took me on a tour of the chemo centre at the hospital, and it was a strangely upbeat place. People sat in comfy chairs, attached to the apparatus that delivered the chemicals, and read books or played board games with their visitors. The woman in charge said that in a recent survey, the chemotherapy ward had received a 100 per cent patient satisfaction rating. That’s pretty impressive for a place where people are getting various poisons pumped into their bodies in order to destroy wild, rampaging C cells. We were introduced to a man named Wilson, who, when he was admitted to hospital, had been emaciated and spitting up blood. (See, if I’d been emaciated and spitting up blood, I might not have been quite so dim-witted with my self-diagnosis.) Wilson was on his last round of chemo (he had stage IV lung cancer, like me, so he got six doses, spaced three weeks apart, also my designated course), and he looked great. He was bright-eyed and smiling, and he’d actually put on weight!
But then something happened. Not long after D-Day, I went to interview Joe Hall, in whose musical ensemble, the Continental Drift, I had played throughout much of my twenties. In those years, Joe was typically wild-eyed, and he trailed liquor and pharmaceutical effluvia in his wake. But for the past many years, he has been sober and living in Peter-borough, Ontario, where he’s raised a couple of new kids and written some wonderful songs. The local arts community had decided to honour Joe, and I was asked to interview him onstage as part of the process.
Joe was always lean, but maturity has rendered him gaunt, his face a chiaroscuro, light beaming from his eyes, shadow in the shallow of his cheeks. He was very excited about this celebration of his life, which he referred to as Putting Joe out to Pasture Day. Many local musicians were on hand, and all of the former Continental Drifters were there. Indeed, George Dobo, the original keyboardist, and his wife had been living for several months in the house directly beside Joe’s.
I would like to transcribe some of the interview for you, but in order to do so I would have to revisit the taped version, because I have very little memory of what took place. It is not so much that I was drunk or anything; the problem was that I was in some discomfort and labouring for breath. I didn’t like the sight of even small flights of stairs; five or six risers, and I was huffing and puffing. Being me, of course, I put this down to a hangover—or, at least, I was unable to distinguish hangover pain from cancer-related pain. But here’s a brief exchange:
JOE: I remember sitting in the Dominion Hotel in Vancouver, and I said to you, “We need drugs.” And you responded . . .
PAUL: We are drugs.
JOE: And that’s where the title of that song you and I wrote came from.
PAUL: Right, right. You know, I suppose I meant “our bodies are made up of chemicals . . .”
After the interview, the newly reconstituted Joe Hall and the Continental Drift played “Nos Hablos Telefonos,” one of the band’s most famous tunes. It was just like old times, except that George played the guitar, as he has for some reason abandoned the keyboards. The song was still programmed into my bass-playing fingers, since the group played it at every show we ever gave. Then I cleared off the stage, making room for J.P. Hovercraft, my bass-playing successor, and Jill said, “Come on, I’ll take you back to Toronto, and we can go to the hospital.”
Now, I don’t mean to be giving such a matter-of-fact account, but it was this little setback that put me on the real journey. At the hospital, a doctor poked a long needle into my back and drew off another three litres of fluid. I wasn’t even admitted on that occasion. I spent most of the night in emergency, then managed to convince the doctor in charge to let me loose. Not that I was developing an intense hatred of hospitals or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was reforming my opinion of them, which had previously been quite low. When Richard was in hospital, for example, I only visited on a couple of occasions (one of which he slept through), and I found the experience depressing. I even announced to some friends that, when my time came, I was going to eschew the institution, because I didn’t want to be in a hospital, and I didn’t want people to come visit me in a hospital. I think now what I was really reacting to was the fact that Richard was dying, cancer slowly draining his life force. Hospitals are pretty amazing, and the people employed there, everyone from the surgeons to the guys who pushed me down the hallways to radiology, are overworked and caring. But I managed to get sprung on that occasion, sometime around dawn, and I went back to the house on First Avenue.
Dr. Li was concerned that I’d had to have more fluid removed. The chemotherapy, she said, might well compromise my immune system, and if I had to get tapped again during the process, I was in danger of infection. Maybe, she suggested, we should deal with the fluid before starting the chemo. Dr. Li thought I should talk to Dr. Simone, the thoracic surgeon. “You could see if he’s in,” she said. “His office is just upstairs.” We—my health crew, Dorothy, Jill, and Marty, were there with me—went to the third floor, and, remarkably, Dr. Simone told us to come on in. He listened to what we had to tell him and scheduled me for a pleurodesis.
Listen, if I’m being dreadfully boring about all this, please just toss the book in a corner. I hate it when people go into detail about their surgical procedures, but I do think this one is reasonably interesting, and it’s not one I knew anything about. Indeed, I still knew very little about it long after it was done to me. But basically, after I was put under, Dr. Sim-one punched a hole through my side and stuck in a tube that would drain off the fluid. See, fluid collecting in the pleural cavity was my big problem, essentially crushing my left lung. That was the havoc my tumour was wreaking. The issue was not the fluid, because we all produce it, but the tumour not allowing me to reabsorb it. So, having drilled a hole in my side and stuck in a tube, Dr. Simone then blasted in talcum powder.
That’s my understanding of things, anyway. I have learned that doctors like to speak by analogy, and they especially like visual aids. For example, we had asked Dr. Simone why he couldn’t simply remove the tumour. He was sitting behind the desk in his office as he answered this, and he immediately scanned his desk top, seeking the means of illustration. He picked up the mouse for his computer. “Paul’s tumour isn’t like this, you know, where it can just be removed.” He then picked up the blotter pad. “It’s like this, you see. It’s thin, but spread out.” (I believe the technical term, which I first heard from Dr. Frazier, but didn’t inquire about, having had my concentration scuppered sometime around, “It’s cancer, lung cancer . . . ,” is “sessile.” Mosslike.) When explaining the pleurodesis, Dr. Frazier found nothing suitable on his desk top, so instead he rubbed the palms of his hands together. “Imagine that you have two plates of glass, and you put sand in between them. At a certain point, friction would cause them to”—Dr. Simone stopped his rubbing abruptly.—“stick together.”
This is what was done to me. The procedure was successful. I knew, we all knew, that it would not hold indefinitely. But it did give me a little time to consider how best to proceed. Margit Asselstine, a woman I’ve known for a very long time, did some work on me. I’m not sure exactly what sort of work; she used her hands a great deal but tended not to touch me. Anyway, I felt much better after seeing her. And one thing she told me was, “Paul, you have a lot of health still in your body. And there’s a lot of health in the world that you can draw on.”
Yeah, I thought. I am healthy. As funny as it might sound, it occurred to me the one thing I had going for me was that I was healthy. Big and burly. I began to wonder why, exactly, I was so eager to make myself sick. Especially since the chemo was palliative. Especially if it might only buy me a couple of months. Suppose those months were February and March. Here in Ontario, that might not seem such a great gift.
Okay, thought I, let’s have a re-think. I assembled the health team. We conferred. The decision was to forgo chemotherapy, at least until I found myself in trouble. In the meantime, there were shows to play, songs to write, people to see, and places to visit. I may only have a year, I thought, but it’s going to be one hell of a year.
And
