Caesura
All treatment is put on hold until my kidneys recover. I distract myself with reading, humans, cinema, and cold places.
I look forward to each talk with Dr. L as if this time she is going to fix me. She will have an answer. Above all, that she will tell me everything will be okay. Which is not her job, nor is it likely.
Yet when we spoke on the phone this week she had a scrap of good news. My kidneys are full of schistocytes, fragmented red blood cells, caused by a rare reaction to gemcitabine, my most recent chemo. Because chemo caused my renal failure, it means that with any luck my kidneys will recover on their own in the absence of treatment. This is an enormous relief.
Despite this, Dr. L organized for me to be seen at a special clinic for people who experience toxicities in response to chemo. I hadn’t been aware there was such a thing. In preparation, I had to do a host of new tests, including a test that required me to collect all of my urine over 24 hours. This was about as challenging and messy as it sounds.
I cannot receive any treatment until my kidneys are fully functional, which will take at least six to eight weeks, the toxicity doctors told me. I need to rest. They have ordered a puncture for my very swollen abdomen and put me on prednisone for the pain and inflammation.
One of the doctors was visiting from Italy. He was very interested in my psychological wellbeing. You need to use this time of rest to travel, to recover yourself, do things you love, he said. To recover spiritually. A French doctor, I think, would never propose spiritual rejuvenation.
I’d love to travel, which is often a spiritual act for me, but given that I could need a drain at any moment, it doesn’t seem wise. It scares me to be away from my medical team. The cancer is growing undeterred at the moment, and will continue to do so until I can handle treatment again. If there is a treatment for me.
The previous day, I attended a poetry reading by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko at The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore. She performed poems – and she really did perform poems – from her new collection, The Looking Glass. She was charismatic and funny and modest and I enjoyed listening to her. It was a full house, as many of us crammed in the store as could possibly fit. I got to talk with several interesting people and was happy to spend the day in literary company. I never worry about cancer in the bookstore.
The other exciting thing that happened this week was my friend Jill visited from New York City. We made it to just one tourist attraction, wandering through Notre Dame, before collapsing from the heat. We spent the entire rest of her stay sprawled in my room talking. But she didn’t come to see the sights, she said. She just came to hang out with me. And we certainly achieved that.
Jill and I have known each other since childhood, because our fathers became friends while students at Case Western. I grew up knowing Jill and her two brothers, playing with them in backyards while our parents talked. I still remember watching Jill’s brilliant teenage performance as Annie in Annie Get Your Gun. As adults we fell in and out of touch. Then one day I ran into her on Fifth Avenue while heading home from work. We reconnected and I discovered she lived near me in Inwood. Since then, we have both married and had children, who have known each other since they were small. Many, many times Jill and Marc and their kids have hosted us in New York and treated us likely family. I appreciate that our parents and kids are as connected to each other as we are.
At the moment, I am particularly grateful that Jill has agreed to take Theo around to look at some American universities this summer. While I’m deeply sad not to go through this rite of passage with Theo myself, I feel lucky to have Jill. It takes a pretty special person to step in to help our family in this way.
The current canicule in France is terrifying. It reminds me how much we are fucking up our habitat. Heat causes me intense anxiety and shuts down my ability to think, write, exercise, eat, or feel happiness. Every part of me stops functioning. I think it’s a genetic thing. I’m made for Alaska. If it were up to me, there would be no summer. I am not sure how to survive this coming week of above 100-degree heat in a city not built for it. But here are a few things that have helped us thus far:
The Lancaster Café near Pyramides is air-conditioned, and Theo and I have been working there for the past couple of days, even though it is all the way across town. After all, we have one of the few reliably air-conditioned Metro lines in Paris, the 14.
Cinema. MK2 Bibliothèque has excellent AC. Theo talked me into seeing Obsession. She had heard so much buzz about it. I never see horror movies. Horror movies terrify me. I get bad things stuck in my brain and cannot get them out. I think horror movies damage the soul.
But I went to a horror movie because I wanted Theo to be able to talk about it with me. She always has interesting things to say. I even managed to eat an entire large popcorn while watching terrible things be done to people’s bodies.
The reviews of Obsession already give away too much of the movie, so I won’t describe it here. Theo loved it because she appreciated the message that it’s never a good idea to force a woman to be in love with you. I did not love it but I loved the air conditioning. And talking about it afterwards. Also, it was the first time I have been in a completely full movie theater in years. Decades, maybe. It could be that we’re in the middle of a heat wave. Or the online buzz. Or both. But I was glad to see that there are people still willing to go to actual theaters to see films.
Both the Seine and the Canal Saint Martin are open for swimming. I have not been yet, but if I can manage to get there before I get a drain, I will gratefully plunge.
I welcome all suggestions of cold places in Paris from others here!
Reading Notes
Plays
Oh Mary!
Cole Escola
I recently attended a playreading group at which we read Oh Mary! out loud. It has been such a success on Broadway I was optimistic. I got to read Abraham for part of it and Mary for another part of it, which I enjoyed. I did not, however, like the play. It felt deeply misogynistic and cruel. Why did Escola even choose Mary as their focus? I think, if you’re going to mock a historical figure, why pick one who suffered so much? She lost three of her children. She may have had mental illness. I am all for satire and black humor, but the lowbrow humor of this play is juvenile and mean. And just incredibly, deeply male. Even the female characters read as male. There is nothing special about the dialogue, no adeptness with language. So I don’t understand its wild success, other than that people in drag have performed it hilariously. It’s not a type of humor I find interesting. Most of our group seemed to concur, especially one woman who saw it performed in New York. But to read the reviews, we are all in the minority.
Take Me Out
Richard Greenberg
A second playreading and discussion group I attended chose Take Me Out, a play about baseball players that is not about baseball. I did like this play, which won a Tony Award in 2003. It features Darren, an arrogant gay baseball player who casually comes out at the peak of his success, little anticipating the chaos his announcement will unleash. The team loses cohesion; even Darren’s best friend reveals a poisonous homophobia. When a bigoted redneck joins the team and openly denigrates his teammates for the color of their skin and their sexualities, the locker room gets increasingly tense. The story culminates with an act of violence that rips lives apart. This is also, of course, a deeply male play. But given the historic exclusion of women from playing baseball, this was expected. Overall I thought the play an interesting exploration of homophobia, racism, and friendship.
The word schistocytes sounds almost Yiddish, doesn’t it? What a relief (albeit a tiny one) to know what befell your kidneys and that you can return to chemo. Dr L sounds ace. I am with you on heat and commiserate fully. I wish I could send you air conditioners for your flat. Sending love instead xx
I love that you read Richard Greenberg's play ... he was a dear childhood friend who left us too soon. You would like his play, Three Days of Rain, which has more of a female sensibility.