Jason Micheli - Cancer Is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo

To Dennis for showing up
To Ali, For better, For Worse
To the people of Aldersgate, for never telling me to make effing lemonade

I unbutton my shirt to expose a chest so smooth it wouldve been the envy of the pimpled boy who came home from gym class and, after thumbing through his contraband Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition, shaved off the dark hair breaking out all over his chestand other places. He used his moms pink razor, with a blade so dull it had left a line of rust on the soap tray in the shower. Like that sixth-grader, who suffered the urgency to fit in with the boys whose bodies were not yet outpacing the sex ed syllabus, I long to look and feel normal again.

I mention this irony to S, my nurse. She smiles.

Its hard to make someone blush who wears rubber gloves for a living, but when youre a clergyman and everyone presumes your occupation makes you officious and tight-sphinctered, its not so difficult to make them laugh.

I add to S how my mother had no idea when she gave me a Sports Illustrated subscription for Christmas that one day every year, the Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition would arrive in the mail like Charlies golden ticket. I dont know how many afternoons I spent thumbing through that Swimsuit Edition... with my left hand, I say, and she snorts a little and laughs, freely, as though if God is in a place of suffering like this, then the surest sign of him or her is our laughter.

I tell her how Id never confessed to the shaving before (or to the being my own best friend), at least not until I got cancer. She nods, understanding how, with cancer, every moment feels appropriate for a confession.

I spread my shirt at the collar to give her access to the dual rubber tubes of my chest catheter into which, one week per month, the chemo-poison drips and from which today, like nearly every day, my blood gets drawn. I watch how it comes out like cheap boxed wine, cab-colored and with a slightly foamy ring around it. It splatters against the plunger of the syringe thats twisted onto the end of my catheter, and I think, as I often do, how the tubes in my chest port resemble the nozzles on a life preserver, the kind they stow underneath the seat on airplanes.

What would happen, I wonder, if sitting there in the infusion center among so many elderly patients, I suddenly pretended to panic and blow into the ends of my catheter as though it were a life preserver? How many of them would realize that they were not, in fact, on an airplane and were unlikely to crash-land or drown? I smile at the thought as S draws the last of my blood and then squirts it into the third of her vials labeled with my name and date of birth, and then I imagine the commotion as confused seniors claw and push each other out of the way, vainly searching out parachutes and oxygen masks before bravely hurling themselves over the counter and through the beveled glass of the nurses station window. Theyre not called the Greatest Generation for nothing.

I chuckle at the picture playing out in my head. Whats so funny? she asks, gathering up the empty syringes, used alcohol wipes, and spent gloves.

Funny? I was just thinking that next time I unbutton my shirt here, I should sway my hips a little and go Da, Da, Da, Dum. I get an eyebrow from her and a crack about sexual harassment claims on top of my medical claims. Good point, I concede. Besides, you wouldnt want to get complaints from all the elderly women here that youd led them to expect a special screening of Magic Mike during their chemo infusions. She snorts again and laughs. I wouldnt wish such laughter upon my very worst revenge fantasy enemy.

The laughter, coming easily and without a need for explanation, suggests we both know, even without saying it, that being deadly serious here of all placesespecially hereis the surest way to feel seriously dead already.

I can get away with saying cancer f@#$ing sucks even though Im a pastor, because everyone, as I soon learned after my diagnosis, knows cancer f@#$ing sucks. Every family tree has the C-word carved angrily into some part of it. Now that I have cancer, I notice how I rip the scabs off the wounds everyone seems to carry.

Everyone knows that cancer f@#$ing sucks.

The only way for doctors to save your life, just as Jesus warned, is to bring you as close as possible to losing your life without actually killing youthough I doubt that poison derived from mustard gas was what he had in mind. No matter how many celebrities wear lapel ribbons, many cancers, such as my own, have no cure, and chemotherapy can provoke all sorts of unpleasant side effects, includingI kid you notcancer.

If the sentiment expressed by the 753 sympathy cards I now keep in a taupe Sterilite box is any clue, then everyone already knows it: cancer f@#$ing sucks. Its why no one knows what to say to you when they find out you have cancer. Its why everyone is afraid to ask what its like to have cancer. And its why, since no one knows what to say and everyones afraid to ask, when you find out for the first time you have cancer, all you know is that its going to suck. And make you throw up.

But heres what I want you to know if you or someone you love has cancer:

Cancer is funny, too. No, wait, it really is funny.

Any ailment that results in pubic-hair wigs being actual products in the marketplace simply is funny. (Theyre called merkins. Look it up.)

For example, on my third day of chemo, I gripped my sutured stomach like a running back desperate to hold on to the pigskin, swallowed a mouthful of nausea, and dragged myself and my wheeled chemo pump into the bathroom of my hospital room in order to clean my toilet before the shy Muslim housekeeper could arrive to clean it.

The TV in my hospital room had been running a feeding-frenzy loop of coverage on Islamic terrorism and the fear it engendered in the West and among Christians. Given the violence in the Middle East and the rising specter of fundamentalisms, Christian and Muslim, the least I could do for the cause of peace, ecumenical understanding, and Jesus Christs kingdom (these were the actual thoughts in mind) was to wipe my own diarrhea stains from the toilet. There are already enough reasons in the world for hatred and bloodshed between us besides my chemically induced squirt stains all over the toilet,