Church with Bruce

                

                Following the general cancer survivors’ motto of “Get Busy Living,” on Friday, John and I dragged our three children to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Washington, DC. John and I had not seen the Boss in 27 years.  Last time we did: the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour, July 4, 1985, in London, at Wembley Stadium. Of course, Bruce opened that night with the song “Independence Day.” The venue was big enough that you could go down on the field and dance if you wanted to, and everybody did. Bruce played for four hours. That was our second date.  It was amazing.

                I wanted my kids to experience that.  I wanted to experience it again. My oldest kid, Sean, is going to college next year; when would we have the chance to do this again, together?

                My older kids were open-minded about going to see Bruce, but Matthew, who is nine, really and truly didn’t want to go. He would have rather gone anywhere else. He would have rather gone to the doctor for a flu shot.

                He was remembering too well being dragged, by me, for my birthday treat, to a Willie Nelson/John Mellencamp/Bob Dylan concert at a ball park in Aberdeen, Maryland, a couple years ago. That concert was awful. The Willie Nelson portion of the evening was washed out when a severe thunderstorm caused the authorities to shut the show down for a long while.  Mellencamp was okay. But when Dylan finally appeared, he clearly did not want to be there. He phoned it in. Every song sounded the same. He didn’t interact with the audience at all. The crowd was pretty much drunk, having had nothing to do during the rain delay but drink beer. It was the saddest excuse for a concert I had ever seen. And it skewed my children’s faith in my musical tastes forever.

                I promised them that Springsteen wouldn’t be like that. Really. It would be fun. They would be singing and dancing themselves before it was over, I swore.  But Matthew still begged for me to find a babysitter rather than make him go.

                “You are coming with us and you are going to enjoy it, dammit!” Hey, I know how to put everyone in a party mood.

                Needless to say, the minute we got to Nationals Park, the baseball stadium where Bruce played, Matthew came around right away. The energy was just there, and even Matthew knew it. Bruce played until midnight, and there was not a complaint or a whine the whole time. Matthew fell asleep eventually—a skill I would love to have—but he fell asleep happy.

                So, what does all this have to do with a cancer blog? Two words:  Clarence Clemons.

                Clemons, the “Big Man,” was the E Street Band’s saxophonist since, what, 1971?  He died last year, following a stroke.  If you have ever heard any of Springsteen’s more rocking songs—“Rosalita,” or “Jungleland,” or whatever, when you get to the part where there is an intense sax solo, that’s Clemons. He also played with many other artists, including Aretha Franklin and Ringo Starr and Lady Gaga.

                Clemons was a huge part of the E Street thing. If you Google Clarence Clemons images, you will find many photos of Springsteen and Clemons together. My own favorite is on the cover of the album Born to Run. On the front, you see a very young Springsteen laughing and leaning on someone.  If you see the back of the album, the rest of the photo, the person he’s leaning on is Clarence Clemons.

                So Clemons’ loss left a big, gaping hole in the E Street Band. I am looking for a metaphor here, but struggling to find one, for a loss like that. It was hard for me to imagine how Bruce would continue being Bruce without Clarence Clemons. How would he ever make the music sound right again?

                Eventually, Bruce hired Clemons’ nephew, Jake Clemons, as his new saxophonist. I was sort of afraid this would turn out to be a lame gesture. What if Jake wasn’t up to it?

                Well, he was up to it. He was there at Nationals Park with Bruce on Friday, and I can tell you, he’s great. Every time he showed his face, the crowd went nuts.  As John put it, he was channeling his uncle. At one point Bruce stopped and said to Jake, “I wrote this song before you were born!” And that was fine, because Jake was totally rocking it.

                As the evening unrolled, it became clear that it was all going to be, in part, anyway, a big, fun, rocking memorial service for Clarence Clemons.    It was like going to church. It was a big revival meeting. And the sermon was on coping with loss, great loss. It was on how you cope gracefully with loss, not with denial, but with hope.

                Of course, every person has loss of some kind to deal with. In my case, I have breast cancer. My self-help books and mental health professionals tell me I am dealing with loss right now, whether I know it or not. I am supposed to be mourning the loss of my old physical body in general and specifically, my right breast. I don’t think I am in denial when I say I do not feel like I am mourning that right now. I am not in denial. I know what I look like. It’s not so bad with clothes on. I mean, a good bra can cover a multitude of sins. But I have seen myself naked. One of my breasts is literally three inches higher than the other one, and it’s messed up. And I have the hair of a seventy-five-year old.

                But I am not mourning those losses yet.  I am still thinking we are going to fix them. The hair, I hope, will continue to slowly come back.  I will be having a bunch of plastic surgery, starting tomorrow, actually, to address the breast situation. I am cautiously optimistic there.

                No, what I feel like I am mourning is the loss of innocence about death.  I know that in theory, we all know we are going to die some day.  But I really KNOW it. I know more and more people with cancer, because of the circles I move in right now, and some of them are dying. And every time I go for one of my three-month checkups, for days afterward, any time the phone rings, I am expecting it to be the oncologist with bad news. Or, I will hear a song on the radio, and think, “That is really a great song. I wonder if Jeff would sing it at my funeral if I asked him,” and I hadn’t even been aware I was thinking about my own funeral.

                My husband said a couple days ago that I should try to think of it this way:  A couple more plastic surgeries and you’re done. It’s over.

                No, I replied. It is never really over.

                That’s the loss that has been bothering me lately. I am just tired of the knowledge of it. Knowing it could come back any time, knowing life is fleeting, wondering if the spirit lives on, pissed off that the body has to cave in so soon.

                It turned out, a Springsteen concert was the best possible place for me to be this weekend.

                Bruce always talks a lot between songs, and he had two themes going on Friday (and apparently at other concerts during this tour).  One was, broadly, “Trains,” as in, “People get ready, there’s a train a-coming,” or, “This train is bound for glory.”  The other was “Ghosts and Spirits,” and of course everyone knew the lead ghost was Clarence Clemons.

                Bruce asked the crowd what they thought, if anybody was missing anything, missing anyone, feeling the loss, and thousands of people screamed back, “YES!” So did I.

                He sang “My City of Ruins,” which I believe originally referred to 9/11. Now it was just about the loss of his dear friend:

                                Now there's tears on the pillow 
                                darling where we slept 
                                and you took my heart when you left 
                                without your sweet kiss 
                                my soul is lost, my friend 
                                Now tell me how do I begin again? 

                

                And 40,000 people sang back,

                                

                                Come on and rise up! Come on and rise up!

                

                Bruce talked about the spirits that were present with us. He came very, very close to quoting Hebrews 12:1, which goes:  “Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

                 Specifically, Bruce said, the spirits’ presence with us is to remind us of: 1) who we are; and 2) that today is beautiful and precious.

                Of course, all this led to him singing “Spirit in the Night,” and 40,000 people singing back to Bruce, line and response, like Psalms at church, at church with a fired-up black Gospel preacher:

                Bruce:  And they dance like spirits in the night

                                Forty thousand people:  All night!

                Bruce: In the night

                                Us: All night!

                Bruce:  Oh, you don't know what they can do to you, Spirits in the night

                                Us:  All night!

                Bruce:  In the night

                                Us: All night!

                Bruce:  Stand up right now and let them shoot through you!

It was all very rousing, like it should be at church, when the preacher says, “The Lord be with you,” and everyone says, “And also with you!”  Or like when my friend and minister, Rick, tries to call out to our congregation on a Sunday morning, “God is good!” And we are supposed to yell back, “All the time!”  Or, he says, “This is the day that the Lord has made!”  And we are supposed to answer, “Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” But being mostly suburban white people and Methodists, we are not very good at this sort of thing, especially first thing on a Sunday morning, when we haven’t had all our coffee yet.  It works better on a Friday night, with a lot of drums and sax and 40,000 people and beer.

                Bruce went on to talk about the ghosts not being really dead. I do believe this was the Good News, in rock form. He sang “We are Alive,” from his new album, Wrecking Ball.  It starts out with the cross of Calvary and goes on from there about death and resurrection:

                        We are alive, and though we lie alone here in the dark

                         Our souls will rise to carry the fire and light the spark

                         To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

                         

                         Let your mind rest easy, sleep well my friend

                         It's only our bodies that betray us in the end

                               

                         

                  I am afraid I am making this all sound a lot heavier than it was.  I would be giving you the wrong impression if I made you think this was all heavy. I mean, we were thousands of people singing and dancing with Springsteen to “Twist and Shout,” and such. It was not heavy. Even my jaded children were singing and dancing.  It was great. In the end, it was more fun than I can express. But it started out with heaviness and loss, and it ended up with singing and dancing. People easily say the words, “It was like a religious experience.” But isn’t this what a “religious experience” IS?

                Toward the very end of the show—in the encore—Bruce sang “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” and when he got to the part where “the Big Man joined the band,” he stopped and there was a little slideshow tribute to Clarence Clemons, with some very nice photos. It was fitting. I believe everyone was left feeling like we had honored Clemons’ memory, and acknowledged his ongoing presence with us, in the form of his spirit and his music and his nephew rocking out right there with us. You could feel both time passing and the also the cold reality of mortality, but it was okay. It was comforting. It was like church.

                Photo by Sean Roome

Doctor trifecta

                

                It’s the first week of September. Not only back to school, but back to the medical world after a summer break. This week, it was like the Triple Witching day, only with doctors instead of economists.  I got to see my plastic surgeon, my oncologist, and the woman who is administering the drug study I am in. As a bonus, I also got referrals to a geneticist and a gastroenterologist! I hit the jackpot. Still waiting for blood test results, but nobody seemed to find anything freaky.

                But, I have to go see a geneticist. Every month, they are learning more about the genetic basis of some cancers. This month, I learned that if you have the gene for cystic fibrosis, your chance of developing certain kinds of cancer goes up. Something like 1 in 23 white Americans have the gene. Guess who does?  It’s me!  We learned this when I had Matthew. Fortunately, to develop the actual illness, cystic fibrosis, you need to get two copies of that gene, one from Mom and one from Dad, and John doesn’t have it, so the kids are okay. But you only need copy one to increase your risk of cancer, so to the geneticist I will go, to see what we can do about it anyway. It sounds like the first step may be a colonoscopy, hence the gastroenterologist. Yippee.

                I will also need to go back to the OBGYN to have her check out every last female part that’s still in there. I am sorely tempted to have them all yanked out by the roots, while she’s at it. They aren’t doing anybody any good right now, anyway. All they seem to be doing is giving me hot flashes and threatening to kill me. Who needs that? It is clearer to me every day that the female body is cleverly designed to self-destruct like a Mission Impossible cassette tape the minute you stop having children. Why did that need to be the case? Major design flaw, I would say. I should watch my mouth or I will be answering to the whirlwind just now.

                I also met with my plastic surgeon about my first big reconstruction surgery, which is coming up on the 19^th. I decided last year that I am too young to go sailing into the future boobless, or with grossly mismatched boobs. So, although I have always sort of thought plastic surgery was usually silly, here I go. In about two weeks, I am going to have my temporary implant in the robo-boob replaced with a more permanent one, and the other boob, I hope, resized and relocated to match. There will be another surgery a few months after that, and if I live long enough, more surgeries down the road to replace the implant every so many years.

                Decisions, decisions.   I got to decide what sort of implant I want. Specifically, do I want one filled with saline, or one filled with silicone goo?  I instinctively wanted to avoid the silicone goo, remembering recalls of the 1980s where women got sick after silicone-filled implants leaked. But my surgeon recommended the silicone one over the saline one. The silicone one is lighter, she said.  And nowadays, they are not filled with liquid silicone, which used to leak out sometimes, but with a gel that more or less stays put. You get a hole in a saline implant, she said, and it just goes flat.  But you get a hole in a silicone-gel one, and the gel stays where it belongs. I imagined a boobload of Fix-a-Flat, but that was probably inappropriate.

                In addition, my doctor said, the silicone ones look and feel more boobular. There’s less of that waterbed-like wave action. And both types of implants are made out of silicone, so it’s not like you are avoiding sticking a bunch of silicone in your chest if you go for the saline-filled version, anyway. So, I decided, hell, she’s the doctor, and I signed up for the silicone-goo one.  Because, you know, if I am going to mess around with all this reconstruction, I am holding out for total awesomeness. A new saline-filled boob might look okay, and be perky and all that, but if it sloshes around, that’s not good enough.

                What a strange conversation it turned out to be. She asks me if, while she’s digging around in there, she can do a little bit of liposuction “here” and “here,” and she points out where. She thinks it would look nice if she does. Duh! Easy question! Suck all the lipo you want, I told her. I am already going to be unconscious. Go for it. Knock yourself out.

                The surgeon is still trying to figure out whether, on the “good,” boob, we are doing a reduction or just a “lift.” Apparently this will be a game-day decision, depending on my weight at that particular moment. Either way, there will be a scar. This sucks.  But, I had already decided that for me, it would be better to have two boobs with faded scars on them that look like they are part of the same person, than one scarred-but-perky one looming six inches above a scar-free old-lady one, sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon. Right now, my “good” (i.e., cancer-free) boob is, like, down in the tropics, while the robo-boob is up there in the taiga somewhere.  When I’m done, they are both going to be up there together somewhere in the temperate zone.

                So, I had to sign mondo release forms.  The lawyers are certainly on the case. There was no shortage of release forms. They sure don’t intend to be sued by the likes of me.

                There was a many-pages-long release form about the dangers of surgery in general.  Then, there is a risk of a phenomenon that can happen where your body builds all kinds of scar tissue around the implant and it gets hard as a rock. Or, the other extreme, the implant can shift, or sag, or disappoint in very many interesting ways. Did you know an implant can wrinkle? I can do that by myself, thank you. Did you know that they can erupt like Old Faithful? Actually that’s a lie. I totally made that up.

                But I did have to initial the paragraph where they spelled out, Hon, your breastfeeding days are over. (I can live with this.) I had to initial the place where they gave me fair warning, this might be pretty painful, and for a pretty long time. (I could have guessed this from the prescriptions they gave me for recreational-quality pain pills and Valium.) Oh, and I initialed the place where they say, if it doesn’t work out, you might need a do-over.  You might even need a do-over using spare parts cut off other parts of your own body.

                There was a whole separate waiver form for the silicone-filled implant itself. I read in great detail all the many things that can go wrong, and initialed paragraph after paragraph with gay abandon. Yeah, the silicone could leak. What if it does? I could get cancer or something. Honey Badger finds it difficult to worry a lot more than she already does.

                There was good news, too. The new implant, unlike the temporary one that’s in there now, will not have a big metal valve in it. So I won’t have to explain to the TSA every time I go on an airplane why my chest is setting off the metal detector. And I’ll be able to get an MRI!  Right now, they are strictly forbidden, because they could suck the implant right out of me in an uncontrolled way. Ouch!

                That’s good, because they want me to get an MRI next month.  As part of our plan to be vigilant about any potential recurrence of cancer, I am supposed to get a breast MRI every so often, starting ASAP. My oncologist, who saw me today, actually urged me to expedite that one. I told him I was on it as soon as they remove the metal parts from my chest so I don’t explode. That seemed reasonable to him.

                I am looking forward to that MRI. Every time I have an itch or a twinge in that “good” boob, I start fearing the worst. I imagine lumps where there aren’t any. I understand this is normal. Still, it would be great to have an “all clear,” even a temporary one.