Part 1: Bald Man-Child — Cancer at 20
People don’t wonder if I had cancer anymore. I’m at the age where being bald can be attributed to genetics. Bald is in, actually. Men are owning it. And I’m happy for them. But my bald is an annoying combination of radiation and high-intensity chemotherapy from ten years ago.
And now, my hair grows in wispy patches that I shave every Monday and Thursday morning along with my beard. All at once, a little trip around the mountain. People say I’m fortunate that my head is not bumpy. I have a nice round head. Thank you. I have dreams sometimes that I have hair and wake up feeling let down. I think sometimes that it would be funny to buy a swim cap just to see if the cashier thought it strange. I have likely saved a lot of money on shampoo. At least $100.
Cancer for me, like most I assume, came out of nowhere. It began with a bad migraine in the middle of the night on a Monday, then again on Tuesday. I was 20 years old. A college athlete. I joked with my mom on the phone that I probably had cancer. She doesn’t like those kinds of jokes. By early Thursday morning I left to the closest ER in my roommate’s Honda Accord. The whole campus was sleeping. It was beautiful. Blindingly bright. I was shaking in pain.
I had a blockage called hydrocephalus. Scans showed a tumor impeding the flow of spinal fluid from my brain’s third ventricle to my spine. In my cat-scan imaging they showed me the balloon of fluid, and next to it a grape-sized tumor they didn’t know much about. They needed to insert a shunt to release the pressure. Lovely. When they told me this, I had already received a heavy dose of Dilaudid. Casual and relatively mellow I called my parents and patiently let them know they should probably come down to Southern California because I was about to have emergency brain surgery.
For the next week we stayed in a Residence Marriott while my parents figured out what to do. They Googled brain cancer, scheduled my biopsy, and tried to hold in their anxiety around me. I took advantage of my Percocet prescription, watched daytime tv in bed and tried to keep up with my homework so I wouldn’t fall too far behind.
Germinoma is a highly treatable malignant brain tumor that usually affects 10–21 year old males. Ninety percent survive. That’s what we thought I had. However, there was a month between assuming I had brain cancer and knowing what kind of brain cancer I had. It doesn’t all happen at once.
While I waited for my biopsy (surgery number 2), life was relatively normal. My parents briefly went back to their jobs and families in Portland. I made an effort to stay in shape for basketball, attending practice and running sprints with the team. My friends said I looked like Batboy. I bought a few headbands that covered the protruding diagonal line of my shunt perfectly. Everything was almost the same, and I had come to the conclusion that my treatment was going to be tough, yet doable. I would be like the functioning mom on chemo that wore a floral head wrap, was always tired, occasionally sick, but at the end of the day still tended to her children. I was planning on staying in school and making it through with the support of my friends.
My experience at the UCLA Brain Tumor Center was good in that my computer automated biopsy was successful. The results I received were shattering. I was sitting with my mom, dad, girlfriend, and two doctors in a small room, waiting to be told that the Germinoma they found could be treated at a local hospital over the next few months. Instead, they called my tumor a Pineoblastoma. Stage 2. It was an aggressive malignant children’s tumor that needed a specific and immediate treatment they could not provide. Survival rates were about 50%. It would take about 8 months to treat. They could help us find a hospital. San Francisco State, NYU, and St. Jude Children’s Hospital were good places to call.
This is the moment in movies where everything is muted. Doctors are talking and you try to focus but your mind is not processing fast enough. You feel somewhat numb. What the fuck is happening? It’s incredibly unfortunate. We listened to a Belle and Sebastian mix cd on the way back to my dorm room in silence. I don’t remember anyone crying.
