An Unexpected Reprieve

My taped wound is healing. 

They said it was the size of a grapefruit or a small cantaloupe. Why must tumors always invoke fruit? I can sit at a computer now without much pain. I have a vertical scar down my abdomen at the scene of the attempted cellular coup. I spent five days recovering at the new California Pacific Hospital on Van Ness in San Francisco where my skilled surgeon, Dr. Lejla Delic works her magic. It is a great state-of the art new hospital where all rooms are singles and many have amazing views of the city.

My primary care doctor discovered this growth during a routine physical. After an ultrasound, PET scan and blood tests the results were terrifyingly routine. The mass was large and seemed solid. It was surrounded by fluid and giving me symptoms that I thought were related to irritable bowel. It wasn't a fibroid and my CA 125 levels (an antigen used as a cancer marker) were through the roof. Is this a metastasis of the melanoma I had twenty-eight years ago? My doctors agreed and my own research came to the same conclusion. I had ovarian cancer, like my mother and so many Ashkenazi Jewish relatives who proceeded me. I found Dr. Delic, a gynecological oncologist, and pushed for the soonest surgery date she could give me.

A friend dropped me off and another friend met me at the hospital that morning. We were wheeled into a curtained room in the surgery waiting area. She had brought with her a special prayer to the Virgen de Guadeloupe that she said always works. She held my hand. I had so many people praying for me and sending me healing energy, I'm embarrassed by the riches. Before I was wheeled into the operating room my doctor stopped by. She said, "It's ovarian cancer, we just need to take it out and stage it." They installed a fusion port in my neck in case I needed an early start on chemotherapy.

When I was wheeled into the intensive care recovery room, three friends were there waiting. My doctors told me that, unbelievably, it was not cancer. The tumor was fibrous inside and most certainly benign. I was heavily drugged still but still aware enough to be overwhelmed by the news. They had said the chances of malignancy were 95 to 98%. I have never won anything. How I slipped into a statistical category of 2-5%,  I'll never know.

All things considered, it's been quite an ordeal. I'm still not back emotionally, but physically I'm feeling okay.  I felt I was in a game of musical chairs without a seat at the moment the music stopped. I was totally prepared to begin fighting for my life.Not that cancer is an automatic death sentence, but it's always a challenging reminder of impermanence as an opportunity for spiritual growth as well as simple all-out panic. Now that I have returned temporarily to the land of the living, I'm trying to keep my focus on the myriad of possibilities before me.  I hope to make good use of the extra time I've been given. I don't know what form this rebirth will take. Opportunity beckons and I am at its center. Like spokes of a wheel, its paths stretch outward in all directions.

Joyce Schon: My First Long-term Partner

Joyce Schon (1952-2016)

I seem to be standing at a crossroads where past, present and future intersect. Being on the receiving end of a nasty ending of a twenty year relationship has left me feeling sad and nostalgic so I looked up an old ex partner online. Our relationship was one that lasted fifteen years from 1980 to 1995. I’d heard more recently she’d moved to her home city, Detroit and became a civil rights and immigration attorney. Last I heard she was still a member of Revolutionary Workers League, the Marxist-Leninist group to which she had always belonged.

I was dismayed to discover that Joyce Schon died of metastatic breast cancer in 2016 at 64 years of age. We had totally lost touch by that time, but I did wonder why she changed her email suddenly and was no longer active. She was still a Facebook friend so I knew I could message her there. We are all immortal online. I located only a perfunctory obituary that was geared toward straight, conventional family only. 

The fact she was a lesbian was missing from the obit. All her years of union activism and leftist organizing had been erased. It was appalling to see Joyce reduced to a traditional woman without spouses, children or interests.

What can I say about our time together? I remember the early days when I was 29 and she was 28. It was a wild, passionate time. We went to political meetings constantly. We also had sex everywhere. In parks, on beaches in every room of our apartments. She lived in Berkeley and I in San Francisco and we were each too poor to own cars but fortunately, there was BART.

Politically we were quite different. Joyce was a member of RWL, a group I referred to as Really Weird Leftists. They were a vanguard Trotskyist party. I, on the other hand, was involved in groups like Lesbians Against Police Violence and Revolting Lesbians. That made us a mixed marriage of sorts.

Joyce worked as a Ward Clerk at SF General in those days and was one of the first to work on the newly created Aids Ward. She was also a shop steward and union activist extraordinaire. Thirty for forty was her slogan for workers there: thirty hours of work a week for forty hours pay. She spoke Spanish with such an authentic accent that whenever she used it her conversation partner would deluge her in the language so rapidly that she couldn’t understand a word. 

She was committed to getting the message of socialism out into the world. I remember when the SF Chronicle was on strike. At the time, I was a research librarian there, a member of the Newspaper Guild. Joyce spoke at a strikers meeting in the Warehouse district of San Francisco. There were about 7,000 people in attendance, members of the Newspaper Guild, the Printers Union and the Teamsters. She addressed the huge crowd without wavering. She spoke with passion and determination. 

Joyce had a beautiful voice and played guitar. She sang both union songs and “women’s music.” “The Woman in Your Life,” was a particular favorite of mine.

In 1991 when I was diagnosed with melanoma and scheduled to have an intensive skin graft on my leg, she took my tumor, floating in its vial, to the head of the melanoma clinic at Mt. Zion for a second opinion. That experienced doctor said that the major disfiguring surgery I was scheduled for in two days, was unnecessary for a forty-year old. He recommended a much less destructive re-excision procedure instead. I have the full use of my leg now because of that decision.

Joyce always wanted to return to her home city of Detroit. In 1995, by mutual decision, we broke off our relationship. Our paths had diverged. My cancer experience had changed me. I became a Buddhist and a more spiritual person. She was still devoutly political and wanted more freedom. We parted ways like two adults who cared for each other. It was an ethical, mutually agreed upon decision that didn’t involve one party sleeping with someone else. Joyce was always an ethical person with a high degree of integrity. I look back on that breakup fondly now, aware of how bitter and ugly things can get.  

After we split I'd given her a check for a thousand dollars as a promise to make good on buying out her share of our home. A couple weeks later, without speaking to me first, she went to the title company and legally took her name off the title, literally giving me the house. She did this because of her Marxist convictions. She knew that my family members were all dead or remarried and that I would probably never be able to buy a house again. She, on the other hand, was from an upper middle class family and her parents were still alive. The magnitude of this gift still makes me cry. Because of Joyce I believe in genuine kindness and compassion that transcends romantic love. 

I am old enough to feel death gaining ground. My life is beginning its final chapter. I must seek out the person I used to be. She is still alive inside me and has grown older, wiser, stronger, less afraid. I speak through her voice now. When I open my mouth the only words I'm able to utter are the unadulterated, unmitigated, unapologetic truth. Joyce Schon you taught me well. I miss you. 

Beauty, Humor and Healthy Pessimism

David Rakoff

David Rakoff has died at 47. The gay essayist, comic, avowed pessimist and self-proclaimed neurotic Jew has crossed over to the other side. His book of essays, "Half Empty," extolled the virtues of a realistic, pessimistic attitude when looking at the world.

The cause of his death was a tumor caused by radiation treatments he had for lymphoma when he was 22. Like any logical realist, his own demise was an option he was prepared to accept with the same humor and grace he used to write about his cancer.

Like Jewish tribal affiliate and fellow cancer survivor, Barbara Ehrenreich who wrote "Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America," he espoused a realistic, rather than a sugar-coated view of life. Of late, psychologists and psychiatrists are arriving at the conclusion that this attitude is healthier for many people than a sunny-bunny perspective that leaves sick and depressed people saddled with guilt and blame for their own illnesses.

Like Rakoff and Ehrenreich, I too, am a cancer survivor. After my Clark's level 4 melanoma diagnosis in 1991 I contemplated for the first time the fact that my life might be concluding shortly. As a terminal Jew, healthly skepicism, i.e. pessimism was always been my modus operandi anyway.

But surprisingly, I actually came away from my cancer experience with a lot of practical and positive resolutions that a cheerier person may not have adopted. I made a list of concrete proposals to change my life just in case I survived the ordeal. That was nearly 21 years ago, so I was one of the lucky ones.

I promised myself that I would write and try to get my work published, that I would hold world travel and language learning as life priorities and that I wouldn't be consumed by the workaday rat race. Four years after my diagnosis, I took a part-time job and have never worked full-time for the capitalism dream-shredding machine again. Yet my overall, dark-sided nature has remained fundamentally unchanged, although in many ways I have definitely mellowed with my(unanticipated) advancing age.

True creativity is not born of sunshine and lollipops, it is a survival mechanism that comes from profound inner struggle mixed with existential angst and humor. Farewell David Rakoff, we will miss you and we will bear in mind that we are all coming up right behind you!