It's Always Something (8 page)

I spent three weeks in the hospital. Though I’d had major surgery for removal of a grapefruit-sized tumor, a complete hysterectomy and a scraping of many of my internal organs, I spent the first week out of intensive care in a dreamy state of happiness. I was on a very potent painkiller called Dilaudid which kept me stoned out and calm. I remember I spent one whole day watching a lamp. I thought it was the television set. I could hear the television set in the background, but I watched the lamp and I was quite content. It never entered my mind that there was no picture and it wasn’t worth moving where my head was, so I just stared at the lamp all day. I would make phone calls to people I knew—to my childhood friend Judy, to my other good friends and to my mother and brother. I was happy and I was very eager to tell everyone I was all right. So I talked to the people closest to me during that time, and made jokes and laughed.

They weaned me off the Dilaudid, but I had an awful withdrawal. I spent two nights with sweats and chills. I became anxious, paranoid, on edge. I hated everybody. I didn’t want to make any phone calls. When the Alchemist phoned to see how I was doing, I told him I hated him and never wanted to see him again. I told my night nurse that I was mean and she should just do her job and not talk to me. I phoned Gene and told him not to come and visit me. Fortunately everyone realized that the medication was influencing my behavior. But coming off the pain medication was one of the hardest parts of the whole recuperation.

Gradually my spirit revived. I knew I had to take one step at a time to get well. I am good with strangers so when a new nurse came in, I would make her laugh and want her to like me. It was psychologically good for me to have round-the-clock nurses. I remember them, and owe a great deal to them. I don’t think they get enough credit for what they do in terms of passing spirit along. They were all concerned with me being relaxed, and all of them, of course, knew more about me than I did, from reading my charts.

One nurse would bring me relaxation tapes or the soundtrack from
Out of Africa
to listen to because I wasn’t sleeping well at night. I would be listening to the
Out of Africa
tape and pretending I was just falling asleep when suddenly I’d say, “Is this the part where Robert Redford crashes the airplane?” and she’d jump up and say, “Why aren’t you asleep?”

Another nurse had this incredible punk, spiked haircut. When you touched it you could cut yourself on the points. I decided I wanted my hair cut that way. One of my day nurses drew a picture of how it could look and the next day I got a hairdresser friend to come and cut my hair. I also asked to have a manicure and a pedicure and someone came and gave me those. Sometimes that would be the only event of the day, or a sponge bath, or getting my legs shaved, but I always had some life force, some activity, going on.

I was always hungry for news from my nurses—tell me about your life; are you dating anybody? One nurse was single and would tell me all these incredible stories of her going after guys in rock bands and having affairs in the backs of cars and good, dirty stuff like that. Another had a boyfriend who was trying to be a stand-up comic so she would tell me about her adventures going to nightclubs, trying to help him in his career. Of course, I had lots of advice in that department.

I took it all in. I wanted to know everything. Usually I would be seeing them again so I wanted to know the next installment. I was even a little happy, despite the cancer and all. I don’t know why I was happy except that I found out I have a very strong spirit, a powerful will to live. In the hospital, it never entered my mind that I wouldn’t live. I just had to take one step at a time.

Every day I would walk around my floor and put chalk marks on a blackboard at one end of the hall to note how many times I had walked around. There was an older man with stomach problems who was there the whole time I was there. He was always watching sports in his room, and I would go in and make bets on the games with him. He’d make bets on how many times I could walk around the floor. I saw that I could make the best out of the situation at hand—that I was someone who said, “This is what I have, this is my world now, so make the best out of that world.” I watched myself on “Saturday Night Live” reruns, young and alive. I looked healthy and I wanted to be that way again. I became my own audience.

Gene came every day and sneaked Sparkle in with him. He said that if anybody was going to stop him, he would say he bought her at the gift shop and she ran on batteries. So I got to see my Sparkle.

Gene would go shopping in Beverly Hills and bring me beautiful things in boxes like you would see in the old movies, with big bows on them that you could take off with one pull—like Tiffany’s. I’d just pull the string and the bow would come open and in the box would be a new nightgown or a new robe. It was joyful every time he appeared in the doorway bringing gifts and messages from the outside world. Gene became funnier than I have ever seen him. He is very funny in the movies but he’s not that funny in real life. He’s shy. He’s a comic actor as opposed to a comedian. I think I am a comedienne—a performer, an entertainer, where he is an actor. But he became very funny, telling stories around my bed, assisting the nurses like Dr. Frankenstein, holding a flashlight for intricate procedures and shaking it on purpose like he was nervous.

I became mischievous myself. I liked walking as fast as I could while Gene was pushing my IV stand, so he couldn’t keep up with me. That would make me laugh so hard. It was dumb stuff, but it would make me laugh that I could walk faster than he could push my IV bottle. The nurse couldn’t keep up with me either. The truth was, they were putting me on. Anyone could have gone faster than me. But I was just like a child. I felt like Eloise, the fictional little girl who lived at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Gene would have his dinner in the hospital with me every night. I didn’t eat for a month, but after he ate he’d lie in bed with me and we’d talk or watch TV. I would cry as easily as I’d laugh.

Sometimes I would even lie in my bed and think up things to make people laugh on purpose. Like, I’d wait till the nurse left the room—maybe she had just gone into the hall to get a coffee or get her lunch—and then I’d buzz for her and say into the intercom, “Nurse,” in the most pathetic way possible. “Nurrrsseee.” I always got them laughing that way. It was some strange form of “The Judy Miller Show”—the hyperkinetic child’s fantasy I did on “Saturday Night Live.” In this protected environment, I was still the clown, still wanting to be liked . . . to be loved . . . to be funny . . . to perform.

Late one afternoon, not quite two weeks after my surgery, I had my first appointment with Joanna Bull. Joanna was in her late forties. Her face was round and open and her blond hair was cut in a Buster Brown style. It was as though an angel had walked into my hospital room, an angel filled with life. I never saw anybody like her; I never saw anybody with so much spirit. She flew into the room, plopped herself
fearlessly
at the foot of my bed and put her arms on my legs so there was a physical contact between us. She talked to me about cancer. She was a psychotherapist who worked at a place called The Wellness Community, where she was assistant director. She counseled cancer patients all the time, and she was just sparkly. I remember her sparkling eyes. We talked about cancer, specifically about my feelings about it. I told her that I thought this ordeal was a school I was going through, that I was meant to teach and help others. She said that now it was more important to see this as an “exquisite” time to take care of myself and heal my own body. We talked about the upcoming chemotherapy. She knew I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time and she said she was assigned not to deal with my psychological problems but to help me learn to relax and to handle having cancer.

I protested that I had
had
cancer. But Joanna confronted me with the fact that you never know. She herself has a form of leukemia. She has no symptoms and it may stay in remission all of her life, or it may show up at any moment. She lives with cancer all the time. That made me trust her. I had a lot of months of treatment ahead of me. The important thing was that I learn to make that treatment work for me in the best way physically and in the best way psychologically, and to use techniques of visualization and relaxation to imagine I was helping the chemicals fight the cancer cells. She put me through a relaxation exercise so I could learn to kind of transcend my body and the feelings in it to a mental state of well-being. Then she had me do visualization throughout my body, concentrating on health and getting well. It was hard to do at first, but she came back three times a week in the hospital, then she came to my house after I was home.

Joanna would speak in a slow, even, delicious voice. I would lie there in bed and she would talk me through a series of motions, telling me to tense my body in all different areas so that I could get a sense of the difference between being tense and being relaxed. “Tighten up your toes and curl them up as hard as you can, then release them and let them go.” Then she would go through my whole body one part at a time until my entire body was relaxed. She would lead my conscious mind through other exercises—relaxation and healing, putting light in certain areas, healing light; seeing the word
relax,
seeing it far away and closer. These were drills for my conscious mind to help my body to relax. I was going down a stairway into deeper and deeper relaxation. After doing this four or five times, I began to realize this was meditation. I also found that even though I fought it, I would go into this relaxation feeling that Joanna was talking about. The sound of her voice was very soothing, and during our sessions, even if only for twenty-five minutes or half an hour, instead of being in the hospital room with tubes and doctors and stress and blood tests and X-rays, I would feel as though I had been somewhere, on a trip out of the world.

The most important thing Joanna ever said to me was, “You can’t do anything wrong when you are doing this technique. There is no wrong.” Like for a second I’d start to think about something else, or a thought would shoot into my mind like,
Is the dog getting her bath today?—
that was okay. It didn’t mean I had ruined it—it didn’t mean it wasn’t working. If I wanted to stop in the middle and say, “Look, I feel too edgy—this isn’t working right at this minute”—that was okay. Joanna said, “There is no wrong; you find what works for you.” When she gave relaxation no rules, she made it possible for me to keep trying. “If you lose track and go off into thinking about something else, bring yourself back. That is part of the exercise. Bring yourself back to relaxation.” This was the most freeing thing to me, that there was no right or wrong.

Because my life was always stressful, a lot of people had told me that I should meditate. I thought meditation was some weird Indian yogi thing, and the only yogi I ever knew was somebody who could put a rope through his nose and make it come out his bum. I thought that was interesting but not something I wanted to do. I had heard about mantras and all that, but all I could think of was I would have to take my contact lenses out to do that because I can’t keep my eyes closed that long with them in; they start to hurt. It’s hard enough to put them in in the morning without taking them out for forty-five minutes and then putting them back in. So, instead, I continued with my stressful life.

But Joanna told me right away that, in order to participate in battling cancer and to help the chemotherapy work, it’s very important to be relaxed and to have times of relaxation when your mind can let your body go so that it can work on healing itself. She also told me that there are techniques of visualizing the healing, visualizing the chemicals going into your body and working to fight the cancer cells. And if you visualize the cancer cells and see them as evil and visualize them being removed from your body, you are supporting the actual process.

What I didn’t know during this time in the hospital was that I didn’t have just ovarian cancer. It had spread to my bowel and my liver, but the cells hadn’t eaten into those organs. They were just lying on top of those organs, so the doctors had removed all the cancer they could see. The internist told Gene that I had only a twenty-percent chance of survival and that they would not know until I was two months into chemotherapy whether or not I would survive. It depended entirely on whether I responded to this particular chemotherapy. Gene, of course, never told me, but he was carrying that information all the time behind his smiling face. Not surviving never entered my head at all. Even today I feel so awful for Gene that he was carrying that load and he couldn’t let on to me.

The Alchemist wanted to begin my chemotherapy as quickly as possible. Ovarian cancer is often extremely fast-growing. It’s very insidious. All of a woman’s major organs are down there in the same cavity, so even though the primary location of the cancer was the ovary, it was jumping onto the other organs. The surgeons thought they had removed all the cancer cells, but there could be microscopic cancer cells that couldn’t be seen with the human eye. That is why they needed to do chemotherapy as soon as possible, before the cells could spread.

On November 11, I lay on my hospital bed like a Muppet and received my first chemotherapy. I tried to do my meditation, to relax as Joanna had taught me, but soon I was heavily medicated into a deep sleep while the drugs were dripped into my IV Port-A-Cath. It seemed like just another of the many procedures that had been done to me. I wasn’t sick; I was just asleep. I woke up thirty-six hours later, weird and wired, and went home.

During my entire stay in the hospital I had not once seen my reflection. There was no mirror, except in the bathroom, but it was so much work to get to the bathroom that I didn’t bother to stand and look in the mirror. When I went home, I saw myself reflected in my own mirror in my own room. A horror came over me—total horror—because I weighed ninety-five pounds. I had no rear end at all. I couldn’t sit in the bathtub. I had to put a towel down because the bones would stick out and hit the bottom. There were huge circles under my eyes and I was as thin as anyone you ever saw in documentary footage of Auschwitz. I looked like I was going to die. It was the first time I was frightened. It was the first time I actually feared what might happen to me—what
was
happening to me. Who was that person in that mirror? Whose image was reflected? This is a nightmare. Why me? This is
cancer!
I am only forty years old, and I could die.