November 3, 2006

I am still awaiting the response as to whether I will get into the Journalism school here at CU, but thought I'd post my final essay in the mean time. Many many thanks to SharQ for the suggestions, they were most excellent. Here's the final copy:

Writing is a long standing passion of mine that brings both substance and meaning to my life. My writing became digital four years ago when I first contributed to the everything2.com website. Under the username “dmandave” I slowly began to gain recognition through posting my nonfiction writing. I soon realized that to establish oneself as a writer you simply must toil and tear apart your existing work and reinvent it into something better. With this in mind I began to change. Throughout this development I began also to read hundreds of works from others within the community. At this stage I came across a submission from the user, “iceowl” entitled Things nobody tells you about the south pole. It documents how the physical marker for the southernmost point occasionally gets stolen. Specifically,

“It is not illegal to steal the south pole. However, in stealing the south pole one would inevitably incur the wrath of the local scientists and support workers, known affectionately as polies. And nobody fucks with polies. Here's why.

Polies don't behave like people fearful of scrutiny. They start out normal as all humans do, but they undergo a transformation few humans will ever have to endure in their lifetime.”

I’ve wanted to experience this very transformation ever since. I got a taste last summer in the frozen lands of Patagonia where skiing and climbing provided me with a sense of inner-calm. This summer I experienced the same feelings while exploring the 14,000 foot mountains surrounding my home. With each new experience, I feel a growing desire to abandon all that I love and face a new challenge of survival and, more importantly, to write about it. Although I have never met nor even made contact with iceowl, I revere him immensely and want to follow in his frozen footsteps. After extensively documenting his journey south, a follow-up, entitled simply, Other things nobody tells you about the south pole, was posted. Within it is an attempt to objectively answer the question of how one goes about surviving at the Pole Station. The most apt reply was exemplified through the simple act of digging a trench:

“The location was about a 1/4 mile from the station. The temp was about -45F. I went out and started digging. I was in full ECW regalia. Everything from hyper-insulated bunny boots to two pairs of gloves and four layers of poly pro. When the Polie science tech arrived, he observed what I was doing and pitched in to help. Between the two of us, the job was done in a flash. As I finished he sauntered away and I noticed he was wearing street shoes. Worn-in, black loafers. Leather. Flat heels. Sides and heel of the shoe broken-in to the point the leather had the consistency of a limp towel. The man wore loafers to dig a 500' long snow trench on the polar plateau. I said, ‘Neil. You're wearing loafers. You're going to get frostbite.’ He smiled and said, ‘Yeah.’ He's still down there.”

In the past, I considered writing to be something that I’d use as a tool within another career – a means to an end. But now, after being inspired by the stories of iceowl, I see writing as a career unto itself. I undergo experiences to write, not the other way around. Iceowl, to me, is the ideal journalist, one who writes on their own terms and for their own satisfaction. With each new experience comes an opportunity to share it, and if you share it particularly well it becomes much more than just a diary entry and is instead respected as a journalistic piece. Starting out, I know I’ll be writing stories which I won’t particularly want to, but I also know that they will only help to build the skills that are essential for the ones I do. My contributions to everything2 have enhanced my self-confidence and matured me into a more level-headed person; but my transition into becoming a journalist has only just begun. With the proper training and experience, I’ll be able to put on my loafers and share this passion.

Notes: After much debate (mainly with myself) I decided to stick with the original quotations from iceowl, including the "nobody fucks with".

Here's the old version:

I truly love to write. It’s a passion that brings relief and self-justice to my oft meaningless life. My writing was brought to digital three and a half years ago when I first logged onto the website everything2.com. Under the username dmandave I began, unsuccessfully at first, to gain recognition. What I did not realize at the time was that to establish yourself as a writer you simply must toil and tear apart your existing work and reinvent it into something better. With this in mind I began the slow yet rewarding process of change. Throughout this development I began also to read hundreds of works from others within the community. At this point I first came across a posting from the user iceowl entitled Things nobody tells you about the south pole. It documents how the physical marker for the southernmost point occasionally gets stolen, but further that,

It is not illegal to steal the south pole. However, in stealing the south pole one would inevitably incur the wrath of the local scientists and support workers, known affectionately as polies. And nobody fucks with polies.
Here's why.
Polies don't behave like people fearful of scrutiny. They start out normal as all humans do, but they undergo a transformation few humans will ever have to endure in their lifetime.

I’ve wanted to experience this very transformation ever since. I got a taste last summer in the frozen lands of Patagonia where skiing became a secondary crutch towards an end of inner-calm. This summer I felt snippets among the clouds of the 14,000 foot mountains surrounding my home. Yet with each approach I’ve been left with a deeper underlying impetus to abandon all that I love and face a new challenge of survival.

Although I have never met nor even made contact with iceowl, I revere him immensely and want to follow in his frozen footsteps. After extensively documenting his journey south a follow-up post was made entitled simply, Other things nobody tells you about the south pole. Within it an attempt is made to objectively answer the question of how one goes about achieving success through survival at the Pole Station. The most poignant answer I found was exemplified by the simple act of digging a trench:

The location was about a 1/4 mile from the station. The temp was about -45F. I went out and started digging. I was in full ECW regalia. Everything from hyper-insulated bunny boots to two pairs of gloves and four layers of poly pro.
When the Polie science tech arrived, he observed what I was doing and pitched in to help. Between the two of us, the job was done in a flash. As I finished he sauntered away and I noticed he was wearing street shoes. Worn-in, black loafers. Leather. Flat heels. Sides and heel of the shoe broken-in to the point the leather had the consistency of a limp towel. The man wore loafers to dig a 500' long snow trench on the polar plateau. I said, "Neil. You're wearing loafers. You're going to get frostbite."
He smiled and said, "Yeah."
He's still down there.

Individual stories like these make me want to be a writer. Unfortunately I’d never really considered writing as a career before having exhausted all my other options. I’ve never been too confident with others and my more personal writings and only through everything2 has this changed. Nowadays, as I’ve matured into a more inspired and level-headed person I feel as though, with the proper training, I’ll be able to share my passion.

Early in the evenin’
just about supper time,
Over by the courthouse
they’re starting to unwind.
Four kids on the corner
trying to bring you up.
Willy picks a tune out
and he blows it on the harp.

Excerpt from CCR’s fine tune “Down On The Corner”

Growing up as I did in Brooklyn, New York and within spitting distance of Manhattan, you’d think there’d be a shit load of things to do to help you pass away the time. I mean, all one had to do was hop on the subway and you’d be smack dab in the middle of all the kind of culture that you’d want. If you were into things like art there were more museums you could visit than I care to count and if you were into sports, Madison Square Garden, Yankee and Shea Stadium weren’t all that far away either. If you fancied a show, the neon lights of Broadway beckoned and if you were a history buff, there were things like the Statue of Liberty and the American Museum of Natural History to keep you occupied .

Maybe when we were kids, we took those kinda things for granted. Maybe it was because of their proximity that we thought we’d always have the chance to visit them whenever we wanted but then again, maybe we thought those kinds of ventures were reserved for things like school field trips. You know the ones I’m talking about. It’s when they crammed you into those smelly aging yellow buses whose shock absorbers had long ago seen better days and you could feel the springs in the seats jabbing away at your ass the minute you sat down.. Once you were situated and accounted for, you were then handed a box lunch that consisted of a stale sandwich made from some type of “mystery meat” and a piece of fruit that was either too ripe or not ripe enough Then the driver would fire up the engines and the stench of gasoline and exhaust fumes would hit you like a sledge hammer and off you’d go, bouncing in and out of every pothole the city had to offer.

Then again, maybe we just preferred to “hang out” instead.

I guess it was like some sort of ritual. Every night after dinner, the six or seven of us who were bonded together in friendship would gather on the corner about two or three blocks away from our own houses and plop our butts down against some wall and talk the night away. Like factory workers, we usually arrived in shifts. The first one to arrive always got the prime spot. He or she would take the high ground in the form of those blue mail boxes and keep watch waiting for the other members of our crew to arrive.

Our conversations usually revolved around the basics such how much school and our parents sucked, local sports, the latest music and for the guys, well, we talked about tits. We’d talk about which girls had ‘em and which girls didn’t and which girls were in the process of getting them. We’d talk about which girls were rumored to be giving them up and which girls weren’t and which guys were full of shit when it came to fondling them.

They were indeed, fine times.

Flash forward thirty years or so….

I’ve long since traded in those nights hanging out on the corner of the street for nights hanging out at the corner of the bar. There are some similarities though. The regulars still arrive in shifts depending on what hours that they have to work. The fortunate ones who get there early enough grab some prime real estate at the bar and wait for the others to arrive. When they do, we still talk about many of the same things we did when we were kids. It seems that while the faces might’ve changed, there’s something universal about our conversations. They’re still dominated by topics such as sports and music with a smattering of religion and politics thrown in for good measure. Instead of school teachers, people talk about their jobs and bosses. Instead of their parents, many of us talk about our kids and how tough it is to be a parent.

Funny thing, there’s no substitute for tits though. They remain a constant.

Sometimes I think to myself that maybe it’s time to cut back. Maybe it’s time to expand my horizons and go wander some local museums and art galleries. Maybe I should take in a local high school football game or some other similar kinda thing. Maybe I’ll get involved in the PTA or do some volunteer work for some kind of worthy cause. Maybe the time has come for me to get off my ass and try and save the whales or to plant trees along the side of the road.

But then again, who do I think I’m kidding?

The next round is on me.

In case you ever wondered about the reality of modern cancer treatment:
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Much less an entire day of Monty Python-esque absurdity.

I'm behind on the Write every day in November challenge - but because of an exception that I would never have called ahead of time.

I found a lump in the area of my cancer surgery this morning.

It was, oh, I don't know, approximately 7:14. Roughly. I don't remember. But immediately my brain went into overdrive.

"Kevin, do you feel this bump?"

"Yup. Feels like a gribley." (That's our household word for dust bunnies, or fuzzy sweater pills. I don't know if this is a Britishism, or peculiar to wertperch. Ask him.)

Okay, Doctor's offices open at 9 am, I'll call both, and see who can get me in first. Of course, I'm commuting to work at 9 am, so I'm driving and listening to the heinous elevator music version of "Girl from Ipanema" while on hold. Endlessly.

I finally get through, and get an appointment to see my primary care doc at 1:30. Oncologist is out of the office, since its Friday. Grumble. I leave several (many) messages for his nurse, and she gets back to me after, oh, about 4 hours. N.b. Once you've been a cancer patient, you don't have "a" doctor. You have a "team". Mine consists of the primary care doc, fist of all. We adore her, and recommend her to everyone we know. Also add in a surgeon, an oncologist, and a radiation oncologist, who Kevin and I refer to as Dr. Vulcan. It's both a play on his name and commentary on what a true geek he is.

I pretend to work, but in the back of my mind I'm making plans. Recurrence is a reality that I don’t' dwell on all that much, but it is there in the back of my mind once in a while. I'm the sort of patient who wants to know everything I possibly can - I wade through papers that are written in Doctorese, because I want to know the original sources rather than the way the medical system interprets things. Medicine is far less cut and dried than they would like us to believe.

So I've read about what would happen next if I had a recurrence. More chemotherapy, but different drugs than the last time. Possibly a clinical trial. No more radiation unless it's a distant recurrence, because I've already maxed out the amount of radiation I can have locally. (We prefer not to give you skin cancer or lung cancer in the process of trying to cure your breast cancer.)

But I was surprisingly un-emotional. The only good thing to say about having been through the most brutal regiment of cancer treatment is that I got through it. (Second only to "I'm not dead yet!") I've done it once, I know can do it again if I have to.

So I head back the Davis at 1 pm, heading to see the doctor. She talks to me for about five minutes.

Her: "Can you go the Breast Imaging Center today?"

me: "Well, I just came from there, but I can drive back."

She goes out of the room.

She comes back in, says, "Why don't you go ahead down there. I have them on the phone, I'm making the appointment right now."

Me: "Uhm, okay. But I still need the referral information for lymphedema."

Her: "No, just go now, you can call me for that later."

I'm starting to get the impression she thinks this is even more urgent than I do.

She heads back out the door, I call after her: "Should I be panicking now?"

She shouts over her shoulder as she disappears down the hallway, "No, not at all." Why am I not flooded with reassurance?

So, sigh, I hop BACK in the car to drive BACK to Sacramento. Of course, they are squeezing me in, so I get to sit around. For quite some time. The entire room full of people waiting gets treated to one side of a conversation - gotta love those cell phones. A young woman in a wheelchair is loudly telling someone about a cruise she is about to go on, they way her boyfriend talks to her and her companion dog, and whether or not she's going to sleep with him on the cruise. Loudly. I don't know whether to laugh, vomit, or take notes. Finally I can't stand it, and I interrupt her, and state that there is a sign on the door requesting that people not use cell phones in the waiting room. She gets pretty huffy, and then says, "Well, THEN I'll GO outside." First, does she not know everyone in the room was following the blow-by-blow, and second, am I to understand that I'm a philistine, because the rules don't apply to people in wheelchairs?

Anyway, in some bizarre fashion, she made my day, because the whole thing was so weird. Does she really not care that a roomful of strangers know about her to sleep with/not to sleep with dilemma?

But I digress.

So I switch from sitting in the public waiting room to the private waiting room, with all those poor nervous women getting mammograms. No one is cheerful. The Ellen (de Generis) Show was on, and again, I see so little TV that it also seems truly bizarre to me. Why is she making Sandra Bullock eat a habanero pepper? What deeper meaning does this have to an audience full of American Womanhood? My culture mystifies me.

So they FINALLY call my name. Being of course that this has all translated through several layers of medical beaurocracy, Things have gotting a wee bit scrambled. She tells me she's supposed to take a mammogram of my right breast. Having a strong grasp of the obvious, I explain that I don't HAVE a right breast. I thought they would just go ahead and do an ultrasound. She looks at me, looks at the order, goes out of the room. She comes back. Apparently she is supposed to go ahead and do the mammogram on whatever is left of my poor flesh. I then proceed to get the giggles as she attempts to do this. Imagine getting the flesh over your ribs caught in an elevator door. Several times. Now you have a decent idea of how it progressed.

Twenty minute wait. Yes, they still need to do an ultrasound. After a bit more poking and prodding, the tech finds something called a seroma - a little pocket of fluid that often happens in or near scar tissue. Nothing else. Nothing suspicious.

Now, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but remember that during the first round, every single test revealed more bad news. Not one tumor, but two. Not two lymph nodes, but several, we don't know how many. Et cetera, et cetera.

I hadn't realized how much I was assuming the worst and rolling with it, until they said, nope, nothing suspicious. That has never happened before.

So I went staggering home. I'm not dead yet!