Comedy as Redeemed Mourning

Harrison Scott Key said in his wildly hilarious book How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, "So much comedy is a kind of redeemed mourning, turning the dross of pain into gold, just as visiting Disney World HIS BEAUTY and HER BEAST tank tops is a kind of psychosis" (138).

I have felt that sense of comedy as redeemed mourning a lot in the last year. (Can you believe it will be one year already in February since the diagnosis?!) There was a lot of mourning, but there was also a lot of hilarity and ridiculousness, which in some ways felt irreverent at times. I felt as if I had to button it up because I had cancer, and who laughs when you have cancer? Everything just needs to be sad because that is the caricature I had in my head of what a cancer patient should look like. Bald and sad. And a permanent resident living on the bathroom floor.

So I began thinking over the more comical moments I've had here lately. Sort of my own personal version of "You know you have cancer when. . ." sort of list, but really these are the moments when I know I have brain cancer (and when I know I have friends and family who have sorted out when they, too, can safely inject some humor into the situation.) This clearly is not a portrayal of anyone else who has or has had cancer, so don't generalize what I'm saying here.

You Know You Have Brain Cancer When:

• You lose your hair to surgery and then again to radiation (but only half of it!) and then while throwing up from the chemo, think, “Well, at least no one has to be here to hold my hair back.” 
• You update your Memoji to more closely resemble the version of you that wears a beanie hat 24/7 and now needs glasses. 
• You joke with your brother that at least you managed to hit the trash can every time you threw up instead on the floor or on yourself, and he responds in a way that only a brother can with “#winning.” 
• You keep a running list of your medical claims just to see how much your insurance company has been billed, just for kicks. And you do this because you called your insurance company to see if they can provide a master report. No, no, they cannot. Not unless you need it for legal purposes, or some other reason you cannot recall. (And for the record, it's A LOT of money that has been billed to my insurance company. I'm not quite to seven figures, but we're getting there.) 
• Your friend buys you a water bottle decal of a cartoonish looking dumpster on fire with text beneath it that says, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Which is a very polite way to say “Your life is a dumpster fire, but you’re doing a great job.” 
• You start a playlist in your iTunes that is simply called “The Year of Cancer.” 
• When you’ve been asked for what feels like the 9,000th time what your birthday is for verification purposes, you have fleeting thoughts of giving some alternate date, just to see how they respond.
• You’re like a toddler whose day revolves around nap time. Although, I suppose the statement could move in the geriatric direction just as easily, but let’s move in the toddler direction. 
• Your prayers consist of things like “Dear God, please don’t let me lose my lunch again today,” and your gratitude journal includes things like “Thanks, I didn’t lose my lunch today.” 
• It takes you four months to finally make it to a dinner date with friends after months of scheduling and rescheduling thanks to a body that has long since left you out of the decision-making process.  
• You have a new section in your personal library you mentally call “The Cancer Section.”
• You realize some people dream of sleeping or napping all day, but you dream of staying awake all day.
• You joke with a friend who is a paraplegic who has a shirt that says, “I’m in it for the parking.” So then when you roll up to radiation and slide into the “oncology patient” parking space, you text him a photo and say, “I’m just in it for the parking.” 
• You watch all these pharmaceutical commercials you used to laugh at, wondering why anyone would take them as the guy speed talks his way through all the possible side effects, “including death,” and now you watch them and think, “No judgment here. You go right on and take that med that includes possible nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, hair loss, deafness, blindness, heart attack, paralysis, asthma, kidney disease, heart disease, loss of all limbs, osteoporosis, hemorrhoids, curvature of the spine, stroke, and in rare cases, death.” I see you.
• You know what day it is based on your pill organizer. (But that’s only if you remembered to take your pills when you should. And if you don't do that, well, then you're just up the creek as to what day it is. Except for your phone, which also houses reminders to take your meds, and yet you still forget to take meds.)
• Your friend sends you a candle with a picture of a dog with a cone on his head with text beside it that says, "At least you don't have to wear a cone."
• You keep a daily log of symptoms in a notebook, and since you've given legally strict instructions to two of your friends to burn your real journals with all the true insights of your life when you die, those health logs will be the last documented remains of your life. So, congrats, at least the world will know if you had a bowel movement or not should you meet an abrupt demise while going through cancer treatment. 
• You seriously question the dividing line between aging and brain cancer. It doesn't really matter why you just walked into a room and can't remember what you're doing there. Just make another lap and the answer might come to you. You could use the steps anyway.
• You now understand the value of dry erase boards and dry erase markers more than you ever have before in your life. You have to write down what you need to do ten minutes from now sometimes. You even ask for some sort of shower-version of a dry-erase board for Christmas. Doesn't everyone do their best thinking in the shower? And you can't wait until you get out to write things down. No, that's far too long. You forget what you were thinking about in the amount of time it takes to squeeze shampoo in your palm.
• You think "Well, clearly when the neurosurgeon removed part of my tumor, he also apparently removed the cells that gave me the ability to back into a parking space without looking like some drunk, newly-licensed teen driver just pulled in."

Comedy. It really is a redeemed kind of mourning. So laugh away.

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Health update

My most recent appointment with my neuro-oncologist was last week and we did our usual monthly lab work. My platelets took a major nose dive. The low end of normal is 150 and my platelets were down to 86, which was the lowest they've ever been in this process. We had to put further chemo temporarily on hold to see if the platelets would rebound before we could green light cycle number five. I redid lab work today and the platelets rebounded - just in a week! - to 175, which the highest they've been since July. I'll start the next round of chemo tomorrow night (But I don't take it until the evening, so I'll still be with it during the Buckeye game!) I told one friend, "Welcome to a life where perhaps whiplash is, in fact, the most common side effect."

In conversations with the doctor, we elected to maintain the higher dose of chemo, which is the same dose as last time when I was ultra-miserable for a period of a few days. I'm not a masochist, but I want to see if the same symptoms still play out or if the body adjusts in any way to the higher dose. This higher dose is ultimately the target dose and the highest I would go anyway. If it super sucks again, then we can just drop the dose back down without hampering long-term outcomes. If it does hold true, then by about Wednesday next week, I'll probably be getting reacquainted with the carpet in my bathroom closet again and water will sound absolutely awful to me. Yay for padded carpet!

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