Writing

Snowflakes the size of popcorn fell over the city of Philadelphia as the chaotic winds of a nor’easter blew them every which way but down. We watched the scene outside through the Perelman Center’s 15-story glass façade. Max and Frankie sat on either side of me, silently eating chocolate chip cookies half the size of their faces, watching Children’s Hospital across the street come in and out of view, as if it were the centerpiece inside an enormous snow globe.

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Corinne and I had taken Max and Frankie out of school so they could see where we disappeared to every day. The thought was that if the boys could see the radiation routine, it would be less scary for them.

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I bought the cookies for the boys at a café kiosk on our way up from Gantry #3 in the basement, where we’d left Corinne for her Proton Beam radiation treatment. People from every tribe imaginable packed the waiting room. When Corinne’s buzzer went off, the four of us got up and walked down the long hallway. The radiation technicians knew Max and Frankie were coming and were waiting for us at the door. They greeted the boys and welcomed them in for a tour as if they were about to enter some place fun.

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The first thing that grabs your attention in Gantry #3 is what appears to be a gigantic eyeball built into the back wall. It’s about 10 feet in diameter with concentric white plastic circles radiating electric blue light from behind them. The gantry is convex, so it looks as if you are inside the head of a giant looking out through one of his eyes. In front of the pupil of the eye is a white plastic bed that looks like a half-shell pod from a spaceship. Then there is a large arm with a massive radiation gun on the end that is pointed toward the bed. How this all works in concert, I’ll never know. Corinne never knew either, because during treatments her head was strapped to the bed with a radiation mask so tightly that afterwards her face looked as if she’d run into a chain link fence at about 25 miles per hour.

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Max and Frankie took in the tour with the appropriate amount of awe and excitement. It was clear something very impressive happened in Gantry #3, and even though it had the look of alien abduction, it also looked like it had a good shot at working some magic.

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Corinne and I drove to Penn five days a week for six weeks. Every day Corinne had her head bolted to the table for an hour and a half and we spent no less than three hours in the car, driving 1,500 miles by the time the treatment was over. And in the thick of this fucking, the universe dumped six winter storms on us, one for each week of radiation. We often had to depend on friends and family to take Max and Frankie to school, pick them up, feed them dinner, and sometimes even get them to bed on the days we had to hotel in the city because of the snow.

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The above may seem a special sort of misery set aside for only the unluckiest of us, yet the impression those six weeks made on me wasn’t negative. Yes, having brain cancer was grim, but taking daily action against Corinne’s tumors felt empowering, and although our new world appeared to be a futuristic war zone from the outside, on the inside it was a promise land of miracles.

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For me, the Perelman Center came to feel like a holy place where the broken people of the world made the daily pilgrimage in hopes of a cure. And despite the bad luck we’d all been dealt, we were a happy lot. The hospital’s futuristic presence alone seemed to affirm that there was a chance of survival, and for the condemned, a chance was all we needed.

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There was a sense of purpose and excitement in those six weeks I’d never experienced before. Corinne had suddenly become the main character in a heartbreaking tale. And yet, the outpouring of love we received was inspiring at every turn. A daily tide of gifts and meals showed up at our door. Everyone we’d ever known wrote cards, sent texts, and made phone calls that always ended in tears. The people on the other end of the line truly didn't know if it would be their last conversation they’d ever have with Corinne.

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Corinne’s sisters started a Caring Bridge blog to try to relieve me from the daily pressure

of responding to all the texts and calls, but after a few posts, I found that debriefing them on the details and then asking them to write about it was both hard and unfair. They had to coordinate the call with me, take notes, then write a summary. It was like a mini newsroom, where I was both the source and the head editor. There were too many steps involved so I decided to do the writing on my own.

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At first it felt like a chore, but that feeling quickly faded. Writing about the absurdity of what was happening to us was cathartic, but the blog became more than just a place to vent. I began to turn our life into a story, and I found the story practically wrote itself. Corinne’s positive energy was a perfect fit with the martyred hero narrative that society projects on cancer patients, and she always had some dramatic hurdle to clear, an important scan, or treatment, or surgery, so every few weeks I had enough material to write the next chapter. My posts became a serial drama, a place where the cancer hunting hordes could read about what it was like to be living through the nightmare.

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Survival was only half the story though, and as the weeks wore on, reporting the medical facts became secondary. The blog evolved into a creative space where I could try my hand at being a writer. My word count ballooned into the thousands. I wrote about snowstorms, the Schuylkill expressway, parking garages, the valets, the waiting rooms, and reenacting the “Philly Special” from Super Bowl LII with Max and Frankie in front of City Hall. The backdrop of battling cancer while trying to raise two kids made it easy to slide normal life events into the realm of sentimentality, and I never missed a chance to report something that would make me cry while writing it.

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What people truly thought of my effusive ramblings, I’ll never know. Friends and family responded well to the posts, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t relish the praise. I did get one backhanded compliment that changed things for me though.

 

I ran into Frankie’s teacher at school one day. She’d read a recent post and was gushing to me about it. I tried my best to deflect her compliments and look humble. Then she asked me where I had taught English before I started staying home.

 

“I didn’t teach English,” I said, “I was a Spanish teacher.”

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“Oh?” she said, looking disappointed. “What a waste.”

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I tried to point out that Spanish was indeed a language too, one worthy of teaching and learning, but I knew what she meant. I’d spent a lot of time teaching kids the nuts and bolts of language, when perhaps my talents would have lent themselves better to teaching language as an art.

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The comment cut much deeper though. I had always wanted to write, but I’d never had enough confidence in myself to commit to it. My decision to teach came about not so much because I wanted to be a teacher, but because I didn’t want to fail at being a writer. She was right – I had wasted a lot of time.

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People continued to say nice things about my writing, and I learned that, for the most part, friends and family aren’t valid critics, but after the teacher’s words that day, I started thinking about myself differently. My identity as a stay-at-home dad was quickly crumbling. Cancer had given me the courage to finally pursue the secret ambition that I’d kept hidden for so long, and that liberation was nothing short of exhilarating. The blog wasn’t just an attempt at writing a happy ending for the four of us. It was my last shot at correcting 20 years of insecurity and cowardice, and my success or failure at rewriting that history became my own private game of survival.