another update, another love letter, and a sad epilogue.

my mamaw moore taught me how to pose for the camera: one hand on a hip, one foot pointed at the camera, and one pointed to the distance. me and my first paycheck in 1981.

i’m three weeks into my immunotherapy and it’s clearly working because it’s kicking my ass. maybe too well. i was having a lot of side effects.  i’d never been so tired and no amount of sleep helped. my back was hurting like someone was stabbing me with an ice pick. it was giving me some form of colitis. the colitis was the most worrisome for my dr, so he started me on a heroic dose of prednisone (100mg a day) and an antibiotic. it seems counterintuitive that the steroid, which dampens the immune response doesn’t seem to lessen the cancer fighting abilities of the immunotherapy that ramps up the immune system.  go figure, but that’s what the clinical studies say. the bummer bit is that now i have to delay my next infusion until after i’m on a lower dose of the prednisone. i’ll know more about that when i see my medical oncologist on monday.

last friday i got another mri. i sort of wish they wouldn’t give you the raw results from the radiologist without the interpretation from the radiation oncologist. most of the tumors are about the same, some are a little smaller, some are a little bigger, and there is one new small tumor.  we’ll see the radiation oncologist on friday to get a better idea of what that all means.  in the meantime, here’s an anecdote from the medical oncologist. he had a patient in a similar situation as mine who came in complaining of headaches and they found one big brain melanoma and several smaller ones. the patient decided they only wanted to do the immunotherapy, no craniotomy, no gamma knife, no chemo, just immunotherapy.  after their second treatment, they began to have unmanageable headaches and an mri showed that the big tumor had gotten much bigger. the patient decided to have a craniotomy. when the pathologist tested the tumor, they found it was completely dead and the increase in size was due to the swelling caused by the immune system doing it’s job. the point of all that is that when you’re on the immunotherapy, just because the tumor may appear bigger, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s still growing, it could be in its death throes. as for that extra tumor, it looks like it popped into existence in the couple of weeks between the gamma knife and the start of the immunotherapy. the medical oncologist has pointed out numerous times, when it comes to the immunotherapy, it could be two tumors or twenty; the immune system can’t count and it will get them all.

i’m still confident and positive about the treatments and still avoiding the fear, anxiety, and depression.

i’ve had two uncontrollable crying jags in the past two months since my diagnosis.  the first one was tears of joy from hearing from an old family friend and the second was last week and caused by self inflicted anxiety.

last week i made a dumb mistake and started to spin out and beat myself up about it. it wasn’t a big deal, but that’s how anxiety works, making mountains out of mole hills. carol sweetly talked me off the mountain and after i got down, i really felt the difference in the air. back when that er doctor walked in and i saw the big white spot in my brain on his ipad, i didn’t consciously put away my fear, anxiety, and depression, but something inside me did. something inside me knew that this would be infinitely harder if i didn’t let go of all of that.  before i had left the er, i was hearing “when the levee breaks” in my head.  “when the levee breaks / crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good / when the levee breaks / mama you gotta move”.

don’t clutch you pearls, y’all, even as an atheist, i understand the power of love and prayer.  i wouldn’t be able to get thru this without the love of carol, or my logical and biological families, or my friends near and far.  i wouldn’t be able to get thru this without all the  thoughts and prayers, and vibes, and juju, and spells coming my way on the daily and i am so thankful to receive every one of them whether silent or not.  but when the levee breaks, the thing that really counts is action.

the other crying jag was tears of joy after getting a call from a guy i used to work for.  saying it that way seems so crass, because bill smith means so much more to me than that and working on his and his father garnet’s farms is one of the highlights of my life. my older brothers worked for bill and his family when they were in middle and high school in the 70s. i worked for bill when i was in middle and high school too, in the 80s. my mom even did a stint in the stripping room back in the early 70s (mind out of the gutter y’all, stripping *tobacco*). it was a real family affair.

working on the farm took a lot of dedication and effort.  in the summer it was long hot humid shirtless days (get your fucking skin checked) and in the winter it was dry and cold to the bone.  there was pitching hay, and milking cows, and shoveling shit, and running from bulls, and pulling tobacco, and planting tobacco, and topping tobacco, and cutting tobacco, and housing tobacco, and bulking tobacco, and stripping tobacco and every bit of that was the hardest shit i’ve ever done.  bill and garnet paid well and their wives, stephanie and mary elizabeth, made the most palatial dinners you can imagine (in the country, lunch is called dinner, and dinner is called supper, don’t ask me man, i don’t know). gallons of sweet tea, meats and vegetables of every kind, right off the farm; on special occasions, like bringing a crop in, we’d even get homemade ice cream.  more than once i figured all the hard work would be worth just the dinners alone (i’m not stupid though).  i hated when bill’s mom would make cushaw, though, that shit can go fuck itself.

bill is legendary in henry county, known for feats of strength and being tough as nails and the friendliest guy you could possibly meet.  we would pile wagons high with hay bales and challenge him to chuck an alfalfa bale over it and he never failed.  after he graduated high school, he went back to help coach the football team and played without pads against the kids and blew them away.  we were pitching hay once. i was up in the top of the barn and saw bill slip and bust his head on the tongue of the wagon; he was knocked out cold.  in the 5 seconds it took me to get down out of the barn he was already back up on the wagon, bleeding and chucking bales into the barn saying we needed to get going because we had more barns to fill.  he got his jaw crushed by an errant throw at a church league softball game and had to get his jaw wired up and still didn’t miss milking his cows. i saw him get kicked by milk cows more than once and he never once flinched or even cursed.

a couple years after my brother ricky died, i pretty much lost touch with bill like i did with most of henry county when i left home and tried not to look back.  he was one of the few that i needed to talk to, though.  i needed to tell him what he meant to me. sometimes i’d see him at ball game or a graduation and the time just never felt right until so many years had gone by that it was just too embarrassing.

and then a couple of days after my craniotomy, out of the blue, i got a call from bill. we hadn’t spoken on the phone for close to 30 years, but his voice was distinctive and clear as a bell and he talked fast. we had a two hour conversation in 20 minutes. he asked me how i was doing and was in disbelief that i sounded so good and upbeat so soon after my surgery. he asked if i would mind if he put me on the prayer circle at his church and i told him i’d take every bit of good will i could find.  especially from him and his fellow parishioners at the relatively small and liberal berea christian church, led by a woman pastor, in the heart of henry county. we reminisced and told some stories and i figured now was my chance to finally tell him what his friendship and guidance has meant to me.  that he was among a small handful of people that made me the man i am today.  that i watched my family work hard, but it was bill who showed me how to put in a truly hard days work and what it meant to be dedicated to craft.  that every raise and professional accolade i ever received were a direct reflection upon him. that the example he set for me, that you don’t just pull your weight on the farm, you pull all the weight you can, and then some, had served me so well in every aspect of my life. how he had helped me while my dad was in prison.  how he helped keep me from despair after ricky died.  it felt so good to say these things out loud. we told a couple more stories, and while saying our goodbyes, he told me i am farmer strong and that i can beat this cancer.  after we hung up, i ran straight to my bed, buried my face in my pillow, and cried hella tears.  i let go of more repressed tears about ricky.  i cried joyful tears about the  friend i have in bill. it felt like i had gotten a call from batman and remembered that, at least for a little while, i was robin.  no matter how far i’ve run, the blood of henry county pumps through my veins and i will beat this shit.

cute epilogue: i was helping pull plants once in grade school. i was bundling a bunch up and dropped them, spilling them all over the ground and i let out out a loud “DAMN IT”. bill quietly came over to me, yanked on my shirt and, with a stern voice and a hint of a smile in his eye, said “don’t you curse in front of these women!”

sad epilogue: on december 8th, 1986, after an evening of bulking tobacco, my coworker todd and i dropped by garnet’s house to pick up our paychecks and grab a glass of sweet tea. garnet’s wife, mary elizabeth almost always had the police scanner running in her kitchen and today was no different.  while she was writing out our checks, the scanner squawked to life, mentioning a shooting that had occurred in tuner’s station, a town on the other side of the county, about 15 miles away from bethlehem, and where my brother ricky lived. it went on to mention the name of my sister-in-law’s grand father as the owner of the house where the shooting had occurred. the same house that my brother and his wife leanne had bought about a year before.  i said “that’s rick’s house”! todd drove us the two miles to my house breaking every known law of physics.  i ran in the back door, mom was in the kitchen making dinner, pop and my older brother dennis were in the living room putting up the x-mas tree; which ricky and i had agreed to do the night before and i remember being mad for a second that they had started without us. i grabbed the phone and frantically called ricky’s phone number.  i was so nervous i had to try three times. each time mom was asking me what was wrong, who was i calling, terror building in her voice.  finally i got thru and leanne’s dad, bobby, answered the phone. i asked him what was going on and all he would say was “lance put your dad on the line.” i kept pressing him and he kept deferring. i told pop that bobby malin needed to talk to him.  mom was standing by the stove with one hand over her heart and the other covering her mouth. pop got on the line and i went over and hugged mom. pop went white as a ghost and slumped into his kitchen chair.  mom kept asking me what was going on.  i was hugging her tighter than i ever had. pop laid the phone down, didn’t bother to hang it up. that’s when he told us that ricky was dead.  i’d been listening to my mom cuss like a sailor for my entire life and that was the first time i ever cursed in her front of her. while still hugging her, we were really holding each other up at that point, i let out the quietest “fuck” right in her ear. she pulled me close and echoed that quiet “fuck” right back to me. the rest of that evening was just a blur of disbelief and uncontrollable tears and quiet fucks.  to this day i can’t stand to be near a police scanner.

it has always been adventure.