Matthew Parker: Foot Soldier

There are cancer tumors in my lungs, one in each, newly arrived and waiting patiently for their next move, like tank commanders scouting out territory for a soon-to-be-fought battle. After blitzkrieging from my throat, they’re expecting orders and reinforcements even as the throat tumor was annihilated with both chemical weapons and a barrage of baby atomic bombs.

I was diagnosed with viral (HPV) throat cancer in February of 2024. The first defensive move was to pull six teeth, including all of my remaining molars, followed by five weeks of a full-frontal assault using the engines of war mentioned above. It began fine, but several weeks in the chemo put me in the emergency room when, a few hours after infusion, I began shaking violently and burning up with fever. Upon arrival at the ER, I foolishly assumed that I could not be in better hands. Once admitted, however, the medical staff were determined to treat every malady that had ever plagued me except the actual fucking cancer. They were indeed so thorough they even insisted upon bombarding me with more radiation in the form of a chest Xray. 

“No, no, no,” I pleaded. “I don’t have pneumonia.” 

This was true. As a junkie and petty thief, I often found myself caught like a foot soldier behind enemy lines in the war on drugs. And, like most street-level addicts, it was inevitable that I’d become a prisoner of war. As such, I’ve had pneumonia a number of times while incarcerated – where the pinnacle of treatment for just about anything was two Tylenols – so I know what it feels like when a virus, like the flu, morphs into an infection that floods the lungs with fluid. A major symptom of both illnesses, for example, is coughing, a symptom conspicuously absent, both during my admittance and after.

But they were adamant, certain that more radiation was exactly what my body in general and my lungs in particular required. 

“We need to be sure,” a nurse soothed. 

Those bouts of pneumonia, incidentally, along with decades of smoking have left scarring in my lungs – aka nodes or nodules – which have been dutifully lighting up x-ray images for a decade or so, like B52 bombers blipping on a radar. 

Three days later, the fever gone, I was released, which is eerily similar to being cut loose from jail or prison, except this time I was packed with a bevy of both expensive and frankly useless medications, including tranquilizers that neither I nor any of my actual, non-emergency-room doctors requested. 

The latter’s plan of attack, btw, involved strafing my throat Monday through Friday with laser-guided baby A-bombs in combination with weekly infusions of chemical weapons. But when the hospital staff capriciously canceled the former, insisting I was too sick to travel, I called my radiation oncologist, who overrode their orders and sent an ambulance to transport me the 12-odd miles from my hospital bed on Geary Boulevard to the Kaiser Cancer Center in South Francisco. 

It should therefore come as no surprise that, after being cut loose from the hospital, I was terrified that the next infusion of chemo would put me back in. To avoid this, I consulted my friend and colleague Margi, whose advice was to stay out of emergency rooms at all costs. Margi is a cancer survivor and her dad an MD, so they’re pretty hip to the whole scene and, as such, were soldiering me through the throat cancer war. Below is a text exchange between us. Note that there may be hours or even days between messages:

Me:

…they told me to take Tylenol both before and after chemo, but I was thinking something stronger, like aspirin or ibuprofen. If I run a fever again after chemo, they want me to check back into the hospital, and don’t sweat the copays. 

Margi:

Chemo team kept saying [to me] not to take NSAIDs, but Tylenol doesn’t do shit. I took Excedrin. Fuck ‘em.  I mean seriously: we are already poisoning our body. What’s a little NSAID?

Me:

I’m just trying to prevent fever. And this isn’t any old fever. We are talking shaking like a leaf fever… That’s what scares me into the hospital, where Lyft and copays are in cahoots. 

Margi:

Drink a ridiculous amount of water.  And take aspirin – works best for me.

If fever is high enough to cause shaking and lasts more than 36 hours, I would seek assistance.

Signed, Doctor’s Daughter Margi. 

Me:

I can’t get this fever to break, Margi. It just keeps coming back. On the plus side the aspirin knock it down to almost nothing 

Margi:

Oy! The fever is your body fighting back. I think it’s a good sign. In a weird, Cancerland way. 

Take the aspirin every 5-6 hours to stave off the fever. Don’t wait until you are shivering. 

Me:

No fever this morning, but dry heaving, too many aspirin. I feel pretty good, although the pain is off the charts at times.  

Last night I had David drive me to the emergency room, where I currently reside in ICU. Good news is that there’s lots of good news, number one of which is this vicious rumor that ICUs are horribly comfortable (relatively speaking) units has been confirmed. They were concerned that my throat was swelling shut, but this is not the case and all other vitals are good. 

My second chemo-causing trip to the hospital yielded almost the exact same results, including another bombardment of known-to-cause-cancer radiation to my lungs. I guess they thought that, even if it wasn’t pneumonia a week earlier, it might be this time, but either way they sure as fuck weren’t taking my word for it. 

They put me in intensive care, btw, because, they said, my dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing, was life threatening. At this point in my treatment I was no longer eating, my survival dependent upon energy drinks. Swallowing just three of them a day was agony because the baby A-bombs had all but welded my throat shut.

Upon my release this second time I was face-to-face with my last week of treatment, which happened to be the last week of May. Determined to stay out of the hospital, I ate aspirin like candy after chemo and ignored the fever that kept breaking through. Hospitals, as Margi so cleverly surmised, are horrible places for actual patients.

But the end of treatment did not mark and end of symptoms. Quite the contrary. They got worse. For eight weeks I was mostly bedridden, dehydrated, and 35 pounds lighter. It wasn’t until the last week of July, after I kicked the opioids, that I began to feel better and eat a modicum of solid food again, and by the end of August I was back teaching full-time at Berkeley.

My Pet Scan in mid-September, however, revealed the tumors in my lungs. A biopsy later proved that the cancer had metastasized. The war is still afoot, but this time there will be neither chemical weapons nor A-bombs. We are rather going full-on immunotherapy. This is good news for a number of reasons, first of which is that its side effects are often mild or even nonexistent. And although the odds aren’t great, I’ve been beating the odds for most of my life. The key is to keep the cancer in remission and, since the tumors are tiny and thus far harmless, we do believe this is the best path forward.

But I’m not delusional. I know I likely can’t win this war over the long run, but I can win a battle or even a series of battles, which are, after all, a foot soldier’s specialty; survival on a day-to-day basis using a variety of weapons or combinations of weapons, including first and foremost exercise and good nutrition and perhaps another volley of chemical or atomic or maybe even surgery over the next hill. In this way days can stretch into weeks, months, years, and hopefully even decades. 

Margi taught me an axiom: “When’s the best time to get cancer?” And the answer: “Ten years from now.” This because the treatments keep getting better and better, her point being of course that there was no immunotherapy when she had her cancer.

Moreover, I’m both trained and hardened. During my time as a foot soldier of the war on drugs, I’ve been faced down by cops, sheriffs, Secret Service agents, U.S. Marshalls, the FBI, judges (more than I can count), prosecutors, wardens, detention officers, corrections officers, parole boards and parole officers, probation officers, murderers, kidnappers, armed robbers, rapists, armies of White Supremacists, members of the Black Guerrilla Family, Mafioso (both Mexican and your more traditional) and once, a Colombian drug lord. I’ve also been shot at, pistol whipped, robbed, and beaten senseless on a number of occasions (including twice by cops and once by detention officers), survived five separate stints in prison (one fed beef and four state) and three overdoses. Given this, I’ll be damned if I let fucking cancer win any battle in the end. Not without a fight.

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Matthew Parker teaches writing at UC Berkeley.

Copyright 2024 Matthew Parker