went to college, joined a fraternity, and lived with a lot of guys who’d had very different backgrounds than I did. I remember another weekend at another brother’s home way out in western Illinois, when I got to put on boots, slog through snow-covered mud, and help feed some cows.

But back to that package.

I opened the box, and hidden inside a sea of curled styrofoam pieces was a brown envelope, heavy and bulging at one end. Inside the envelope was a five page letter and a baggie full of steel nuts, all different sizes.

The letter explained the bag. Back in October, when I first announced that I had cancer again after ten years, Kevin—having seen my Facebook post and having read my blog—went to his men’s group at his church, and he asked them to pray for me. The group thought about something else they could do. One option was a “prayer blanket,” where the women in the quilting group make a blanket, pray while they make it, and then send it to the person being prayed for. But a few weeks later, after one of the men read my post “Please Lie Still While I Crush Your Balls,” they decided to do something else.

They would pray over nuts.

Kevin gave a nut to each of the twelve men closest to him. All of them carried a nut around in their pockets for a couple of months and prayed for me while it jangled around with keys and loose change. One of the men looped his through a leather cord and wore it around his neck.

When my chemotherapy ended, Kevin gathered the nuts back up and sent them to me. In the letter, he told me a little bit about each of the men (including which fraternity brother each one reminded him of).

I put them on a cable ring, and I’ve been carrying them with me every day in my right pocket. It’s a nice balance to my keys, which I always carry on my left side. It’s also a suitable replacement for what I’m missing on my right.

I find myself reaching into my pocket several times over the course of a given day. I like to hold the ring, slip my fingers through it, feel the weight of the nuts. I’m not a big believer in the power of prayer, but I’m a huge believer in the power of friendship and good acts—especially those done by strangers for strangers. It makes this big, scary world a lot smaller and reminds us that we’re part of something. To me, that’s what’s holy.

So I’d like to thank these twelve men, all of whom I hope to meet someday: Rick Lohnes, Tom Payne, Scott Riddle, Bob Sammer, Steve Ward, Harry Jiles, Shawn Benz, Kyle Merkle, Steve Dean, Gary Tipsord, Jeff Baughman, and Parker Daugherty (Kevin’s twelve-year-old son). And I’d like to thank the thirteenth man, my dear friend and brother Kevin. I hope that someday I can do something for someone that means as much to that person as this gift has meant to me.

A Big John World

My fourth and last round of chemotherapy ended on Friday (the 17^th), and the numbers are excellent: my tumor markers are at zero and have been for several weeks. As far as cancer goes, I’m lucky to have been stricken with one that has a pretty effective treatment. As a good friend messaged me, “Better living through chemistry.”

Well, almost.

Now I’m caught between two states—No Longer Sick and Not Yet Normal. Ten years ago when I went through this, I had a total of three rounds. This time I had four rounds, and let me tell you, there’s a universe of difference between Round Three and Round Four.

For one thing, I never felt a full bounce-back after Round Three before I had to go back in again. The side effects were fewer, but the ones—or, rather, the one—that was there was pretty intense. Nausea.

From nearly the get-go of Round Four, I was getting sick. As the week progressed, it intensified to the point where, for the three days following my last treatment, I couldn’t keep anything down. No solids, no liquids. I was down to bile, and that was running out fast. Every thirty minutes or so would find me heaving over a toilet and looking like I needed an exorcist.

All of which is to say that Round Four put me on the business end of a serious ass-kicking.

It’s not that I wasn’t getting anti-nausea meds; the problem was that I couldn’t keep them down.

I finally realized that I wasn’t going to pull out of this on my own; my body was becoming dehydrated, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Shannon drove me to the chemo center, where the nurses took one look at me standing there all pale and woozy, told me to sit down, and began pumping fluid into me.

They threw in some anti-nauseants while they were at it, and they changed up my prescription a bit. That was Tuesday, and I’m happy to report that I’ve most definitely turned a corner. The idea that I was somehow going to make it in to teach this week is laughable to me now.

In the wake of this somewhat rough landing, I decided to go to a support group. I went to one ten years ago and found it very peaceful and affirming. A few weeks ago, I picked up a flier for one being run out of my oncologist’s office on Wednesday nights, but I’d forgotten about it.

I’m glad I went. There’s a poem by Tom Wayman that I like to teach in creative writing called “Did I Miss Anything,” and it’s a teacher’s snarky response to that inevitable question that an absent student will unthinkingly ask upon his or her return. The final lines go like this:

“[Did I miss anything?]

Everything. Contained in this classroom

is a microcosm of human experience

assembled for you to query and examine and ponder

This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here”

I remembered this ending during the support group meeting. I could have blown the meeting off, telling myself, Well, I’m through this now, time to get on with my life, and by the way, what’s on TV? But then I would have missed out on meeting Sam (again, no real names here), a guy who’s survived esophageal cancer, and Gladys (a lymphoma survivor and widow who was diagnosed just weeks before her husband died of stomach cancer) and Fred, an octogenarian who’s still waiting for a clear diagnosis of his condition.

And I would have missed out on the meeting the incredible Valdez family, whose patriarch, Rudy, is now facing colon cancer. He’s had his surgery, and now he’s steeling himself for a stretch of radiation and chemotherapy. He didn’t come to the meeting alone; instead, Rudy was flanked by no fewer than a dozen family members—sisters, brothers, nephews, sons, and even his ex-wife—all of them there to support him and ask questions of what to expect. It was an emotional hour and a half, but all of the family members looked visibly relieved—or at least less shell-shocked—than at the meeting’s start.

I don’t envy the journey they’re about to embark on together—for obvious reasons—but I also don’t envy the obvious love and support that Rudy will be surrounded by on this journey. I don’t envy any of that because a person can’t envy what he has.

I can’t even begin to catalog the acts of love, kindness, and support that I’ve been the grateful recipient of these last several weeks. So rather than try, I’m instead going to tell a story that, for me, can better capture what I’m trying to say.

The story comes from my cross-country bike trip back in 2010—a part of my past that seems like a long, long time ago. One leg of the trip took me through Metropolis, Illinois, a small town on the Ohio River. On its outskirts, I passed through a tree-lined section of Highway 45 with a huge factory to the right and a lot of activity going on in front—people, cars, canopy tents, lawn chairs, a big American flag or two, and a large gray shape on the left that looked like one of those gorillas that car dealers use to advertise “King Kong-sized Savings!”

But what I thought was some kind of party or picnic turned out to be something else. As I rolled closer, I saw people holding signs that read “LOCKED OUT,” “HONEYWELL,” “CORPORATE GREED,” and “USW Local 7-699.”

I immediately slowed down.

The members of United Steel Workers Local 7-699 were happy to have someone to talk to. They were all employed at the Honeywell plant—the gigantic, chain-link-enclosed compound behind them—which happened to be the only uranium-conversion facility in the U.S. I didn’t understand the physical or chemical principles involved, but I understood enough to know that it was hazardous work and that the people who do it should have some health protections, which is the very issue that stalled labor talks between the workers and Honeywell and led to the lock out.

  The shape that I thought was a gorilla was actually a giant inflatable rat. It had a sign around its neck that read “SHAW,” a company that was providing scab workers to Honeywell. While business more or less continued at the plant, these workers—and their spouses, sons, and daughters, who were also out there holding signs—had to make do on savings and whatever support the USW or local residents could provide. Mainly food, one of the workers told me.

  Lockouts and strikes are awful things—weapons of last resort that test each side’s will and resolve, and the longer they go the more reluctant the warring sides are to blink. As I looked at this group of people, I knew that they represented just a fraction of the total workers; if a union is going to pull off what might turn into a long-term protest, you need to work in shifts. I could see in their plain t-shirts and torn jeans and scuffed boots that they were going to be harder hit than the Honeywell executives. No one on the other side would go without meals or water or electricity during this struggle, but I could see a future of letters from banks and first- and second-notifications from utility companies in the mailboxes of these workers. I could see boxes packed with loaves of white bread, macaroni and cheese, and cans of soup being dropped off door-to-door or handed out at some parking lot. I could also see that they were in it together.

  One of the kids asked about my bike, and when I said that I rode from California, I was bombarded with questions while a couple of people took pictures of me with their phones.

  “Where to from here?” one man asked.

  “Paducah.”

  One woman in the back looked at me with wide eyes. “You’re not taking 45 over the river are you?”

  I was pretty sure I was, and I told her so.

  A couple of them exchanged looks while she shook her head.

  “You need to flag down a truck and have them drive you across,” she told me. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Someone got hurt real bad out there just last month,” another guys added.

  I told them that I’ve been through some pretty rough terrain already, and even though a few nodded and laughed and one guy even said, “I’ll bet you have,” the woman in the back looked unconvinced.

  “You get a truck to stop for you, hon,” she said again before I pedaled away.

When I finally made it to the bridge, I knew why she was so worried. It looked long, narrow, and had no discernible lines painted on it. There was also a sign warning motorcyclists to keep off. There weren’t any trucks to flag down for a ride; by the time I hit the bridge it was late on a Sunday afternoon, and the few people who needed to cross the Ohio River were probably doing so by way of nearby Interstate 24.  Even though it was drizzling and had been ever since I left the Honeywell workers about an hour and a half earlier, I took a minute to appreciate what I was about to cross.

The structure known informally as the “Brookport Bridge” and more formally as the “Irwin Cobb Bridge” stretched out high above the Ohio River for over a mile before it hit Kentucky soil. Aesthetically, its ten-truss, no-frills, blue steel construction looked strong and solid, just like the people I met from this area. I took a deep breath, started across, and immediately understood the posted warning. If the sign-makers thought for a second that someone would be crazy enough to cross this bridge on a bicycle, they would have extended the warning to them as well. But what biker in his right mind would attempt to ride over a bridge whose floor is made of steel grates large enough to reach an arm through and touch the girders beneath? The sound my tires made on the surface was just awful, and at any moment I expected to get thrown from my bike as my tires shredded and my front wheel locked between the fierce metal squares.

  As much as I wanted to just cross and be done with it, and even though I could feel the drizzle gathering up into a bona fide rain, I stopped halfway across. It was soupy and humid out, and there was little activity on the water except for a couple of long barges that crept across the brown surface. The bridge was empty, so I dismounted my bike and leaned against the side. I could just make out the edge of Metropolis, jutting into my line of sight downriver.

  After I left the workers and biked into town, I was thinking more about what they were going through than the reason that brought me to Metropolis in the first place—Superman.

  The town made sure that I wouldn’t forget for long. About a half mile past the Honeywell plant, I was greeted by a big fence that read “Welcome to Metropolis” below a picture of the Man of Steel in flight. As I rode further, several signs directed me to the Super Museum, and I wheeled my bike inside.

  The museum was at the back of the building; to get to it, I had to first pass through the gift shop. I promised myself that I’d sift through all of the shirts, books, stickers, magnets, cups, postcards, pencils, and anything else they could slap a giant “S” on after I’d checked out the museum.

  I paid my five bucks and went in.

  It was a funhouse of relics and kitsch. Costumes from the movies, action figures, dolls, board games, puzzles, card sets, buttons, and even lamps. There were plastic 7-11 cups from the 1970s adorned with superheroes. My brother and I used to beg my mom for Slurpees during hot Chicago summers when we were kids, and we fought bitterly over the best cups. I would always lose. While he’d get Mr. Mxyzptlk, Braniac, and Clark Kent tearing off his Daily Planet garb to reveal the Superman costume beneath, I’d be stuck with Ma and Pa Kent and Jimmy Olsen.

  There was also a framed photo from the first Christopher Reeve movie, where he saves a train that’s heading for a gap in a bridge. One of the rails is bent down and the other is gone completely. In the photo, the Man of Steel holds one of the rails with his arm and lets his back serve as the other so that the train will pass safely.

  Outside the museum was the town square, and smack in the middle of that was a big statue of Supes. I had a stranger take some pictures of me standing beneath him, striking a similar pose.

  And what is that pose?

  He stands alone, hands on hips, barely the hint of a smile on his face. A generous onlooker might describe him as searching the distance for some wrong to right, but what I saw was someone posing impatiently for a photograph. His expression isn’t the least bit friendly; it’s more like resignation. Or disdain. Something along the lines of, Here I stand above and there you are below. He might have even been counting the minutes until he could soar back to his Fortress of Solitude to sit quietly and stare at Kandor, the shrunken capital city of Krypton that now resides in a bottle, the last remnant of the home he’s lost.

  I wondered what the United Steel Workers of Honeywell—those very real men and women of steel—think of this statue or of the image of Superman’s body, stretched in mythic flight on the “Welcome to Metropolis” sign. Superman isn’t going to make the Honeywell executives do the right thing. He’s not big enough to combat greed.

  Hell, he’s not even the biggest guy in Metropolis; that honor goes to Big John, who stands at least ten feet taller at the other end of town, towering over the parking lot of Big John Foods. John lacks Superman’s classic good looks; yes, the square jaw is there, but his eyebrows are way too thick and his nose bulges across its bridge as if it’s been broken a few times. When I saw him as I left town, I took one look at his mug and those thick arms filled with grocery bags, and I thought he was probably a punchy ex-boxer working the only job he could get—bag boy at the local food store.

  But John’s a member of the community; he’s integrated into the ordinary and necessary ritual of shopping for food. Superman, on the other hand, is exotic, a destination for tourists and curiosity seekers like me. While Superman parks his hands all mythic-like on his hips, John’s using his to deliver food somewhere—to his family, to a customer, to a neighbor in need. Really, if you’re a locked-out worker who’s wondering where the next meal is coming, who would you rather see at your door—Superman with his x-ray vision or Big John with ground beef, bread, apples, and milk?

  The rain started to pick up, but I didn’t move. Because of the bridge, I could head into Kentucky whenever I was ready. But before there were bridges, crossing rivers was a dicey operation. Native Americans and then pioneer explorers would have had to cross the Ohio by canoe. As I looked at the current below, I knew that I wouldn’t want to have been them. Later there were ferryboats, and before the steam engine, those ferries were towed by rowboats. It was a group effort, and even with several hands helping out, people died. Building this bridge was a group effort, too, from the people who designed it to the miners who dug the ore to the millworkers who forged the parts to the workers who riveted and welded it into existence. Anonymous faces working together so that I could cross this river in a few minutes.

  When I was younger, I saw myself as indestructible; when I was building a family and profession, I saw myself powering through any and all challenges; when I had cancer the first time, I felt vulnerable and lost; and when I left on my bike trip, I felt the need to feel strong, to be found.

  We like to romanticize our journeys as solo adventures—I know that I sure did—but the fact is, they’re not. Not even close. Biking across the country reminded me of the connections that give my life texture: the memories that filled my head as I pedaled, the people I met along the way, the ache I felt when I called home, the blog updates that I sent out like a beacon to others, the rush I felt whenever someone left a comment on what I’ve written.

  Cancer—both times—has been more of the same. The phone calls and cards. The visits during chemo, friends sitting with me quietly, holding my hand, making me laugh. The surprise dinners. The never-ending offers to do something—anything—to lighten my burden. When I was still planning to teach this week, my friend called and told me that she was ready to take my classes for me. It wasn’t really a request; there was something in her voice that said, I’m doing this for you, and it broke me. Yes, she was going to do this for me and I would let her.

  Back on that bridge, I hopped on my bike and continued across the river. I was wet, my legs ached, and as soon as I heard that awful sound of bike tire on steel grate, I wondered if I was going to make it to the other side. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to fly? I thought. After all, what’s a river to Superman? If he didn’t feel like flying, he could still leap over the wide expanse without breaking a sweat. Or maybe alter the river’s course with otherworldly strength.

But nobody is more powerful than a locomotive or faster than a speeding bullet. We owe a huge, un-repayable debt to all of those anonymous others who build our bridges and drive our ferries and develop the drugs and treatments that can extend a life. We also need those others who aren’t so anonymous: the people in our lives who remind us where we’ve been, help us imagine the future, and stay with us for a little while along the way. We might think we’re Superman soaring across the sky in magnificent solitude, but it’s a Big John world out here, and none of us is going to make it very far on our own.

Nice Shootin', Tex! or, Crossing Off #18 on the Bucket List

When I was a kid growing up in the 70s, a bunch of us in the neighborhood used to play a game we called "Guns." Not very imaginative, but neither was the game, really. We sorted ourselves into teams, and everybody picked someone to "be" from TV. Tony Cruz, who lived two doors down from me, was Baretta; Scott Reed, my next door neighbor, was Hutch; his sister Debbie, the only girl who played, was Pepper Anderson (from Police Woman); and Steve Kafka, who lived on the other side of the townhouse unit from me, was Hondo Harrelson (from SWAT). He took this role only grudgingly; because Steve had a pair of nunchucks, he wanted to be Bruce Lee, but that kind of went against the whole spirit of the game. Me, I was always Starsky.

The objective of the game was to disperse, hunt each other around outside, and shoot members of the opposite team with the capguns we had. I'd saved my money and bought a beaut--a black-and-silver .38 snubnose with a real cylinder that spun around. While some of my fellow players used big rolls of red paper caps, my gun had special ammo--a plastic ring of caps that fit onto the back of the cylinder and rotated around so that the real-action hammer could hit and pop each cap.

We played lots of games, my neighbors and I, but Guns is the one that I remember best because I really liked those shows we imitated, and I really liked running around and shooting my gun.

And somehow, I made it to age forty-six without ever firing a real one.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

Once word spread of my cancer, offers of "Let me know what I can do" came pouring in. When it was made by one of my former students--a vet who'd served in the Air Force and had posted a few of her firing-range escapades on Facebook--I told her that I had an interesting request for her. Take me shooting.

Now anyone who knows me well knows (or can guess) that I'm in favor of much stronger gun control laws, and that I consider the NRA's leadership and lobbyists to be among the biggest douchebags on our political landscape. But, I've always wanted to fire a gun, if for no other reason than to see what the excitement was all about.

My former student--let's call her Annie (as in Annie Oakley)--and her Glock 27 met me at an Oceanside firing range. It was crowded with both people and guns--long glass cases filled with revolvers and automatics, and wall racks holding up various rifles, shotguns, and assault weapons. I was asked to sign a sheet stating that I was not a felon, did not abuse alcohol or drugs, and was mentally stable. There were four people on staff--three men and one woman--and they were all professional, courteous, and extremely safety-conscious. When Annie was showing me how the magazine fit into her Glock, one of the staff members shouted at us to make sure that we weren't loading a weapon in the lobby (we weren't).

When our turn came, we were given a couple of targets and two heavy-duty pairs of headphones for noise protection. The rules required that we put them on before we entered the firing range. I should point out that even in the lobby, the pops of the guns from beyond the thick glass wall were loud. To get to the range, we even had to go through a "sound lock," where we opened and closed one big, padded door before we could open another one.

Inside the range proper, two things were immediately noticeable--the smell of gunpowder and the pops that were now BANGS. Annie and I had to shout at each other from two feet away, but those gun blasts had no trouble getting through our ear protectors.

We went to the far lane, where Annie hung up a target and then showed me how to load, hold, and aim the Glock. She fired a few shots to demonstrate before handing the weapon to me.

I don't want to make too much of holding the gun, but at the same time, I do. Without trying to be overly metaphorical, I would describe it as heavy. The gun itself looked like a toy; the Glock 27 isn't very big and has a short grip, so its weight was surprising to me. But more than that, holding the gun didn't provide that rush I'd felt as a kid. In truth, it was a little scary. This was an awful amount of power to hold--the power to do some serious damage to another human being. Maybe a lot of people buy these things with the sole intention of shooting targets, but I don't think so. At some point when a person buys a gun, he or she has to imagine pointing it at another human being. The idea certainly passed through my mind as I held it in my hand, and it made me feel a little sick. Part of this feeling, I'm sure, came from the chemicals lingering in my system. But part of it also came from the close proximity I've felt to death since mid-October in my thoughts, sure, but also in being around lots of other people in much more dire stages of cancer and chemo than me. I wondered if wanting to fire a gun was an effort on my part to exercise some control over death. If so, it was a failed effort; holding that Glock felt like shaking hands with someone I didn't want to meet, not ever.

All of these feelings were intensified when I fired it. Even though I'd watched Annie fire a couple of rounds, the force of that kick surprised me. And the noise, now exploding from about two feet in front of my face, was even louder.

I emptied the gun at the target about twenty-five yards away, and there was another full magazine waiting for me. Annie had told me to aim "center mass," and that's what I did--or tried to do.

"It's a stress reliever, right?" she asked as she passed another full magazine my way.

"Not really," I said, but I'm not sure my reply made it through the headphones.

I kept waiting to get into some kind of rhythm or comfort, waiting for the excitement that I'd felt as a kid running around on those summer days with my fake .38 to kick in, but every time I pulled that trigger, the noise and jerk were sobering, and I couldn't help thinking that all of those cop shows and action movies that transform the noise, smell, and feel of shooting into entertainment are bullshit.

I walked out of the range glad that I'd finally done this thing but convinced that I wouldn't return.

But here's the weird thing: the further I get from the experience, the more that I think it might not be too bad to try it again.

Voices from the Road

I'm working on a longer, more text-heavy post (teaser: it might have the words "bucket list" in the title), but in the meantime, I wanted to share some of the comics from my recently-completed book, That Hidden Road. The images below represent a sampling, and they are sprinkled throughout the manuscript. I decided to draw and write these comics because, when I bicycled across the country, I had a lot of encounters with people that stuck with me, but they didn't seem substantive enough to warrant space in the narrative proper. These comics seemed like a good solution, especially because I've always thought that the medium excels at amplifying quiet moments.

Here they are:

To any publishers and/or agents out there, the book is finished and clocks in at 100,000 words. And if the fact that I have cancer makes you interested out of pity, I'm totally okay with that...

Numbers Don't Lie

Good news to report: I got the results of my blood tests back after the first week of chemo, and my two tumor markers--alpha Fetoprotein (AFP) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)--are dropping. So, the evidence is strong that the chemo is doing more than just turning me into a naked mole rat.

Also dropping, unfortunately, are my white blood cells, which apparently are important in fighting off germs and bacteria. That means some changes for me: I'm carrying a little bottle of Purell and squirting it on anything and anyone I come in contact with, I'm not driving on any roads where there's a Taco Bell, and I'm no longer honoring the "Five Second Rule" (although truthfully, I've always stretched it to more of a "Five Minute Rule," especially if the fallen object was candy. Or bacon.)

In other news, with some help from my buddy John, I've got all of the comics done that are going to go in my second book, That Hidden Road. There are about 35 pages all together that will be intercut with the larger narrative, and I may post some of these pages here if there's any interest. That, by the way, is my non-subtle invitation to any readers out there to express some interest.