pet scans, infusions, and steely dan
last wednesday i got my baseline pet scan and last friday i got my first immunotherapy infusion. no issues at all with the infusion, but they said it could take up to a week for the fatigue to set in, if at all. either way, i am all jacked up on the juice and my little immuno army is on the hunt. along the way, i had a spectacular view of portland and i read about and listened to steely dan.
i spent some time with my oncologist while he interpreted the results of my pet scan and patiently answered my myriad of questions. the pet scan showed that the spots on my lung and liver are indeed cancer; bummer, but no real surprise there. it also showed a small spot on my pancreas. he explained to me that that spot would present very differently if it were pancreatic cancer and that the odds of me having two different cancers are exceedingly low. the good (my term) / neutral (his term) news is that none of the brain tumors lit up in the pet scan; meaning marsellus wallace and his gamma knife did a good job of getting medieval on some brain tumors. another mri is required to get a good view of them, though.
by saturday evening, i was stupendously tired and got in bed at the unthinkable time of 8:45 pm and slept a solid 12 hours and i’m still hella tired by tuesday. go little army, go!
that’s the end of the update. the rest of this is just a long hand waving ramble about science and a love letter to steely dan and my brother ricky.
mri and ct scans show anatomy while pet scans show particular views of physiology. in general, cancer cells have a much higher metabolism than regular cells. when using a pet scan to look for cancer, they shoot you up with radioactive glucose then you sit around for an hour or so while your body metabolizes it. the scanner detects the result of the metabolic activity and the radiologist can usually differentiate between areas of hyper-metabolic activity (cancer) from the normal background activity of healthy tissue. they can shoot you up with different kinds of radioactive molecules to diagnose all kinds of issues. the results of the scientific method never cease to amaze me.
when i think about my favorite bands that i’ve kept with me since childhood, i can trace most of them back to their source of introduction which usually lands on my mom, my brothers, and my cousins. however, there are a handful of bands from back then that i consider mine. ones that i liked and still like outside of any external influence (other than the radio) and steely dan is the prime example. they’re a hard band to classify, they’re not a typical 70s rock band and people always want to shoehorn them into jazz fusion or easy listening, neither of which fit at all. really, i think they’re on their own branch of the tree. songs about near-do-wells, misanthropes, contrarians, and people longing to be elsewhere delivered in a smooth style played by a rotating cast of top-of-their-game musicians for sophisticated urbanites (or wannabes like me). and on top of all of that, i really wanted to look like walter becker; which i eventually pulled off, more or less.
i don’t know when they landed on my radar, but it was before i was 8. they were on the radio a lot. a little bit after my oldest brother, ricky, had gone off to college, mom and i heard “rikki don’t lose that number” on the car radio. i got maudlin and she asked me what was up and i told her that i hoped ricky wouldn’t lose our number. she smiled and assured me that he wouldn’t forget his home phone number and that he’d always be able to find me. then she said “you know the number they’re talking about might not be a phone number?” yeah? like what. “it might be a melody or maybe a joint.” y’all this was the 70s, i lived with three much older brothers, and mom, hilariously, knew that i knew what a joint was. my response was “smoking is gross.” she laughed, puffed on her NOW, and refused to crack the window even a little bit.
ricky was my hero. he was a badass in everything he did. he was charismatic, a great artist, a natural athlete, hilarious, and embodied the role of mr henry county. he was ten years older than me, but never got tired of me hanging around, wanting to wrestle and ask him questions he didn’t know the answers to. when my dad was in prison, he was my rock, and mom’s too. he was like 21 and in a bowling league with her! he came to my judo tournaments, band concerts, all that shit; he was my biggest fan.
to say that my family is competitive is like saying the sun is hot. everybody wanted to win. it didn’t matter if it was trouble, tripoli, pong, or trivial pursuit. and you were basically expected to cheat at monopoly; like my brother tim explained, it’s right there in the name of the game. there’d be a lot of good natured shit talking around games, too, which usually ended with me in tears because i’m overly sensitive. when i got a little older and started to beat ricky at video games, the shit talk would intensify. he’d accuse me of cheating and being able to practice more than him (all while laughing his goofy laugh with a big gap toothed smile). more than once when i’d sleep over at his house, his wife leanne (the best sister-in-law a kid could ask for) would storm into the living room in the middle of the night to the sounds of the pew-pew-pew of a video game, ricky shit talking, and me sobbing. she’d demand we play right or she’d take the intelevision away from us. between my sobs, i’d tell her “it’s ok, leanne, i’m winning”. ricky would guffaw and it would devolve into a wrestling match. through all the competition and ribbing and practice and tears, my family taught me that you could win, even if you were the runt, even if you were grumpy and crying; you just couldn’t give up.
a few years after pop got out of prison, he got me a cd player for xmas. mom took me to mother’s records, in the city, and let me pick out a few cds. i got “a decade of steely dan” (full of ramblers and wild gamblers), the charlie daniels band’s “fire on the mountain” (i was and always will be a long haired country boy), and “in the digital mood” a collection of songs by the glenn miller orchestra (mostly for pop, but also because i am nostalgic for times i never experienced).
cds were fucking expensive back then, so i spent the next year listening to these three a *lot*. especially “decade”; it just fit the misfit in me. but before the next xmas would come we would lose ricky to suicide. it was like being hit by a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky and we were stunned and wrecked as a family; i don’t think any of us got a lick of counseling. i spent the next two weeks holed up in my bedroom pouring over family photo albums, listening to “rikki don’t lose that number”, and the next 30+ years expecting to find him in every new city i visited; hoping he was just in witness protection or something stupid. he didn’t leave us note, so i’m left wondering, what could have been so bad to make this larger than life character give up? i’ll never know, all i know is that we all miss him every single day.
henry county always felt a little small for me, but after ricky was gone, everything reminded me of him. every backroad, every barn, every hill we’d sledded on, the high school, the football field, the bedroom we’d shared, all the video games, all his friends, every single memory i had was tainted. i loved (and still love) henry county and wouldn’t trade growing up or being educated there for anything, but i had to get the fuck out. before i graduated i got a copy of steely dan’s “katy lied” and the song “any world” summed it up perfectly: any world that i’m welcome to is better than the one i come from. that became my mantra.
fast forward 16 years, and the first friend i made in portland was actually an old friend from henry county because that’s how this stupid world works, sometimes it gives you exactly what you need when you need it most; but that’s a completely different story about two misfit ramblers bumping into each other on the opposite side of the country trying to find themselves and the good life that had always eluded them. in portland fucking oregon.
