15 YEARS AGO, I had dealings with two different kinds of vampires.
As part of my treatment, I had regular appointments with a friendly vampire, a/k/a the clinic phlebotomist. I started chemo with a great deal of fear and sensitivity where needles were concerned. To any degree that I’m more comfortable with being stuck now, I have her to thank/blame.
We warned her from the very first time, that I was a big baby about having a needle stabbed into my vein so two test-tubes could be filled with my vital fluids. But she was very understanding – she was experienced with babies of all ages. This wide range of experience helped a lot when the quality of my veins started to degrade.
During one of my visits, she opened a drawer to get out a small bandage and, noticing the kids’ Band-aids with cartoon characters, I jokingly said I wanted one of those. She said since I was a brave boy, I could have a Snoopy Band-aid. From then on, I got Snoopy.
One day we happened to have with us our toy stuffed “baby” Chulhu. It was one of the original handmade plushes sold by Pagan Publishing, which used a glove pattern for its tentacle-mouth head. The phlebotomist thought it was the cutest thing, and gave it a Snoopy Band-aid, too. ‘Thulhy still wears his to this day.
The other vampires I hung out with were our best friends, and became part of our morale support system during my season of chemo.
A couple of years earlier, I discovered the roleplaying game “Vampire: The Masquerade.” This was mechanically similar to D&D – write up a character on paper, talk through its adventures and roll dice to decide random events such as the success of an action. The twist on this was, instead of hunting a monster, you WERE the monster. All player characters are members of the thirsty Undead. The title comes from the “Masquerade”* of blending in with mortal society, hiding in plain sight both for survival and easier hunting.
By pure chance, I picked up one of the very first edition rulebooks in 1991. In ’92, I played in an excellent game at a Missouri sci-fi convention, after which my then-wife Kathy** and I started playing and running the game as part of our RPG campaigns. That summer, at GenCon in Milwaukee, all the scheduled VtM games were filled, so Kathy started an “open gaming” session – with my input – which ended up going “live” by the end of the convention, with about 30 people acting in character and us winging it with the rules. The official LARP (live-action roleplay) rules wouldn’t come out for another year.
In ’93 Kathy was out of my life, but Gwen was in, and it didn’t take long for her to get hooked on vampire roleplaying, especially after a weekend with an independent LARP group in Kansas City. That August, back at GenCon, White Wolf Games (the publishers of VtM) hosted the sign-ups for the official fan club and LARP organization, the Camarilla (named for the fictional society of “civilized” vampires in the game).
A quick aside: Our roleplaying was completely theatre of the mind. We did no actual bloodletting or sexual “blood play.” In fact, we made a point of not being part of the “real vampire” subculture. In the live version of the game, we would improv our speaking lines and use hand signals to represent use of power and rock-paper-scissors to resolve conflicts and settle anything that would require a dice roll in the sit-down version. Most of the time, the “feeding” aspect of the character was trivial. In fact, the games looked more like “The Sopranos” than “Dracula.”
By the end of that year, we had met a couple of other Camarilla members who lived in Fayetteville, and persuaded some of our roleplaying friends to try the game. At the start of 1994, we had established the organization’s first provisional chapter in Arkansas, which we called “Coterie Bellaluna.”
Our group had two scheduled meetings a month. One was roughly a business meeting. We kept the business to a minimum and had fun with it, patterning each meeting after one of the Clans (vampire subgroups) from the VtM rulebooks. The other meeting was a live roleplay session, and we rotated who was in charge of the storyline.
The camaraderie built this way, and my concentrating on club business as its first president, helped keep me occupied while undergoing treatment. I never considered going to a cancer support group. After all, my treatments were going well, and it felt good to spend a few hours every other week with friends, pretending to be immortal, with cancer the last thing on my mind.
- - - - -
* If you are unfamiliar with this game, but have heard of “Vampire: The Requiem,” that is the revised version of the RPG used today. Due to the revisions, and since I’ve drifted away from active roleplaying, I’ve never played this.
**Not her real name
(NEXT)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
The easy part
15 YEARS AGO, I was into my first month of chemotherapy.
As it turns out, the easiest part of being on chemo – was receiving chemo.
I’m referring to the actual procedure in which I get a bunch of mad poisons injected into my body. There are other times for worrying about paying on the deductible or dealing with side-effects or other aspects of life with cancer. But when it was time for my treatments, it was fairly simple and easy.
Fortunately, I had Gwen to come with me to the cancer clinic, and more importantly, to drive me home. During my treatment she occupied herself in the waiting room.
The clinic’s treatment room had a couple of beds and a couple of recliners. I would usually get into a recliner, making myself comfortable in the position I would be in for at least the next hour or so. Then comes a bit of discomfort, as one of the professionals there finds a vein on my hand and inserts the IV. This became harder as the treatments progressed, due to the damage the chemo did to my circulatory system (formerly the owner of jump-up-and-say-hi veins, to this day I’m now a “bad stick”). The nurses -- or whatever their technical titles were -- had to be very good and careful, as they not only had to find tricky veins, but get the needle solidly in so that the corrosive nature of some chemo ingredients wouldn’t leak and damage the flesh of my hand.
After I’m hooked up, and the bags are put in place, then gravity and my circulatory system do the rest. I think there are anesthetics involved at first, so that I don’t feel the harshness of the drugs. There’s a TV up on the wall for us to watch, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what was on. It wasn’t long before the space-time continuum no longer applied to me. During the first treatment, time leapfrogged a bit, but I think I remember Gwen helping me to the car and driving me home. On other visits, both time and space were affected, as I would find myself teleported to my own bed. How did I get home? I frankly didn’t care at the time.
One treatment like this a week for two weeks on, two weeks off. This was my life for the next few months.
But while I was getting drugs, Gwen acquired an addiction. In the waiting room, she would read the clinic’s copy of Entertainment Weekly. Never finished, she slipped it into her purse as we left. The next visit she would bring it back and take the more recent issue, and so on. When my course of treatment ran out, she would be left without her fix, so she mailed in the subscription card.
She’s still hooked, with no intention of kicking the habit.
(NEXT)
As it turns out, the easiest part of being on chemo – was receiving chemo.
I’m referring to the actual procedure in which I get a bunch of mad poisons injected into my body. There are other times for worrying about paying on the deductible or dealing with side-effects or other aspects of life with cancer. But when it was time for my treatments, it was fairly simple and easy.
Fortunately, I had Gwen to come with me to the cancer clinic, and more importantly, to drive me home. During my treatment she occupied herself in the waiting room.
The clinic’s treatment room had a couple of beds and a couple of recliners. I would usually get into a recliner, making myself comfortable in the position I would be in for at least the next hour or so. Then comes a bit of discomfort, as one of the professionals there finds a vein on my hand and inserts the IV. This became harder as the treatments progressed, due to the damage the chemo did to my circulatory system (formerly the owner of jump-up-and-say-hi veins, to this day I’m now a “bad stick”). The nurses -- or whatever their technical titles were -- had to be very good and careful, as they not only had to find tricky veins, but get the needle solidly in so that the corrosive nature of some chemo ingredients wouldn’t leak and damage the flesh of my hand.
After I’m hooked up, and the bags are put in place, then gravity and my circulatory system do the rest. I think there are anesthetics involved at first, so that I don’t feel the harshness of the drugs. There’s a TV up on the wall for us to watch, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what was on. It wasn’t long before the space-time continuum no longer applied to me. During the first treatment, time leapfrogged a bit, but I think I remember Gwen helping me to the car and driving me home. On other visits, both time and space were affected, as I would find myself teleported to my own bed. How did I get home? I frankly didn’t care at the time.
One treatment like this a week for two weeks on, two weeks off. This was my life for the next few months.
But while I was getting drugs, Gwen acquired an addiction. In the waiting room, she would read the clinic’s copy of Entertainment Weekly. Never finished, she slipped it into her purse as we left. The next visit she would bring it back and take the more recent issue, and so on. When my course of treatment ran out, she would be left without her fix, so she mailed in the subscription card.
She’s still hooked, with no intention of kicking the habit.
(NEXT)
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cut the mustard
15 YEARS AGO, I got an interesting history lesson.
My story continues at a cancer clinic in Fayetteville (Ark., where I lived at the time). I’m sorry to seem ungrateful to the person who (with the help of his friendly staff) saved my life, but I totally forgot my oncologist’s name.
Anyway, he had the results of my tests (confirmation of Stage II Hodgkins) and came up with a strategy for attacking the dread disease. Like an extra on “ER,” I have since totally forgotten the jargon of what the components of my treatment were. But because I know any readers here would be curious – and because I felt kinda curious myself – I did some looking on the Internet.
For the sake of this memoir, wikipedia will do. Since the cancer was aggressive in confining my lungs, I was to undergo an aggressive treatment, a one-two punch of chemotherapies: MOPP (Mustargen Oncovin Procarbazine Prednisone)
and ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine). According to the wiki, the latter is now used in place of the former, but at the time it was a newer cocktail, and the doc felt the older, harsher mix was better for attacking the malignancy. Each has its own side-effects, the doctor explained, and going half-and-half should reduce the severity of any given effect.
Note the “M” in MOPP is “Mustargen,” which looks like “mustard.” That’s not a coincidence; it is actually derived from mustard gas.
According to the oncologist, during research between World Wars I and II on the deadly chemical agent, it was discovered that it was particularly deadly to Hodgkins cancer cells. Thus did a horrific weapon of the first world war evolve into one of the first successful cancer cures.
This also brings home the point of how chemotherapy works. Chemo is basically poison. While it can destroy all manner of cells, the normal ones can be replenished through the body’s healing process, while the malignant cells aren’t. Meanwhile, well, you’re being poisoned! Thus the side-effects, and the fact that even an “easy” treatment like mine isn’t fun.
My regimen was to take six months. If successful, I would undergo six weeks of radiation treatments to clear out what bad cells were left. The chemo pattern was two weeks on, two weeks off. During those two weeks of intravenous treatments and the third week of the drugs working their way out of my system, I had strict dietary restrictions (this left one week a month, which became known as “cheese week” – I’ll make a separate posting on that eventually).
Expected side-effects included extreme fatigue and mental weirdness, loss of hair and suppression of sperm count if not sterility. Because of the half-and-half approach the degree of these effects should be lessened, but still impossible to predict.
Also, after making note of my weight, the oncologist ordered me to gain more. In fact, if my weight ever went down during treatment, it would be a sign that the chemo wasn’t working. Looking over my gut now, I know that having a license to pork up is not as cool as you might think.
(NEXT)
My story continues at a cancer clinic in Fayetteville (Ark., where I lived at the time). I’m sorry to seem ungrateful to the person who (with the help of his friendly staff) saved my life, but I totally forgot my oncologist’s name.
Anyway, he had the results of my tests (confirmation of Stage II Hodgkins) and came up with a strategy for attacking the dread disease. Like an extra on “ER,” I have since totally forgotten the jargon of what the components of my treatment were. But because I know any readers here would be curious – and because I felt kinda curious myself – I did some looking on the Internet.
For the sake of this memoir, wikipedia will do. Since the cancer was aggressive in confining my lungs, I was to undergo an aggressive treatment, a one-two punch of chemotherapies: MOPP (Mustargen Oncovin Procarbazine Prednisone)
and ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine). According to the wiki, the latter is now used in place of the former, but at the time it was a newer cocktail, and the doc felt the older, harsher mix was better for attacking the malignancy. Each has its own side-effects, the doctor explained, and going half-and-half should reduce the severity of any given effect.
Note the “M” in MOPP is “Mustargen,” which looks like “mustard.” That’s not a coincidence; it is actually derived from mustard gas.
According to the oncologist, during research between World Wars I and II on the deadly chemical agent, it was discovered that it was particularly deadly to Hodgkins cancer cells. Thus did a horrific weapon of the first world war evolve into one of the first successful cancer cures.
This also brings home the point of how chemotherapy works. Chemo is basically poison. While it can destroy all manner of cells, the normal ones can be replenished through the body’s healing process, while the malignant cells aren’t. Meanwhile, well, you’re being poisoned! Thus the side-effects, and the fact that even an “easy” treatment like mine isn’t fun.
My regimen was to take six months. If successful, I would undergo six weeks of radiation treatments to clear out what bad cells were left. The chemo pattern was two weeks on, two weeks off. During those two weeks of intravenous treatments and the third week of the drugs working their way out of my system, I had strict dietary restrictions (this left one week a month, which became known as “cheese week” – I’ll make a separate posting on that eventually).
Expected side-effects included extreme fatigue and mental weirdness, loss of hair and suppression of sperm count if not sterility. Because of the half-and-half approach the degree of these effects should be lessened, but still impossible to predict.
Also, after making note of my weight, the oncologist ordered me to gain more. In fact, if my weight ever went down during treatment, it would be a sign that the chemo wasn’t working. Looking over my gut now, I know that having a license to pork up is not as cool as you might think.
(NEXT)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
