ever-fixed mark

An old Peace Corps friend, Dave, died suddenly this weekend. A bunch of returned volunteers were weaving in and out of a Facebook thread commenting on one person’s announcement that he was coming to the States in a few days to interview for a job with the Peace Corps, when someone broke in with the news that Dave had succumbed to a brain aneurysm the previous day.

I hoped it was a joke, some kind of inside joke between the two of them that I just wouldn’t get. Dave couldn’t die at 40. Dave had saved two lives in one Thanksgiving!

Fucking Facebook. This is what it’s come to. The medium that everyone else uses to post what they had for lunch and how much they are T’ing G that it’s F is now how everyone will know that you’re dead. When all of us first met, the internet barely existed, and no one had a telephone. If you wanted to deliver a message you had to send it through the Tunisian post, or get up off your ass and go tell them in person, unannounced.

That’s how I first met Dave. Another volunteer brought him and another trainee to my house during a “kick-out,” a week-long period during training. It was meant to be the trainees’ first real experience out and about in the country. I suppose A., the other volunteer, thought his charges should see the bright lights of Tunis, so they ended up at my place.

Dave was young, cocky, and good-looking. I thought that pretty much summed him up, with no need to give him any further consideration, but that weekend he surprised me. He was smart and well-read and really, really charming. The kind of attention that you or I might lavish on a seduction target or someone who might leave us a million dollars was the kind of focus that Dave turned on everyone: pretty girls, ugly girls, middle-aged women, old men, straight men, gay men. At one point during that first weekend he paid me the best compliment I’ve ever received:

“You know, you have a really good vocabulary,” he said.

And that’s how you make a friend for life. He had me at “vocabulary.”

Here’s a photo from that weekend. Doesn’t this make the Peace Corps look like fun?

Dave was the Brobdingnag among Liliputs.

Dave gave me gifts of music, literature, laughter. He turned me on to Joni Mitchell; I had only known “Big Yellow Taxi” but he loaned me cassettes of Blue and Court and Spark, and I was converted. When I taught Wuthering Heights and complained about how dull it was, he borrowed one of my photocopies (university policy; we couldn’t afford or perhaps get our hands on actual books) and schooled me in its genius. Every few months, he tried to get me to read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I never could get past the first few pages. He told me that life was too short to read trash, a view against which I used to protest, but which I’ve now come to espouse. Life is too damn short.

He was nicknamed Haj because of a red fez he wore at some party or another. Hajji is an honorific given to men who wear the fez, denoting that they’ve made the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. It’s inconceivable that Dave’s made his last hajj.

Peace, xuyya.

Can you guess which of the incidents, below, is a real-life local news story, and which is the plot of a scary blockbuster movie?

A. A large, smelly, gelatinous, alien-looking life form terrorizes a small town, sending people screaming into the streets.

B. On the eve of a major holiday week, a fisherman in a tourist town claims to have spotted a great white shark, but no one believes him and the beaches remain open.

Yes! You guessed it! Both are local news stories AND movie plots! To wit:

The Blob

Jaws

Just your average summer in New England.

Two noisy birds have taken up residence in the tree outside our home. While craning my neck to see if I could locate their nest, I realized I was standing there with my mouth agape like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

“That’s funny,” I thought, and tried to close my piehole, to no avail. “Did my mouth always hang open like this when I moved my head back?” Then I remembered: oh, yeah. Surgery.

With this big slot in my neck, and a mouth that yawns open every time my head tilts back, I resemble nothing so much as a Pez dispenser.

Minutes before I was about to be wheeled into the operating room, my surgeon came by to say hello. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m fine but the important thing is how are YOU feeling?” I asked him. After all, how he currently felt would determine how I might feel in the future. Had he slept well? Breakfasted abundantly? Was he satisfied with his long-distance carrier?

“I’m thinking about a change in plan,” he said. Let me assure you, this is not something you want to hear at that juncture.

Basically, when you have this kind of cancer, there is a continuum of options. At one end of the continuum, you could do nothing and hope that you die of old age before the cancer spreads. This might be a perfectly valid option; unfortunately there are no studies giving you your chances. At the other end of the continuum, you can take out the whole thyroid and all the lymph nodes in the neck area, eliminating all the places the cancer is likely to have metastasized in the early going. This increases the chance that you will get all the cancer but you risk cutting unnecessarily; the cancer from the left side of your thyroid might never have gotten to the lymph node under your right jaw anyway.

All along the continuum are other options: Take out half the thyroid; half the thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side; the whole thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side; the whole thyroid and the lymph nodes on the affected side and center (our original plan). How do you choose a course of action? It seems to be a gut instinct. If a lot of lymph nodes light up on a scan, or if the biomarkers for the cancer are high, you might assume that the cancer has spread, and you need a more aggressive approach, but on the other hand the metastases might be microscopic and won’t show up until you take the nodes out and do a path report, or the biomarker may not be indicative of the size and spread of the tumors.

My surgeon didn’t find much evidence of metastases on the scans, and my biomarkers were relatively low, but my surgeon just saw this as a chance to “cut for a cure.” He proposed changing from the “more aggressive” to the “most aggressive” surgical intervention, which would mean breaking the surgery into two parts: one surgery now, and another in six to eight weeks.

Deep sigh.

So, I’m currently in possession of half my thyroid and neck lymph nodes, which meant I was in surgery for a slightly shorter time than expected (4 hours, instead of the predicted 5). I am still generating thyroid hormone, so I feel relatively normal. It hurts a lot less to have your neck cut open and sewn back together than you would think. On the visual analog scale, my neck pain is barely registering, whereas the place they put the IV is an “oh my God you sadistic nurse how the hell could this STILL hurt a week later?”

But, hey, all in all, it’s a thumbs up. I even went running on Wednesday, one week after the surgery, and banged out three miles without too much trouble, so I guess that means I am All Better. The stitches did feel a bit weird when I was running, like I had been decapitated and had my head stuck back on with masking tape. That is, in fact, what it looks like thanks to the rank-looking steri-strips still closing the wound.

I keep trying NOT to think about the guy with the neck wound in Cold Mountain:

:At the hospital, the doctors looked at him and said there was not much they could do. He might live or he might not. They gave him but a grey rag and a little basin to clean his own wound. Those first few days, when he broke consciousness enough to do it, he wiped at his neck with the rag until the water in the basin was the color of the comb on a turkey-cock. But mainly the wound had wanted to clean itself. Before it started scabbing, it spit out a number of things: a collar button and a piece of wool collar from the shirt he had been wearing when he was hit, a shard of soft grey metal as big as a quarter dollar piece, and, unaccountably, something that closely resembled a peach pit. That last he set on the nightstand and studied for some days. He could never settle his mind on whether it was a part of him or not. He finally threw it out the window but then had troubling dreams that it had taken root and grown, like Jack’s bean, into something monstrous.

I’m curious about what will come out of my neck when the tape finally falls off. Silly Bandz and dog hair, no doubt.