#255 – Pray for Eyebrows, or Is Laughter Now Only the Fourth Best Medicine?

[I'm interrupting the report of my last night in London, as well as the numerous items still unwritten from my London adventures, to update everyone about my wife Jo Anne. But rest assured, (1) she's fine, and (2) the London posts will keep rolling out at a rate of approximately one per day for the next several days, and then as quickly as I can write them.]

I’ve gotten many e-mails and had countless players ask me on Full Tilt about my wife Jo Anne’s condition. Things are great and if she doesn’t kill me, we’re going to make it through cancer just fine. Her chemotherapy starts about one hour after the time I’m writing this, on Friday, September 28. She will have one session every three weeks, eight sessions in all.

Maybe I’m tempting fate but luck has been on our side so far – at least my side, until yesterday. It was not by design but her cancer schedule fit perfectly with my travel and poker schedule. There were numerous times I thought I was going to have to cancel or cut short my London trip but it all worked out perfectly. First meeting with the surgeon, surgery, surgical follow-up, first meeting with the oncologist – those all occurred during the two weeks before I left the country. The education session about chemotherapy (which was eerily like those Troy McClure documentaries on The Simpsons), the surgical installation of a port in Jo Anne’s chest, and the start of chemotherapy – those all fell on the week after my return.

All I missed was two tests, the petscan and the mugascan. (No idea if I spelled those correctly or if they should be capitalized or if they are acronyms. But since they went well and they are finished, I’m not looking back.) The petscan, a full-body scan detecting the presence of fast-growing cells (which would include cancer cells) was completely clean. (Nevertheless, I had made quiet preparations to return early from London if the results had been otherwise.) The mugascan revealed something I already knew about Jo Anne: she has a remarkably good heart.

The surgery for the port was routine and successful. The only notable feature was that the surgery center was also known as a place that performs, as Jo Anne put it, “the other breast surgery.” So at 6 AM on Tuesday, half the waiting room was at some stage of breast cancer treatment, and the other half was just coming off shift at Christie’s Cabaret.

Everything has been going great … until yesterday.

The warnings about chemotherapy are so dire that it’s natural to get a little scared about starting it. Who knows what it will be like, introducing such power chemicals into your body?

I started Thursday at 2 AM, taking my mother-in-law to the train station in Flagstaff, 150 miles away. She had been visiting from Detroit for three weeks and doesn’t fly, so I had to get her to the Amtrak station by 5 AM. Our housekeeper was coming by in the morning so I stopped off to take a nap at our condo. (I succeeded in get up to date – or at least not too far behind – in paying the electric bill so air conditioning has recently been restored.) While there, I made good on my promise/threat to shave my head.

Doctors recommend that patients undergoing chemotherapy shave their heads. They are about 99% likely to lose their hair during treatment and it’s depressing when it comes out in great clumps all at once. Relatively, it’s empowering to beat chemo/cancer by doing it yourself.

But it’s hard actually DOING it and, though Jo Anne agrees in theory, I could see she was having reservations about actually cutting off all her hair, especially the eyebrows. She already has a very nice wig, but they don’t make eyebrow wigs. I knew she’d be uneasy about it, so I told her I was going to shave my head and eyebrows first. She made some kind of objection, which she mostly withdrew, but said she didn’t think I should shave my eyebrows. We shelved the discussion because her mom was here and nobody was shaving anything until she left.

I had purchased a very powerful electric clippers early in the week. It was so powerful that when I tested it on some leg hair, it burned me. Staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror at the condo – I had gotten my hair cut last Sunday down to 1/2 inch from the scalp, which frankly looked pretty damn good – I started tinkering with the clippers and my sideburns.

When I was nine years old, I was sitting at home absent-mindedly twirling a ball-point pen with the cap on it. I started scratching my head with the cap-end of that pen, scratching and scratching and scratching and scratching. Then I noticed the cap was no longer on the pen.

I’ve always told my kids, “That’s why I’m worried about going completely bad: a head full of ink scribbles.”

My other childhood experience with baldness involved Silly Putty, my favorite childhood toy other than Etch-a-Sketch. I loved that Silly Putty so much I put it in its egg at bedtime and slipped it under my pillow.

Somehow, the putty escaped and became entangled in my hair. A barber had to be dispatched and the extraction left my hair so short that, even in 1965, it drew stares.

But the hum of that clippers must have been hypnotic, because the next thing I knew, I was a bald as William Shatner. In the mirror, it looked pretty good, better than I expected.

Then there were those eyebrows. Their reflection reminded me that I was just a cancer wannabe, that was much as I wanted to share this experience with Jo Anne and keep it from being a solitary journey if it was at all possible, I was just along for part of the ride and not even the scariest part.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, right? So I closed my eyes and ran the scary clippers over my eyebrows.

When I opened my eyes, my former eyebrows were … still there. Maybe 15% were in the bathroom sink.

No more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Vidal Sassoon. I attacked those brows, feeling the burn of the clippers.

Again, when I opened my eyes they were still largely intact. It took a dozen raking passes with a fresh razor to finally eradicate those mocking brows.

This time, the look in the mirror said, “Not so cool, dude.” Irrationally, I made a grab for them in the sink but they had already swirled down the drain.

But hair grows back, and I hope that includes eyebrow hair. At least I’ll know that if I don’t retch and puke after chemotherapy, I took this much of the trip with my wife. That should count for a lot, shouldn’t it?

I soon learned how much. I reached Jo Anne as she was driving home from school. She wasn’t in a good mood to start, and wasn’t thrilled when I told her I shaved my head. “I thought we were going to do that together over the weekend.”

I started explaining about how I was making it easier for her and casually mentioned that I had shaved my eyebrows as well. She hit the roof at that, getting so upset that she actually pulled her car off the road.

There was, however, something else going on. During a class break on Thursday, the mother of one of her students, who knew she had cancer, brought her a bag, seemingly as a present.

The bag wasn’t a present; it was an excuse. It granted the woman an audience to tear down all Jo Anne’s psychological defenses. “You have cancer because your immune system failed you” – which is ridiculously false – “and now you’re going to DESTROY your immune system with THAT POISON???” She ranted about drug-company conspiracies and left Jo Anne with the bag of “holistic cures” along with videos that explained “the truth.”

So when Jo Anne regained her composure and told me about this, I lit into her. “I try to show my solidarity by shaving my eyebrows, while you are wasting a half-hour of your life with Holistic Conspiracy Lady? If you can’t stand to look at me tonight, I’ll be on an errand taking that bag to the nearest landfill.” Jo Anne told me she wasn’t allowed to keep many of the items in the bag (like the videos), which made me even more determined to dispose of them.

Apparently, Jo Anne couldn’t cut this woman off. This is a problem of hers, a bigger problem than having a lunatic for a husband. She is too nice to say no. She can’t be selfish, even when it’s reasonable to be selfish.

I don’t have that problem, even with my own wife. “So fine,” I told her. “Keep that ludicrous bag. Apparently, laughter is now the fourth best medicine. First is chemo, at least until the conspiracy crowd gets to you. Second is dinner. And now third is the Crazy Holistic Bag.”

She laughed and mostly forgave me, which means that laughter retains its position as third in the polls (especially because the eyebrow reparations included that I figure out dinner). Crazy Holistic Bag, at least until I can find a way to exorcise it from our lives, hangs on as the fourth best medicine.

Even though Jo Anne was initially mad at me, I still maintain that doing this will make it easier for her to handle the loss of her hair and eyebrows. I admit, though, that shaving off my eyebrows was probably a step too far.

A lot of people are in my wife’s corner and several of them have said they are praying for her now. This entire experience has complicated my relationship with god, a frequent thought during this time of year, the Jewish New Year. I still believe, and am even willing to allow that god can exist despite a virtuous, wonderful, perfect-as-I-can-imagine person like Jo Anne getting cancer. But I can’t REASON through it so I try not to think about it much.

So when people tell me they are praying for her, it tests my faith to contemplate that simply ASKING god to get her through this can make it happen, at a time when I really don’t want my faith tested. As a result, I started telling them yesterday, “Instead, pray for eyebrows.”