The flight attendant whose apartment I’m subletting has an odd collection of coffee cups, including two from The Onion: “I Hate Whatever Today Is” and “I Wish I Were Dead.” Today I am drinking my second cup from I Wish I Were Dead, though I don’t really. I’m back on NY time, somehow – it must have been getting up with Peg before five yesterday to get her on the plane and going to sleep at 10:30 last night after reading three pages of Scott Spencer’s Ship Made of Paper – not sure I’m ready for a novel about a doomed love affair. May have to return to The Odyssey, which I read (again) in anticipation of the Humanities 101 class parents took at Reed last week.
Odysseus, there was a man with a tough road to hoe. But as Homer keeps saying, and sometimes O himself, “What good can come of grief?”
Adam was not feeling any side effects from the chemotherapy yesterday so after arising at the crack of noon I took him down to the Academy of Art where he enrolled in four classes for this coming semester. I later persuaded him to drop one, and only that did I agree to when I had word from the school that he could drop his classes before Sept 30th, if he wasn’t feeling well, and get a refund. I’m still not sure how much of an advocate he is for himself; telling people you are having chemo usually gets you some slack (he cut his hair a half-inch short before I got here, in anticipation of it falling out, which reminded me of an episode of Desperate Housewives when one of the women shaved her kid’s head because of lice and then realized she could cut to the head of the yoga class when people thought the kid had cancer…).
In fact, the prognosis is good at this point, though he is sort of an anomaly and hence a favorite among the doctors at General. “Adam’s going to be with us for a long time,” the head of urology told me the first time he talked; the onset of the cancer, and the complications in care brought about by his Aspergers seems to have caught their attention. One of the reasons doctors like public hospitals like SFGH is that they get more anomalies than they do in nice rich hospitals where preventative treatment is more the norm, I think. When I met the doctor in person this week she told me about people coming in with tumors the size of melons, wondering what the problem was, and going to the pharmacy to get Adam’s anti-nausea medicine was like a scene from a Denis Johnson novel.
One of the things I hope to do while I’m here, waiting to see how A reacts to the chemo, is get him to a treatment center for adults with Aspergers in Danville. My hope is that they will help with getting him more self-dependent, because my fear, like any parent’s with a (grown) child with issues is that I will die (or so they say) and he will not be able to take care of himself…
Okay, I’ll stop. I have work to do anyway. This morning’s meditation came courtesy Jack Kornfield, again, who tells the story of some American parents who adopted a child from India only to discover she was born deaf – and had cerebral palsy. After a year they returned to the agency and said they wanted another one like her. “Imagine this for yourself,” he writes. “Imagine adopting a child and learning that he or she was deaf or crippled, and then imagine a response that answers back without self-pity or fear and says, ‘I have one child like this, now please send me another.’”