Before I get to the cancer news, let me get something right up front: it has been a spectacular weekend. This weekend was like a commercial for weekends written by writers from the Wonder Years and shot by Robert Altman.

A bunch of my best friends came up to visit this weekend — two guys I’ve known since kindergarten, one guy since the seventh grade, and then my friend Mark Koch who’s been on the scene since ninth grade. He’s the new guy.

It was Mark’s bachelor party weekend. Nobody’s going to make a smash comedy hit out of it, as the whole enterprise was more bourbon and burlesque than blow and strippers. We had dinner at Peter Luger, hiked over the Williamsburg Bridge to have a look at the streetcorner that was the cover of “Paul’s Boutique,” walked the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton Beach and saw a hot and hilarious burlesque show at Bar on A.

My roommate and upstairs neighbor kindly gave up their rooms for the cause and let us spread out in the building a little, too.

Not too shabby at all.

I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time. And at points I had my hands over my incision, afraid I was literally going to bust a stitch.

Instead I just stretched. Stretched and healed. I haven’t felt this good in a really, really long time.

So here’s the doctor’s news from the other day:

I’m healing up fine, textbook perfection, basically. The CT/PET scans showed one questionable lymph node up in my throat, but he jabbed around in there with his fingers pretty hard and said “whatever, I’m not feeling anything in there, so let’s forget about that one for now.”

There’s these markers in the blood that cancerous tumors give off — they differ by the type of tumor. But for simplicity’s sake here, let’s collectively call them Carl.

Normal levels of Carl in a healthy adult male might be between 0-5. My Carl quotient was burying the needle at 1,250 before surgery. So they drew blood from me a week after surgery, and whatever my Carl levels were, that’s the baseline right there.

Say I’ve got a Carl of 100 a week after surgery. Then a week later, my doctor expects me to have half as much Carl — a level of 50. A week later, Carl’s supposed to be down to 25. Eventually, those levels will bottom out and kinda flatline. And if Carl flatlines at a level that’s higher than normal, we start chemotherapy.

Awesome. Really, that makes sense to me — it’s careful and cautious, and following the results scientifically. What I wanted was for my doctor to clap and dust his hands off, then say, “that’s it, you’re done!”

But that’s not gonna happen for a good while yet. As a wise man named Tom Petty once said, “the waiting is the hardest part.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

testicles

Originally uploaded by ai pohaku

My friend Rob and I have this ongoing juvenile argument.

He loves to ask people:

Which is better, having one testicle, or having three?

He’d rather have one, he says, because

I’d rather be a little sad than a lot creepy.

I disagree. I’d rather be strange than pitiful, myself. But it turns out I might not have much of a choice.

A few weeks ago, I was doing a bit of a self-test — got to do these things once you’re in your ’30s — and I discovered that one of my testicles was the approximate size and weight of a Cadbury Creme Egg. I made an appointment with a GP who gave it a perfunctory juggle, shrugged, and put me on antibiotics for a week.

It didn’t work. I got referred to a specialist who I went to see today. He ran some ultrasounds, then frowned and called up NYU, sent me across town for an emergency sonogram.

“That can’t be good,” I thought as I got into the cab. But it was all moving too fast for me to think about it.

So there’s this mass growing in the center of one of my nuts, making it all big and really hard. It feels like I could pound nails with the thing. Or really surprise someone in my Muay Thai class. But instead of being useful it’s consumed a lot of the healthy tissue in there and needs to come out.

As the doctor says, if it’s benign, it’s a problem because it could keep growing. If it’s malignant — out it comes, too. The procedure’s called a Radical Orchiectomy, and it’s about as fun as it sounds.

Luckily it doesn’t seem to have spread anywhere, and it’s been caught early. This is one of the few truly curable cancers in the world. Lance Armstrong let his go WAY further than mine, and he’s fine.

But still. Ain’t THAT a bitch. I’m going to lose one of my testicles, sooner rather than later. And I’m not even going to get to lose it to a hungry octopus, or at the tip of a pirate’s saber, or some other cool way. Just to one of the most common, curable cancers in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m getting a second, third, opinion. And I feel lucky that this isn’t gonna take me out. Or at least not for long. Reproductive health and hormones should still be ticking right along. That’s why we have two of these things, apparently.

But I’m reeling, feeling betrayed by my body and mourning the loss of a body part already. I know it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I mean, SHIT.

So tomorrow’s going to be more doctor’s appointments and blood work, just to be sure. I’m told that I can get a prosthetic testicle put in during surgery if I want one. Not sure what to do about that one just yet. Does it even matter? Or, more importantly: does it cost much extra to get two prosthetics in addition to the real one?

**Update** I just had an idea. I wonder if I could get a musket ball from the Civil War encased in silicone and put in there instead. That could be really cool — keep a little Virginia with me at all times.

Popularity: 3% [?]

A good friend of mine sent me this writing gig post from Craigslist in L.A. As if dating, online and off, weren’t hard and strange enough:

ghost writer

Very busy executive would like to hire a writer to send emails on his behalf on personal dating websites. And do a few enails back and forth to get the ball rolling..

This person needs to know how to write in a masculine, but romantic way and at the same time create a challenge for the reader of the email

I’m from the South and I live in New York, so I’m not sure how y’all work it out there in Los Angeles. On the one hand, it seems like this dude runs the risk of getting his ass found out as soon as he does some ill-advised Blackberry thumb-stumbling of his own. But on the other hand, I’m not sure that this guy’s target audience would be smart enough to notice or deep enough to care.

I’m wondering here – what’s the real goal? Is it to meet someone of quality? Or just get laid? What’s the backup plan when this guy gets found out? I mean, if the ghostwriter succeeds, then they’re able to do something that the poster himself cannot do. This just won’t last.

I’m curious, too: what kind of responses did he get? How does one land this job, and what’s the time commitment?

One thing’s for sure though: whoever takes this job and takes it seriously is a putz, big-time. It sucks needing work and it sucks needing money, but I’d imagine what really sucks is looking in the mirror and knowing that you’re Cyrano de Bergerac with a dick for a nose.

Popularity: 4% [?]

There’s a pretty cool piece of wheatpasted subway art on the Uptown-bound side of the A/C/E at 23rd street in Manhattan. The posters are pasted in what had been empty spaces for advertising — these knocked my shoes loose a little when I saw them on Saturday morning:

For Google/ machine-reading purposes, the posters are images of Marilyn Monroe looking particularly lost and dazed with bleary, Warhol-style makeup. The text of the poster reads:

Then it hit me. I’m not going to be famous. I won’t get to be a rock star. I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time.

You can see a closeup after the jump …

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]