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AFTER A MOVIE at the Lake Street Screening Room, there was a note for me to call Bob Havey. “I have good news and bad news,” my doctor said.
“What’s the bad news?”
“The tests came back. You have thyroid cancer.”
“What’s the good news?”
“You have the kind you want to have. It’s one of the rare cancers with a ninety-nine percent cure rate.”
He explained that I would have thyroid surgery, a common operation. After I recovered, I would check into a hospital room for two days and drink a shot glass of radioactive iodine. The Achilles’ heel of my particular cancer was that it finds iodine delicious. It soaks it in and the radiation kills it, no matter where those cells may have spread to.
Bob Havey has stayed in general practice in an age when many physicians specialize. He is a great and brilliant man whose knowledge is wide and whose mind is open. Many sick people search the Internet and bring their findings (usually loony) to their doctors. Havey searched the specialist sites and found the latest developments for me. He discusses my condition with me thoroughly and honestly. Some patients probably prefer to be lied to. I find the truth a great comfort. If I’m going to die, I’d rather know.
I’ve had a conviction of invulnerability through all of my illnesses, never mind how misplaced it may have turned out to be. I don’t have a lot of fear. Like many people, I fear pain more than death. I’ve had doctors I trust, and if I should die during surgery it will be no more an event than falling asleep. Now I know something I didn’t know before, which is that after my surgeries failed, I could live a perfectly happy life.
The thyroid surgery was successful. The radiation treatment was bizarre. I was shown into a hospital room where surfaces were covered with white paper. I drank the tasteless cocktail. For two days no one was permitted to enter my room, and my meal trays were pushed through the door. I wore clothes I could throw away and resurrected an old laptop that would have to be mothballed for radioactivity. At the end of the time a nurse came in wearing protective gear and checked me with a Geiger counter, and I was sent home with instructions to not sleep in the same bed with Chaz for two weeks, or sit next to a pregnant woman on an airplane. The radioactivity in the iodine, I was told, was about 5 percent as powerful as the monthly radiation treatments I, and thousands of children, had been given in the 1950s for ear infections and acne. Those treatments paid off half a century later in a boom for the formerly rare thyroid cancer. Now all I had to do was figure out the correct dosage of Synthroid to take every day for the rest of my life. I discovered Synthroid is the most commonly prescribed prescription medication in the world.
A few years later, I went in for a routine scan to check for any new problems. This time the news was not good. Bob Havey sent me to Harold Pelzer, a specialist, who explained cancer had been seen in my right lower jawbone. It wasn’t the same cancer as affected my thyroid, and I guessed exactly what it was. In 1988, a cancer had been found in my right salivary gland. There was a lump there clearly visible in a photograph of Siskel and me. When Christopher Hitchens fell ill, people wondered why he hadn’t noticed a lump on his clavicle that even they could see in his photos. Maybe it was because you don’t want to notice such things. I had been shaving over the lump for some months in the 1980s before Doc Schlichter palpated it and sent me to George Sisson, who was impressed; this cancer was so rare he’d never seen one in thirty-five years of practice. He was like a hunter bagging a unicorn and told me with some pride that a color slide from my tumor had made the cover of the Walter Reed military hospital’s research magazine. It was the kind of publicity difficult to turn into Nielsen ratings. My tumor grew less rare in the years to come. The childhood radiation had probably caused it. Because I was born four or five years earlier than most of the boomers, I was the canary in their coal mine.
“He is a good surgeon,” Doc Schlichter told me. “I was in the OR every minute. He took his time and got everything, and a little bit more around it. You have no more tumor.” Yes, but Dr. Sisson warned me, “It is very, very slow growing, but the odds are it may return after some years.” It did. It had probably hidden in my mandible. Pelzer took one of those plastic models you always see in medical offices and measured a length of mandible a few inches long. This, he explained, would be removed and replaced with a bone graft taken from the fibula in my calf—one of the bones we don’t need. Dr. Neil Fine, an expert plastic surgeon, would do this and patch me up so that after healing there was every reason to expect I’d be back on the television show.
That’s not how it worked out. All by myself, with nobody to blame, I found out about the work in neutron radiation being done at a handful of hospitals. It was much more powerful and narrowly targeted than gamma radiation. The leading specialist was said to be Dr. George Laramore at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. “My equipment is made for your tumor,” he told me. “Of course you should have surgery first.” Pelzer also recommended surgery first. So did Havey. But no. I became convinced there was a shortcut that would avoid plastic surgery and a healing period and have me back on the air much more quickly. I insisted. It was a great temptation. My doctors and Chaz advised the path of caution, but I cited reams of Web printouts indicating what a miracle this neutron radiation was. Eventually it was decided to give it a go.
The Internet is said to be responsible for helping patients take control of their own diseases. Few movies are ever made about sick people courageously taking doctors’ advice. No, they get bright ideas online. I believe my infatuation with neutron radiation led directly to the failure of all three of my facial surgeries, the loss of my jaw, loss of the ability to eat, drink, and speak, and the surgical damage to my right shoulder and back as my poor body was plundered for still more reconstructive transplants. Today I look like an exhibit in the Texas Chainsaw Museum.
I have vague memories after my first surgery of Chaz holding a pad on which I could write notes. She says they didn’t always make much sense. I was on a good deal of pain medication and my memories of that period are often hallucinations. I imagined myself in a hospital that doesn’t exist in Chicago, with a broad flight of stairs leading down to the Chicago River. I saw myself in one of a row of barber chairs, while medical personnel rotated us for obscure reasons. Gradually my mind began to clear, and my assistant Carol Iwata brought three-ring notebooks and a box of pens.
On these I wrote out everything I wanted to say. I also began various random writing projects, including my memoirs. None of those words are included in this book; they were more like exercises in total recall from long ago events that were more clear to me than whatever had happened that day. Chaz dated and preserved every one of these dozens of notebooks. “You’ll want to look at these someday,” Chaz told me. I never have. I think I would find them depressing and would discover I was sicker and more confused than I care to remember.
I’m sure there are long painful pages written very late at night on the subject of pain medication. I was on a form of OxyContin, an addictive drug that supplies euphoria for thirty minutes or so, relative calm for another hour, and then increasing uneasiness and anxiety until it is finally time for the next dose. The final hour became almost unbearable, and I wrote out pleas that I asked the nurses to take to the overnight residents, who would have to approve additional medication. They never did. My meds were being injected using the “push” method, by which a liquid is supplied intravenously, and this produced an instant rush that seemed to expand my consciousness to fill the entire room, and then subsided into intense energy and a feeling of well-being. I think I learned something of what heroin and morphine addicts feel. I certainly learned something of the agonies of withdrawal.
I was put on the drugs while unconscious after surgery and regained consciousness already addicted. I told Chaz I felt I needed more pain medication, and she told me I was hooked and needed to detox. Finally I couldn’t take the withdrawals anymore. By then I was in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and wrote out a note to the doctor in charge, Dr. James Sliwa, saying I was “turning myself in.” He took charge of the withdrawal process, joined by Dr. Susan Pearlson.
From those days I remember hallucinations that are startlingly vivid. I imagined a house in Michigan I thought was ours, which wasn’t, but I had returned there with Chaz all the same. I found myself driving down country roads outside Urbana at dusk, the earth and sky unnaturally beautiful, a mournful song filling the air. I remember repurchasing my childhood home on Washington Street, moving back to Urbana, and buying the Daily Illini so I could edit it. During the presidential primaries, Chaz tells me, I thought Hillary Clinton had rescued me in a helicopter. I would often be interrupted from these hallucinations by one of my physicians making his rounds with half a dozen interns. It was like being captured by aliens.
So no, I don’t want to look at those notebooks. Much of what happened is confused and lost. Let it stay that way. I have, however, identified the mournful plaintive beautiful song I heard on my drive through the Illinois cornfields. It was “Calling You” from Bagdad Cafe, waiting in my memory all those years.