Cynthia Hawkins

Day 43: Electricity

Cynthia Hawkins — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 18:17:49 +0000

When I spoke to Jody on the phone she encouraged my confidence in her acupuncture services because she used the word “evil” when I mentioned “cancer” and “chemo.” Last week, I had … a vision? I don’t want to say the word “vision” because it makes me think of Dirty Steve in Young Guns warbling out at half-speed, “Did you see the size of that chicken?” I was dozing off at any rate, and I imagined without trying (okay, call it a vision if you want) that chemo was a lanky woman in a cheap feather boa leaning on an elbow, flicking the nails on one raised hand together, looking back at me with her brows aslant in mock pity. I’ve worried that my animosity toward the chemo might manifest itself more deeply, might make my body resist the work of the chemo every two weeks. So I’ve been trying not to see chemo as evil at all, but when Jody made the connection I thought, this is the acupuncturist for me.

“How about January second?” I asked her. “Do you have anything then?”

“Oh no no no no no. Too busy. Everyone wants to come have acupuncture for the New Year.”

“Oh,” I sank with the phone on the sofa. The “oh” might have even registered as a sigh, a static burst in Jody’s ear on the other end of the line. “I’ll call another time then.” I really wanted January 2 because that’s the day before chemo treatment number three, which I’ve heard was an optimum time for acupuncture.

Then Jody blurted out before I could disconnect, “What about nine in the morning?”

“On the second?”

“Yes yes yes.”

When I hustled across the parking lot this morning in my pea coat and scarf and knee-high red boots, I expected to fling back Jody’s office door to a full room. There wasn’t anyone except Jody, poised to answer her own office phone that never rang, her hands folded expectantly over the receiver in its cradle. I told her I had an appointment, that I was a little early. I thought she might need to look me up on the computer that didn’t seem to exist on the sparse desk, so I gave her my name. She nodded.

“Remind me why you’re here,” she said, sitting straight in her swivel seat, her hands on the phone, her shoulders taut under a white lab coat.

“Uh. Acupuncture?”

“For why?”

“Oh! Yeah. I’m currently undergoing chemo for breast cancer. That’s why.”

“Why are you so smiley and happy?” she asked, sitting back in the chair, her fingertips leaving the phone. “You have cancer!”

My open, silent mouth framed a circle, and somewhere in this circle, skirting the void, was that old joke of Mel Brooks’: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” The “I” and “you” in that quote seems immaterial to me. I come from a long line of morbid vaudevillian would-bes, anyway, a grandpa, for instance, who liked to say, “I don’t buy green bananas these days,” with a poke of an elbow in the nearest set of ribs. Maybe that’s why I was smiling, because this was so unfunny it was funny, because in my mind chemo is played by Carol Burnett from Annie.

Jody didn’t look like she had a sense of humor, though. Her brows were in a permanent knit as if everything in the world – from the plastic areca palm to the acupuncture pamphlet rack to the phone – was on the verge of exploding. She proceeded to tell me about some lady upstairs with breast cancer oof. Then she wanted to know my entire story, from annual visit to mammogram to biopsy to oncologist and how long they gave me to live because she was sure it was three or five years, and I was thinking, shouldn’t we get a move on before your onslaught of post-New Year patients get here? But Jody came around the desk to sit with me in the waiting room and listen.

“I’m going to live old enough to hold my friend Andrea’s teeth in a jar in the old lady home for artists. We’ve made a pact,” I explained.

And when I told her how chemo will shrink the tumor so it can be, as my surgeon says, swiftly and elegantly removed – like Sean Young from the Oscar red carpet or something – Jody reaches into my sweater to assess the lump for herself. There we sit in the waiting room. My boob in Jody’s hand. Now do you see why cancer is funny?

“Oh yes,” she says. “Good size, the lump.”

She tells me about her years practicing gynecology in China, and I learn more than I need to know about her sister’s vagina which she shapes with forefinger pressed to thumb, exactly the way that I shape a deer with antlers while playing shadow puppets with the Firecracker. All this time, they were really vaginas.

Then a half hour later Jody puts hands to knees to rise.

“Well?” she looks back at me. “Are you just here to look pretty or you want acupuncture?”

So into the apparent acupuncture room we went. No special robes. No tinkly music. A table. Something that looked like a microwave. That was it.

“Pants off. Socks off,” she said with a flip of her hand.

When I was stretched bare-legged on the table, Jody told me how I needed a second opinion. Maybe a third. Because she was convinced I needed to dispense with this whole chemo nonsense and have a full mastectomy because I was going to die in three to five years. Somehow her sister’s vagina was the reason. There was a long story, anyway, about IUDs and cancer and radiation and loose stools. “When she has to make pooh, she has to make pooh, you know?” And then, “These long legs! Your husband must love you. But get a second opinion. And a third.”

She opened a package of acupuncture needles like fumbling with a box of Mike and Ikes at the movies, an audible rip finally issuing forth. I made a point not to look at the size of them, being somewhat needle-phobic. And when she began, pushing my sweater hem up and out of the way, tapping a needle into my stomach and then turning it three times, I’m thinking, Good God, I thought this wasn’t supposed to hurt. Everything I’d read said it wasn’t. But it did when Jody drove one in. Each and every one. When she hit a nerve around my ankle, I winced and said, “That one really hurts.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s just the bad chi wanting out.”

And when she twisted it three times, it felt like all of my insides were winding tightly around it and I feared I might run out howling into the cold parking lot, half-naked and bristling with needles. She held my feet in her hands for second and asked, “Are they always so cold?” And before I could answer, she screwed a needle into the bottom of each one. “There,” she said. “Better.” She gingerly patted the tops of my curled toes and moved around to scoot something closer to the edge of her cart, some kind of box from which she unwound tiny jumper cable pinchers.

I’d researched electroacupuncture, and that wasn’t at all what I signed up for, but before I could protest, my legs were dancing by themselves on the tabletop.

“Oh, oh too much!” she said, adjusting the dials.

Then my legs danced only a little. The bottoms of my feet throbbed with tingly pops I swear I could hear.

“Good for your energy,” Jody said, bending the neck of an ultraviolet lamp to hover inches from my stomach. “Good for your digestion.”

And then she left me to answer the phone that finally rang.

Okay, I thought, this is going to be great for my energy, which is why I’m here.

And I tried not to think of the digestion part and Jody shaping her sister’s slack colon with both of her hands about twenty minutes before. Instead, as electricity sizzled down my limbs from pin to pin, I thought of Frankenstein’s monsters zapping to life in the James Whale films my friend Duke and I had just critiqued for Halloween only one month before my diagnosis, when monsters were just monsters on screen.

Thirty minutes later, Jodi returned to remove the needles and tell me again how and why I needed a second and third opinion. She made me promise her I’d do it. She made me promise I’d come back. She seemed so lonely, Jody, in her empty acupuncture office. I felt badly for making promises I was going to break.

“Get dressed,” she said, with another flip of her hand as if she knew this too, the door falling shut after her.

And when I leaned to reach for my jeans I noticed that my stomach had a sunburn splotch and she’d left two pins in — the ones in the bottoms of my feet. I’ve had two recurring panic dreams in my life. In one, I’m holding all of my own teeth and not in a jar but in bloody fistfuls. In another, I’m pulling shards out of my foot soles. At least these are slender needles, slender at their points. At least I could imagine, as I cringed to pluck one needle free, that something dark slipped loose too, loose into the room, Chemo Carol slumping over the armrest of a chair, or maybe, maybe even cancer.

I left the two needles, thick on the ends as bolts, rolling across the cart top.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 3

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Day 35: Mommie Dearest

Cynthia Hawkins — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 22:10:38 +0000

On Day 30, Joe escorted me to chemo treatment number two, and before the hook-up we visited with the oncologist who asked me about my behavior, sleep habits, and mood. “Fine,” I said. “Pretty good.”

And to Joe, she asked, “Is that right or is she kicking butts and taking names?”

“Oh yeah,” Joe said.

I slapped him on the thigh. “She means am I being really mean to everybody at home,” I told him.

“No, you’re, like, feisty with a good attitude about getting through the cancer and all. That’s what it means.”

“No it doesn’t!”

“Yes it does. Taking names. Kicking butt.”

“No!”

“Maybe she’s just a little cranky at home,” the doctor said in a kind of whisper, writing something down.

This is how my perfect record has been marred. The last oncologist visit, as I’d sat on the table for yet another breast exam, I was able to peek over her shoulder at her computer screen on which she’d written roughly one-hundred and fifty words about me. Not really about the diagnosis, but about me as a person. Cynthia is a very nice and funny person, it began. It mentioned the Firecracker and Hannah and their ages. A little something about them too. One full of energy, the other, sensitive. It mentioned that I teach creative writing. But mostly, it said I was a very nice and funny person. Now it probably says I am the Day One Monster and counting.

“You totally misunderstood what she was asking you,” I said.

“No, like you’re kicking butt and taking names.” He put his fists up this time to demonstrate. “She is,” he said to the doctor.

“I am not! Maybe I’ll take your name down and kick your butt.”

“Sometimes,” the oncologist said with a nervous laugh, “people can really change during treatment.”

“The thing is, I’m not really changing,” I said.

But just a few days before this visit, when I was driving back alone at night from picking up a stack of exams others had been so kind to proctor for me, an impossible traffic jam materialized on an entrance ramp to the highway I needed access to. So I kept going on the highway I was already on, thinking of exiting elsewhere to take the long way home. This is the way I used to drive, last semester, to pick up the Firecracker from school. For a few seconds, it felt like that was where I was heading, to that old life when everything was just fine. And I started to cry, sitting at the light, bald-headed, listening to “Thunderstruck” on the rock station because ten miles back I’d decided the bald head required rock music. This road was under construction, squeezed down to one lane, but it took me past the Incarnate Word University Christmas lights display. So I sat waiting at the intersection, staring up into the mess of oak branches dotted with lights.

The first chemo went fine, and I’d rebounded fairly well according to the lab results, but this second round of chemo swallowed me whole. I dragged myself around in the belly of the chemo fog, straining to open my eyes, forgetting to take a nausea pill on time. I curled up in bed, watching The Returned, the French series in which the dead wander back into their idyllic village, as they were, as if they’d never left. I sat wearing the new satin turban the oncologist gave me, calling down the long hallway for things like refills of my glass of water or the next pill or a “smidgen of a milkshake” or “toast with butter cut on the diagonal!” And after I asked Joe to make sure the knob on the toaster was turned just slightly past the first setting, he said I looked like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest:

After sleeping all afternoon on Day 31, I found myself at a family Christmas party in a new sweater and the wig. “Do you like my wig? Does it look real?” I asked everyone. I have this thing about the wig. I feel like I have to mention it just as I would surely have to mention an armful of capuchin monkeys if I’d walked in with an armful of capuchin monkeys. And maybe I did walk in holding monkeys. I can’t really tell you. All I really remember is that the Firecracker got a toy fairy stuck in her hair and that during a behind-the-back origami sort of game my big sister accidentally shaped a penis out of paper instead of a Christmas tree.

By Day 33 I thought I was dying. No, not dying. Worse than that. Undead, trapped in the ethereal cotton of an Enya song. Unable to move with ease. Unable to swallow a piece of bread. Unable to open my eyes wider than stoner slits. I started to fear that the rest of my sixteen weeks of treatment would be just like this. I left slurred messages for the oncologist’s nurse stating as much. All the while Joe was bustling between work and home, bringing me prescription refills, taking the Firecracker along with him, buying me the Raisin Bran Crunch and milk I’d decided I had to have and then couldn’t swallow either. And some time around four in the afternoon, when my cousin and her husband brought their baby to visit, the fog cleared. Poof! And I was back amongst the living. I’d returned. Just in time to straighten my wig and hug my cousin at the door. “What do you think? Does it look real?”

I’d returned, and I decided I had to change, really change, before the next chemo treatment hits just as hard. Through a mutual friend (the wonderful Kimberly Wetherell of Spirited Bakery), I’d just met Terri Eickel, a cancer survivor who keeps a truly informative blog at Tiny But Mighty Beats Cancer. So I started here in my panic for a little guidance, and by Day 34, Christmas Eve, I found a yoga workout to follow at home and got info on scheduling acupuncture appointments and drank green tea and read Life Over Cancer and vowed to go full vegan and listened to guided meditation for fifteen minutes that suggested I imagine my white cells rising up like an army. I imagined an army of Tolkien’s orcs, and I’m not sure what that means. Other than I might be nerdier than the regular cancer patient. And a tad bit evil.

Then other good things happened. Joe victoriously poached the perfect egg for himself, texting me this picture of his breakfast from the kitchen:

He read the Firecracker her new bedtime book, which, as one friend put it, means we “can never be sad about anything ever again, knowing this video exists in the world.” (Seriously. Follow the link.) And after I’d sneaked the kids’ presents down the hallway and arranged them under the gloriously lit tree, sans wig or satin turban, Joe ran a hand over my sparsely stubbled head in the kitchen and said how glad he was to see that I was back, “taking names and kicking butt.”