My Youth (Circa 1986) Is Calling Me

It’s a quiet Saturday night and I want to get out.  The problem is all my friends are my age, which means too old to call up and say, “Let’s go out and find some excitement.”

Not only that, but I don’t think I have the energy to spend more than an hour anywhere tonight.  I don’t want to go out, but I don’t want to stay in.  So I just sit here feeling old.  I’ve been listening to music from the 80s on YouTube.  My youth is taunting me from the far side of a canyon 20+ years wide.  That little smartass.  I want him to shut up.  

Sometimes his bragging and boasting are pretty broad in scope.  Other times, he’s very specific about his exact location, mocking me with memories of it.  Tonight he’s shouting at me from 1986—a time when I felt especially bold and ready for a new adventure every day.  By early July, I’d been out of college a couple of months and in Tampa only a month.  That young version of me had no real plan, no idea what his next move would be.  But a fresh sheepskin and a wallet full of shiny credit cards keep that from bothering him.  These are his talismans, his shields from worry proof that he was a full-fledged adult.  He didn’t have these things only a few months earlier.  This was the time he dreamed of for four years.  Now he would savor it and take his place in the post-collegiate world..

Never mind that he doesn’t have much money and the humidity in Tampa is almost a hundred percent.  He’ll go out because it’s Saturday night and he’ll have so much fun it won’t matter that his clothes cling to him like they're afraid he'll go off and forget them at the nightclub or wherever else his whim might lead him.

If it’s July, 1986 he still loves the latest hit by Journey called Girl Can’t Help It.  It won’t end up being one of their biggest hits, but it will end up being his favorite song by them.  Maybe it was the steady, strong drum beat, like his steady, strong young heartbeat.  

He'd be deciding what to put on with his stereo turned up loud (to hell with the neighbors upstairs) playing his favorite Top 40 station, called Q Zoo.  Ironically, he's sliding into a pair of button fly Levi's 501s with a 28 inch waist and a madras shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  He surveys himself in a mirror and is quite please, thanks to his newfound habit of working out at a gym.  His confidence has seen a huge uptick.  This while We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off is on.  It seems this song is always on when he's getting dressed to go out or in the car headed out to prowl.

This song, World Destruction, might fill the dance floor.  He loves it and is pretty sure it isn't being played back in Arkansas.

He sees the movie Ruthless People and likes it as much as this Luther Vandross song from the soundtrack.

Maybe 1986 stands out so much because my body enderwent a bit of a makeover.  I found out i actually liked lifting weights and, even more surprising, it was working.  I heard this song, The Other Side of Life, alot at the gym.  It reminded me of what I was doing in Tampa.

By October, he's made several friends, almost all of them transplants from other states, just like himself.  There's a big street party in Ybor City at Halloween.  It's warm and people wear costumes leaving little to the imagination.  He spots several other young people, all with perfect bodies, dressed up (or maybe I should say down) as Baby New Year.  Twenty-two year old me has on old army pants, a green T-shirt, combat boots and a black bandana.  Rambo.  Word Up comes on and he climbs up on a 4-foot wall to watch the crowd dance in the intersection.  He sheds his inhibitions, along with his T-shirt, and carefully dances on the wall.  He feels free, alive, and fearless. 

Happy Birthday to Me--And All the Other Survivors

I rarely call much attention to my own birthday, especially since I passed 40 so long ago it’s almost disappeared from my rearview mirror.  If you count the two transplant surgeries, I get to celebrate three birthdays a year.  Unlike the original one, I can remember those two. 

But, this year is different. 

Last year, my birthday landed on Memorial Day.  It’s something that happens every few years.  It’s a bit surreal having a birthday that occasionally lines up with a roaming holiday like Memorial Day, Labor Day, or Thanksgiving.  At the end of May, cold and flu season is long over.  You don’t have to worry about being sick on your special day.  But, last year, there was some kind of bug going around and I coughed and sneezed all weekend.  I wondered if it was some kind of omen about the year to come.

It turns out that it was.

In the late fall, I was diagnosed with cancer.  It was a highly curable form of it, but it was cancer just the same.  That meant chemotherapy and all the nasty side effects that go with it.  By the time I had been at it for nine weeks, I was cured.  The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘intense.’  It was a relatively brief encounter with The Big C, but it left me reeling for a few months afterward.

Last winter, I spent a lot of time watching TV.  Beside sleeping and checking e-mail once in a while, it was the only thing I felt like doing.  I saw a commercial in which a woman sang “Happy Birthday” and said it was for everyone who had survived cancer to celebrate another birthday.  First of all, it was nice to see a commercial where no one was trying to sell me anything.  It was a relief to see one that wasn’t so weird and vague that I was left wondering just what the message was.  And it was really special to be honored in such a way.

That commercial was months early for me, but I had faith that I would live to mark another year.  I’ve always loved having a birthday this time of year.  It was always during those first, sweet days of summer vacation from school.  It put the period (sometimes the exclamation mark) at the end of the school year.  Move on to the next grade, then turn a year older.

I share a birthday (May 31^st) with celebrities Clint Eastwood, Joe Namath, Brooke Shields, and writer Walt Whitman.  Now, there’s a mixed bag!

This year, I share the celebration with everyone who has beat cancer and those living with it that made it through another year.  After cancer, life just doesn’t look the same.  We’re part of the same tribe now.  We have a bond.

You know what they say about getting older—it beats the alternative.

I belong to a few other tribes who know this fact better than most people do.  There are the others who had a kidney/pancreas transplant.  There are those who had another type of transplant.  There are the diabetics—that includes the current and former ones (like me).

This birthday will be especially sweet.  The cancer was timed well in my case.  I get to look and feel like myself again on that day.  I’m a year older, but thanks to the cancer, I’m “new and improved” in many ways.  Once you’ve dealt with cancer, everything else seems pretty easy.

And so, to all of us who have survived something intense, whether it was health-related, a natural disaster, or something caused by the malice or carelessness of another—Happy Birthday.  Not matter what day it is.

The Many Faces of Jim

I’m starting to recognize myself in the mirror again.  What I see looking back at me is a slimmer version of what I saw last fall.  It’s funny how a serious illness can make you feel more satisfied with the former status quo.  Not that I was dissatisfied before, but the cancer put things into perspective.

Today a good friend told me, “No offense, but last month you looked like death warmed over.”

None taken.  I already knew that.  I avoided looking at the mirror, even when I brushed my teeth.  After the beard and most of the hair on my head fell out, the bottom half of my face looked like a twelve-year-old boy’s.  The top half?  An old man.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to adjust to drastic changes in the way I look.  When my kidneys failed in 1997, my weight dropped to where it was in college (where it happens to be once again).  My skin was sort of grey.  In other words, I looked about like I felt.

I looked even worse when I got out of the hospital a year later after having a kidney/pancreas transplant.  A purple hematoma shaded the right side of my face and neck.  My arms and legs were like twigs.  I looked like a junkie with little bruises on my veins from blood tests and IVs.  Within a few months, my color was back and the Prednisone (a steroid and anti-rejection drug) had quickly increased my weight, and it showed in my face.  At first I welcomed it.

Then my looks started changing even faster.  Some days, I woke up to find I looked different from the night before.  No, it wasn’t after a night of heavy drinking, either.  I was still on high doses of Prednisone.  (In addition to weight gain, it has some other unpleasant side effects, but that’s another post.)  I bulked up like never before.  I loved how my shoulders looked like a football player’s.

My face, on the other hand, looked like Charlie Brown.  I moved back to Fayetteville and some people didn’t even recognize me.  I had to buy new clothes to fit my bigger, healthier, post-transplant, non-diabetic body.  That didn’t bother me.  What bothered me was having to buy 36-inch waist pants at my heaviest. 

For the first time in my life, a doctor cautioned me about putting on more weight.  “It’s easier to keep it off than to take it off later.”  Really?  I’d never had to think much about it.  Perpetually scrawny Jimbo had attained a maximum healthy weight. 

Welcome to the world of the non-diabetic.

The Prednisone dose gradually tapered off and the bulk went with it.  Most of it, anyway.  A year after the transplant I had the body I was meant to have.  With a normal metabolism, I could work out at the gym and hold on to the results.  Before, a day of two of high blood sugar could undo several days’ worth of weight-lifting.

So, at 35, I was more satisfied with my appearance than at any other time in my life.  My body had undergone changes more rapid and drastic than adolescence.  For several months, it was one surprise after another—some welcome, some not.  But it had been worth it.  For the next few years, I carried myself with more self-confidence than I’d ever known, secure in the knowledge that, finally, I didn’t look diabetic, or like a dialysis patient, or overweight, or underweight. 

When the kidney failed a few years later, I looked just as I had the first time around.  After a second transplant, my body and appearance returned to what had become normal for me.  I landed on 40 not only glad to be alive, but grateful I didn’t look ill--and happy that my face wasn’t steroid-plump and round like Charlie Brown’s.  Had I really dreaded f-f-forty?  Once again, a health issue had put things in proper perspective.  Getting older sure beats the alternative.

Then along came cancer.  I was too sick to even care how bad I looked.  Not just vanity, bold cold weather made sure I had my head covered whenever I left the house.  One nice thing about having cancer in the wintertime—it kept me inside, so few people saw just how sickly I looked. 

Several weeks after the chemo, my hair gradually began to sprout, along with the first signs of green in the spring.  My beard—and especially the hair on my head—are much softer than ever.  Who knows if or how long that will last?  I’ll just enjoy it as long as I have it.  It’s just the latest twist in the ever-changing story of my life, illustrated by my appearance.