It's Always Something (18 page)

It kept repeating, “Why are you waiting? Why are you waiting?”

Five minutes later, when the honking started, I realized the light was a blinking red light and I was supposed to stop and then go through. There was a long line of drivers all pissed off behind me and they all began to pass me ferociously, giving me the finger through their sun roofs.

I screamed in my car, “Why am I waiting? I’ll tell you why I’m waiting. Because I am going through cancer and I am having chemotherapy and because I have so much on my mind and because I shouldn’t be driving probably, I have no right to be on the street but I want to be independent and not a victim.”

Later that day at The Wellness Community meeting, a lady was talking about her struggle with cancer, and she said, “Look, nobody knows when somebody is going to die. You could get hit by a car.”

I yelled back, “Yeah, and it’ll probably be me driving.”

Glorious laughter.

Actually, between chemos seven and eight, I totaled Gene’s car at an intersection in Santa Monica. I stopped. I looked both ways. I entered the intersection at three miles an hour and almost in slow motion I was colliding with the cutest blue-eyed guy in a Triumph convertible. I turned into Imogene Coca and Lucille Ball. I kept repeating, “My husband’s gonna kill me.”

The guy recognized me and said he knew who my husband was and he thought he probably wouldn’t kill me. Gene’s car looked like an accordion. As I pulled away from the accident scene, the hood flew up over the windshield, totally blocking my vision. A gas station attendant helped me tie the hood down and I crept home in what looked like a circus vehicle. Gene didn’t kill me. He was just happy I was all right (but he did get very quiet for the two months he drove the rental car while his car was being repaired). When I called the young guy with the Triumph to exchange insurance information, he’d changed his answering machine message to his impersonation of Roseanne Roseannadanna ranting about car accidents, and ending with, “It’s always something.”

He made me laugh.

Finally, my last chemotherapy day arrived. It would be safe for people to drive in Los Angeles again and the new “take-charge Gilda” was going to capture this one on tape.

On the big day, May 9, 1987, I met a friend for lunch because I knew there would be ten days of me not having my proper taste buds and not enjoying food. So my girlfriend and her husband and I had a nice lunch, and they worked on keeping my mind off what was coming up. I also had to drink a quart and a half of Gatorade that day from noon on so that I could flush out my kidneys. I will never drink Gatorade again, and I intend to dump Gatorade on Jodi’s head when this is all over and we’ve won.

At about three-thirty I went home and packed all my stuff to go to the hospital. Gene came home and set to work making sure the video camera was all prepared and the batteries were charged. We grabbed my overnight stuff and the umbrella with the shoes hanging on it and Sparkle and left for the hospital. I didn’t cry. I usually did because I would rather have been going to the airport to get on a plane to go to France or going anyplace other than the hospital, but I had to go through with it. I always went back to the same room at the hospital. There was a familiarity to the whole procedure.

Immediately I had to give up my walking freedom and put on that dumb hospital gown and get hooked up to the IV machine which would continue to flush out my kidneys and hydrate me. Suddenly I thought I was like Howard Hughes in his final days. Without my turban, almost bald, I imagined that I looked like a little old man. I brought three pairs of funny slippers—ones that looked like puffy running shoes, my ballet shoes with watermelons on them, and the pair I bought in England that only grannies wear and cost a dollar. This was all to make the night nurse laugh. Can you imagine me trying to entertain the person in the room when I am asleep? Gene opened up the video camera, got it all set up and realized he’d forgotten to bring a tape. I couldn’t believe it. Here we had all the equipment and the battery charged and everything—the cast and the crew and the set and the props—and
no film.
It turned out that there was a security guard working in the hospital who had a tape that he had a couple of movies on, but he had seen the movies and he sold us the tape.

Gene videotaped the room, videotaped Jodi setting things up, videotaped me sitting on the bed. When someone came in to take my blood, Gene videotaped him. We all loved it. It was like a show. We were part of the documentary of the final chemotherapy.

My gynecological oncologist came in and Gene got lots of footage of me just talking to him and asking him the same questions that I asked him every time I saw him. The answers calmed me down and gave me peace of mind. He did talk more about future treatments than he had ever done before, and what would happen when I had my second-look surgery, where they would go inside and do biopsies to see if there was any cancer left. He talked about putting a catheter in my stomach so they could do water washes for the next six months or a year to see if I sloughed off any cancer cells—just another mechanism to check to see if there is a recurrence. I hated the idea of it, but I also saw the value in having one more diagnostic tool.

If we got boring, Gene would go to the dog. Sparkle would be walking around or eating from her bowl. My regular gynecologist came to visit me and we videotaped him. Then it was time for Gene to go home. The evening went really fast because there was so much visiting and so much talking. Gene went home around ten-thirty or quarter to eleven. That was a wrap for the night. Jodi would take over filming the next day.

I lay in my bed. The fun part was over. I tried to be calm. My last chemotherapy. It had once seemed so far away, and now it was here. Bonnie was my night nurse, the same nurse who had been with me the first night I stayed in the hospital over seven months before. She brought me crystals, which she knows a lot about. She left the bag of stones with me so I could go through each one and feel it and look at it in the light.

Bonnie is a registered nurse. She does all the traditional medical duties that her job calls for, but she also believes in the spirit and its healing power. She says she has learned a lot from seeing how well I got after I had been so sick. She has begun to believe in the healing power of scientifically researched medical treatment in combination with spiritual enlightenment and belief.

I, too, have come to believe in both. I know how important those chemicals are to my survival, and yet holding those healing stones got me through that moment. I had started to wear crystals around my neck as reminders of the body’s and the spirit’s desire and capacity to be well.

Bonnie gave me a sleeping pill at about midnight and then she put in the catheter so I wouldn’t have to get up to pee. But I went into tension and never slept the whole night. I just lay there trying to fall asleep and trying visualization, trying to find something to calm me. I thought of everyone at The Wellness Community. I thought about Joanna, Sparkle, Gene, anything to latch onto for peace of mind. I was just too anxious. Bonnie came in and gave me another half of a pill to put me to sleep.

Before I knew it, it was 6:00
A.M
. There were Jodi and Bonnie, hanging bags of chemicals on the IV pole. The first thing they had to do was shoot the steroids into my system. I was suddenly so wide awake that they made me take my three and a half sleeping pills and the Benadryl to go to sleep.

I said, “Don’t start the steroids, I’m not asleep”—still trying to control the situation from my helpless position. As soon as the steroids went into the IV, I could feel my whole body go hot. It was such an awful, weird feeling that I pleaded, “Wait till I am asleep. Wait till I am asleep.”

I felt the heat go through my body, and that is the last thing I remember. The sleeping pills started to work and I fell sound asleep.

This is what I saw later on tape:

Gene coming down the hall with Sparkle in a tote bag, hiding the dog from other people in the hospital. Then coming in the room. It’s about 6:00
P.M
. I see me lying there—I look a little like Bruce Willis. My hair is starting to grow in every which way and I am asleep and you just see my head with all the covers all around me. Gene puts Sparkle down on the bed and Sparkle runs and kisses my face and I wake up. Then I see Gene and he kisses me and I kiss Sparkle and they set up my tray table and they bring me something to eat. I murmur something and try to take a bite of the food and fall promptly back to sleep. There is a jump cut.

The Alchemist comes in. He talks to me—I kind of mumble and don’t wake up. So he yells, “Did you see the hearing doctor?” He asks me questions while I am asleep. He says again, “Did you have your hearing checked this week, Gilda?” He has a whole loud conversation with me about my hearing. I whine and whimper, “Go away, leave me alone, let me sleep.”

The picture fades to black.

Jodi spent twelve hours with me sound asleep. I guess she got bored because she went and got paper from the nurses’ station on the floor and started writing things in Magic Marker and putting them near my head and videotaping them. They were like the balloons in cartoons. She got compulsive about it so you see me lying there, sound asleep—so pathetic—and there are note cards saying, “I wonder when Gene and Sparkle are going to come.” Or, “Oh, I am so happy this is my last chemotherapy.” Some of the thoughts are quite long, like, “I’m really handling this well. Here I have gone through all this and I am doing a great job.” It’s the same positive attitude that Jodi had been injecting in me since she had gotten the assignment to take care of me. Meanwhile I was just lying there, not even changing positions.

Jump cut—the umbrella with shoes hanging from it is over my head. Jump cut—there are roses all around my head like a wreath on a horse. Jump cut—this horrible Chinese china dog that was always on the coffee table in the room is now sitting on my pillow. It looks just as stupid on my pillow as it did on the coffee table. Jump cut—the gynecological surgeon comes in. He is an angel and we always joke about him because he wears clogs. He is sitting in the chair and you can’t believe how panicked he is to be on camera. You begin to wonder how you can let someone operate on you if he can be this nervous. Jodi pans down his body and takes a picture of his feet so you can see his clogs. Jump cut—it’s Jodi holding the video camera, looking into the bathroom mirror and holding a sign that says: “This is Gilda’s nurse videotaping this.”

Two days later, Jodi and I watched the tape. I found it hysterical. Of course it is terribly out of focus and too dark and slow and boring for anyone to watch who isn’t the sleeping, balding star. But Jodi and Gene did a magnificent job and everyone at The Wellness Community loved hearing about it.

In May of 1987, my chemos were complete. Six months of cisplatin and Cytoxan had left me very tired. The last chemo wore me out more than any of the other ones. I felt the toll of the constant assault on my body. I felt more side effects than ever and felt clammy for a long time. For the first time I felt like my skin was hanging on my bones. My chest felt heavy and my breathing was short. My feet were totally numb now so that sometimes I felt like I was going to tip over because I wasn’t standing on anything. My hands were so numb that I had difficulty writing. The doctors said the numbness would gradually disappear. I threw myself a party to celebrate the end of chemotherapy and midway through the party I was so exhausted I wished everyone would go home. I had a month to go before my second-look surgery.

It seemed that now more than ever my brain filled with anxieties. When chemotherapy is ongoing, you feel like you’re doing something about the cancer. When it’s finished, you wonder if the cancer is getting away with anything.

At The Wellness Community the next Friday afternoon, somebody stood up and said that in the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” even though it says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death,” that’s no reason to buy a condominium there. I thought that was the funniest joke I’d ever heard. I decided to take action against my own brain. I made up this chant that I could think over and over again so that I wouldn’t think of something else. It was just so I’d have these words to think so that the cancer thoughts couldn’t get in. I suppose it’s like Buddhist chanting, just to close out the mind to other thoughts, but the Gilda version of it.

I started to say to myself, “I am well,” because I wanted to be well. And then—for an insecure comedienne this was very difficult to say, but I put it in—“I am wonderful.” I was embarrassed about it even though no one else was hearing it. Every time I said the word
wonderful,
I would smile. I knew that smiling a lot helps fight disease. And finally I would say, “I am cancer-free,” because that was my goal—the ultimate situation to achieve. So if I woke up in the night and I was scared, or if my thoughts were negative during the day, I would just say, “I am well, I am wonderful, I am cancer-free.” It would help me fall back asleep at night if I woke up. I repeated it over and over while I swam in the pool. I spoke it out loud in my car. Those words just happened to work for me. It sounded like a slogan from an advertising company, but it gave me peace of mind.

My friend from The Wellness Community who is my age and also has ovarian cancer was having her second-look surgery just a few days before mine. She was filled with anxiety. We had an emergency lunch to discuss fear and on the way there in the car I extended my chant into a song.

I am well.

I am wonderful.

I am cancer-free.

No little cancer cell is hiding inside of me.

But if some little cancer cell is sneakily holding on, I’ll bash and beat its fucking head and smash it till it’s gone.

W
ouldn’t you know that I would have the kind of cancer where they have to open you up again? With most cancers, you go through your course of chemo and then you just have to believe that it worked and killed all the cancer cells. I had to have an opening, a second opening, a big show, where they could look in and see, putting a whole lot of opening-night pressure on a very tired Gilda. My friend Helen at The Wellness Community said to me that she was sure that when they opened me up for my second surgery they would find a beautiful restaurant with no cancer cells eating there, that my visualizations would have turned the whole peritoneal cavity into Lutèce.