Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life

by Robert Schimmel

  Below me, my mom looks past Vicki at a large basket of muffins, untouched, a bouquet of ribbons attached to the handle, the contents still encased in plastic. “Who sent these?”

  “Fox,” Vicki says.

  “Mrs. Beasley’s muffins,” my mom says. She nods in approval. “Very classy.”

  “I love the lemon poppy seed ones,” Vicki says.

  “The minis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The best,” my mom says. “Take a couple.”

  “Really? You think Robert would mind?”

  “He’s in a coma. You think he’s gonna wake up and say, ‘Hey, two of my lemon poppy seed muffins are missing. I go into a coma for a couple of hours and you steal my muffins?’ Vicki, please, take a muffin.”

  Vicki shrugs and rips into the plastic muffin wrap.

  “We never had a catch,” my dad suddenly says, his eyes still peering out the window.

  “What?” my mom says. “What are you mumbling?”

  “Me, Robert. We never played ball.”

  “Sure, you did. Plenty of times.”

  “That was Jeff. Robert was too busy tinkering with his trains. Playing pretend games. Looking at girlie magazines.” He grunts, eyes still focused on something far away. “I have regrets. We never went fishing, hunting, none of those things.”

  My mom stares at him. “What hunting and fishing? We’re Jewish.”

  Vicki, cheeks wide as a chipmunk’s, stares at me propped up in the chair. “Look at him,” she says, through a mouthful of muffins. “So pathetic. So sad. You know, Robert told me many times he didn’t want to go like this.”

  My mother squints at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Like this. A vegetable.” Vicki swallows the last of her muffin, then with her pinky pokes at a poppy seed jammed between her teeth. “I think we should pull the plug.”

  No! I scream, still aloft, fluttering above them, desperate, helpless. I’m right up here! Look! Help!

  “Otto, what do you think?” my mother says. “Should we unplug him? It’s getting late. We leave now, we beat the traffic.”

  “We never restored a car together,” my father says. “Never went camping. Built a doghouse—”

  “If we pull the plug, we have to divvy up the muffins. I insist,” says Vicki.

  “I only like the lemon poppy seed and you ate all of those,” my mother says.

  STOP! I scream.

  And then my legs feel heavy, immense, as if they’re made of iron, and suddenly I plummet downward like a shot and I’m—

  In my bed. Blinking. My mom and dad sit across from me. Vicki isn’t here. There are no muffins. I remember now. My dad brought me in. My mom came later. She called Vicki, told her what happened, and said she’d let her know when we had the results.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “You were out,” my dad says.

  “I had some dream.” I sit up slowly, rub my eyes. “Has the doctor been in?”

  “Not yet,” my mom says.

  “Wow,” I say again, and then I laugh. “That was nuts. This whole thing has been nuts.”

  My mother shifts in her chair. My dad dips his head, studies his hands. There is dread etched into their faces. These are two people who have survived the Holocaust and then the loss of their grandson, Vicki’s and my son Derek. They have endured more than their share of bad news and days of horror.

  “Am I rich and famous yet?” I say.

  My dad cracks a smile. “Not yet.”

  “Who’s gonna play me in your show?” my mom asks.

  “Meryl Streep,” I say.

  “She doesn’t look like me. Plus she chews the scenery.”

  “Ma, we talked about this. You might not even be in the show.”

  She shrugs. “Fine. So it won’t be any good.”

  Now I smile and try to piece together what’s happened over the last couple of weeks, during the shooting of my sitcom pilot, then performing in Vegas, and the events come rushing at me at warp speed with the force of a tornado blowing through a pile of leaves—

  I am in Los Angeles. I am separated from Vicki and living with Melissa. More about her in a bit. As soon as the pilot is finished and I get everything straightened out, I’ll settle in L.A. for good, with Melissa.

  Vicki and I have had a checkered relationship. We got married, then got the marriage annulled, then got remarried, got divorced, then remarried, then on the way to divorce for the absolute final time, no turning back, no bullshit, Derek got sick. We stayed together for him, for our other kids, fought the good fight, lost, then drifted apart, not uncommon when a couple loses a child. Now, unfortunately but inevitably, it’s over, the final divorce. Bottom line, we tried. But it wasn’t meant to be.

  And now Melissa. Finding her, falling in love with her, realizing that I belong with her, being more certain of that than of anything in my life. And then, wham, there’s a light shining on me, as if the spotlight finds me for the first time. I’m asked to do a sitcom. Me? You kidding? I’m fifty, bald, and Jewish. Not exactly the demographic advertisers are trying to reel in. Who cares? It’s my time. After twenty years of stand-up, America has embraced me and my raw, take-no-prisoners, balls-out comedy. I’m gonna be famous. Bizarre.

  I go into rehearsal for the pilot. The hours are grueling, the work is intense. I feel fatigued and dazed, and then right before we’re set to shoot the show, I start getting chills, two, three times a night. I’ve got the shakes so bad that I pile on extra blankets. When I wake up, the bed is soaked, totally drenched, as if a pipe has burst beneath the sheets. Melissa is worried, begs me to see a doctor. I don’t know any doctors in L.A. I call my manager, who makes an appointment for me with his doctor. I go in for a checkup, and the doc schedules me for a CAT scan. The scan comes back clean.

  “You’re run down,” the doctor says. “We might want to do more tests. You could have Epstein-Barr or mono. That’d be my guess.”

  Even though there’s nothing on the scan, something eats at me. I don’t know why, but I feel like there’s something else, something that the scan didn’t see.

  About a week after we shoot the pilot, I’m playing the Monte Carlo in Vegas. My parents are staying with me. It’s early June and by noon the temperature is hitting 110, but no problem, it’s a dry heat. One afternoon, my dad and I decide to take a stroll through the forum shops. Suddenly, I’m freezing. My entire body starts to shiver. My lips quiver and my teeth begin to chatter.

  “Robert, you’re shaking.”

  “I’m freezing. I’m gonna go into the Gap and buy a sweatshirt. I’m really cold.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Yeah. I saw that guy in L.A.”

  “You have to get a second opinion. Today.”

  I call the doctor who removed my gall bladder a few years ago. He sets me up the next day with a doctor at Mayo in Scottsdale. The doctor wears a permanent frown as he goes over me like he’s buying a used car. Finally he says, “How long have you had this lump?”

  “Lump? Where?”

  “Right here.” He lifts my left arm and rubs a tiny bump in my armpit, half the size of a pea.

  “I didn’t know I had that.”

  The doctor puckers his lips. For a second it looks like he’s gonna kiss me. Then he whistles out a thin stream of air.

  “Feels funny,” he says. “I want to do a biopsy.”

  And that’s how I ended up here at the Mayo Clinic, my parents sitting bedside, nobody saying much. All of us waiting for the news.

  Actually, there’s another curve ball. When I woke up in the recovery room, after some of the anesthetic wore off, I felt pain shooting up under my right arm. Sure enough, my right arm was bandaged, not my left, the one with the pebble-sized lump. When I was being wheeled into my room, I said to the orderly, “You guys did the wrong arm.”

  I could see him studying my chart. His eyes clouded over. “Let me get the doctor.”

  I don’t know how long I waited for the doctor.
I was in a morphine-induced cloud. When I managed to blink my eyes open and focus, the doc was standing over me.

  “We didn’t do the wrong arm,” he said, continuing the conversation I’d begun with the orderly. “We found another lump under your right arm.”

  “How big?”

  With his thumb and forefinger, the doctor made a circle the size of a quarter.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Is it—?”

  “Waiting for the results,” he said.

  You think about dying.

  Even before you get the news. The thought creeps into your head, takes a seat, and stays there, the elephant in your brain.

  Of course, I’ve been here before. With Derek. Through all the years he fought for his life, the thought that he might die was always in the back of my mind, a constant presence. Now I’m facing it myself. You have to. “Biopsy” is never a word you associate with a good time.

  A few years ago I had a heart attack, which got me thinking seriously about the whole dying thing. I survived that but the thought remained etched in my head. One time, I had a really bad headache before a show. I looked at myself in the makeup mirror and I saw a vein on the side of my head that was bright purple and swollen.

  “You see that vein?” I said to a comic who was sitting next to me. “That’s really bad. I hope I’m not having a stroke or something. If I am, I hope I can hang on so it doesn’t pop until I get home.”

  The comic looked at me. “What difference does it make where you are? Here, home, on the plane . . . you’ll be dead. Why do you care?”

  He had a point. But that made me wonder. What would be the best way to die? I asked my doctor.

  “Either heart attack or stroke,” he said. “No question. Because if you have a big enough stroke, you’ll be dead before you hit the floor. That’s ideal. You don’t want cancer because then you can hang on for years, suffering and everything.”

  I was still confused. “But if you go suddenly, what happens to your stuff? If I’m at the airport and I have an aneurysm and I fall down dead, what about my bags? I didn’t get to claim my luggage. I always have personal things in my bags.”

  “That’s the beauty part. It’s not your stuff anymore. You’re dead. Not your problem.”

  “This is not working for me. I want to die at home.”

  “Fine. Just go for a really big stroke or massive heart attack. That way you’re out. No pain, no suffering, bang, boom, we’re sitting at your funeral.”

  “Great. Thanks for the tip.”

  “My pleasure.”

  His pleasure? Where do I find these people?

  Back at Mayo. Lying in my hospital bed. My right arm begins to throb. Instinctively, I rotate my shoulder, which sends a painful ping down the entire side of my body. I muffle a howl, remind myself not to do that again. I start to say something to my parents. The door handle clicks, and two doctors step into the room, the doctor who found the lumps and another guy I don’t recognize. Their faces are gray from five o’clock shadow and delivering bad news. I see no relief in sight, no light in their eyes.

  “Robert,” the lump doctor says. I sit up. With a slight flourish, he gestures to the other doctor as if he’s the grand prize on a game show. “This is Dr. Mehldau. He’s going to be your oncologist.”

  “Oncologist?” I hear myself say. “You mean I have cancer?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Mehldau says.

  And then, as if I’m in a fever dream, I am far away and I am instantly, monstrously big, and Dr. Mehldau is minute, a speck in a teeny white lab coat. I tower over him, a fifty-foot man, and then, just as quickly, our sizes reverse, and he is fifty feet tall and towering over me. I am delirious, hallucinating, undergoing a mad moment of disconnection. This is not happening to me. This is happening to someone else. I’ve got too much at stake, too much on the table. These guys have wandered into the wrong room, or misread the chart. I want to scream, You got the wrong guy! but nothing feels real. Time has stopped dead and I am both out of my body and out of my mind.

  A sound—my mom whimpering? my dad clearing his throat?—shocks me back to the present tense. I know I haven’t taken leave of myself for long, but something tells me that the calm in my hospital room is a front, hiding underlying chaos. I have to find my way back to reality and comfort my parents, my protectors. Even though I’m the one with the big C stamped on my forehead, I feel I have to protect them. I don’t know if they can deal with this. They’ve been through so much. First Derek, their grandson, and now me, their son? How are they going to get through this?

  Dr. Mehldau steps forward, a foot away from my bed. The other doc allows his hand to rest on my mother’s shoulder.

  She reaches up and clutches two of his fingers, her other hand entwined with my father’s on her lap.

  From his lab coat pocket, Dr. Mehldau produces a small yellow legal pad and a Sharpie. He screeches a black line down the middle of the top page. I smell the alcoholic scent of the felt-tipped marker.

  “There’s Hodgkin’s disease.” Dr. Mehldau writes and speaks simultaneously, scratching the words Hodgkin’s lymphoma on one side of the page in clumsy cursive script. “And non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” He scribbles these words on the other side of the black line and looks up at me. “You have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

  “Just my luck,” I say. “I get the one not named after the guy.”

  Dr. Mehldau laughs, jarringly, then says, “Well, if you can find something funny the moment you get the diagnosis, you’re going to be okay.”

  Poof. The joke brings a moment of relief. Of hope. The tension in the room escapes. It’s as if we’re encased inside a giant balloon, and, pop, I’ve stuck a pin in it and let the air out. All that’s left now are the five of us and Mr. C, the rampaging rhinoceros in the room.

  Amazing when you hear that word.

  Cancer.

  Cancer.

  I know that for some people just hearing “You’ve got cancer” means they’re dead. Bam. Might as well stop at the mortuary on the way home and pick out the casket. Life over. And the buzzer sounds. Ball game.

  And I know that there are other people, loved ones, sitting bedside, who immediately say, “Don’t worry, you’re not going through this alone.”

  Yeah? When they lower me into the ground, are you jumping in, too? I don’t think so. I’m taking this death cruise all by myself. I know that much.

  What’s strange, but not surprising, is that when I hear the word, my first reaction, my initial instinct, is to go for the laugh.

  It really is. I don’t plan it, don’t think about it. I just go for it. I realize instinctively that even though I’ve just been told I have cancer, I haven’t been told that I’m going to die. And to prove it, I’m going to do the one and only thing that shows that I am very much alive:

  I am going to make the audience laugh.

  It’s a small house tonight—my mom, my dad, the lump doctor, and my oncologist—but they’ve paid for their tickets (well, it’s co-pay). They’re here for the show and I’m not going to let them down. I’ve still got my sense of humor, my edge. And that means I’m alive!

  What’s even better is that I’m a big hit. Dr. Mehldau, my oncologist, loves it. He gets the joke. Even better, I have the feeling that he gets me.

  “Yes. If you can keep your sense of humor, you’re going to be okay,” he says again.

  I’m thrilled he says this because my first reaction to the news—going for the laugh—lasts about as long as it takes me to get the joke out. My second reaction kicks in right away, pretty much canceling out the first one.

  My second reaction is total shock.

  As I said, the thought of dying has crossed my mind. Now here’s Dr. Mehldau hitting me with the C word, and I remember my doctor in L.A. telling me that I should try to die from a stroke or a heart attack in the middle of the night and not from something like cancer because of all the pain and suffering, and now I’VE GOT CANCER.
Guess I screwed that up. And Dr. Mehldau is talking in his low, serious doctor’s voice, a kind of gravelly baritone that somehow reminds me of the ninety-year-old cantor who smelled like a musty attic, at the synagogue in New York where I had my bar mitzvah. I’m trying to focus on the words dancing out of Dr. Mehldau’s mouth, I’m trying, but I’m only picking up every third word: stage one, V cell, large V cell, stage two, D cell, T cell, wait, I remember reading that Mr. T had T-cell lymphoma, which sounded funny at the time and somehow I blink and connect to Dr. Mehldau through my haze and hear him say, “Indolent, which is slow-growing, we can sometimes just watch it, but your cancer is, unfortunately, aggressive—”

  Aggressive is not a word I want to hear in the same sentence as cancer. Aggressive is a good word for a woman. As in, I’ve always wanted to be stuck in an elevator with a beautiful, aggressive woman with a huge rack and no gag reflex.

  Then I go from shock to panic.

  I ask Dr. Mehldau, “Aggressive? How aggressive? Am I gonna make it to the parking lot?”

  “I’m going to be blunt.” Dr. Mehldau holds for a beat. Strangely enough I’m thinking that this can’t be that easy for him.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “If you went untreated, if we didn’t catch this now, now as in today, you would be dead in six months.”

  “But you caught it,” I say.

  “We caught it,” Dr. Mehldau says. “I’m going to put you on chemotherapy starting in two days. That means Wednesday. That gives you exactly one day to get yourself together. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. By the way, Robert, are you open-minded?”

  “I guess you haven’t seen my act. Why?”

  “Well, some patients find that using marijuana during chemotherapy helps with the nausea and appetite loss. It’s actually safer and a lot more mild than most of the anti-nausea injections they give you. So that’s an option.”