It's Alive!

think I can cram cassoulet down this tube?

(For all of you who have asked for an update on my situation here at MD Anderson in Houston. Thanks for all the "Good Thoughts", 'Sláinte!', and "Hook 'em Horns", - they seem to be working like a charm, so to speak.)

Dear Friends,

I'm out of the hospital recovering at a nearby hotel (the ZaZa, which Kimmie dubbed the "Zaspital") thanks to their special "MD Anderson" rate, and Monday I go back for a last series of tests and pokes and prods, after which I may get to go home. Some observations:

- Surgery is now much easier on the patient than it was thirty years ago. Last time I was in an operating theatre for eight hours the after-effects of the anesthetic were almost as bad as from the surgery itself, and waking up in intensive care was miserable in every way. This time, the after-effects were almost zero. Amazing.

- No more cancer. Brilliant Lady Surgeon removed the cancer tissue and this time a brilliant zen master plastic surgeon took a hunk of unused muscle and tissue from my thigh and used it to fill in the gap. No cancer in the jawbone. None of my fears came true. No bone removal, bone grafts, mutilation, nada. If I can pass the swallowing test on Monday, I can get this plastic feeding tube out of my nose and make a beeline for my favorite Houston restaurants (Feast, Café Rabelais) and start inhaling soup in a serious fashion. And, as a nice present, the plastic surgeon miracle guy gave me a neck-lift!

As for the philosophical stuff, I must confess that one lingering effect of the anesthesia combined with the opiates (for pain) has been a rather dull mind this week, but a few random thoughts straggled to the surface after ten days of post-op recovery with a feeding tube and no food or drink by mouth allowed:

- Never, ever drink a glass of cold ice water again without stopping to enjoy it. I would scalp you and eat your eyeballs raw right now for a glass of ice water.

- Same goes for an ice-cold cerveza frosting the sides of a glass, foam dancing on top. I won't take this for granted again. 

- This is much like my previous epiphany only more basic; a cool glass of water, a spoonful of warm soup, the aroma of red wine as you tip the glass to your mouth. I'm being whipsawed by longing and gratitude in equal measure. Is it possible to regard such mundane things with tenderness? I am now. I bet I continue to, too.

- One of the larger ironies of this whole thing is that had I not had cancer again and come to this hospital for treatment, I might not have learned that I was a candidate for speech after thirty years of not speaking. Not pretty speech, or particularly easy to understand. But what the hell? Am I complaining? Do I look like such a putz?

- It is humbling and touching to be told "we are praying for you" or "we are sending good thoughts your way" or "our prayer group prayed for you today". While I remain a grumpy old skeptic, my heart is made tender by this constant inpouring of sweetness and faith directed into the aether on my behalf. Thank you all. I accept it gratefully.

- this has all happened so fast that it is almost impossible for (my) mind to process. From cancer diagnosis with its plunging primitive fear to "cured and healing" in a few weeks is as mind-blowing as any trip I've been on so far. I'm still way back there trying to deal with the past and already the future is crowding it out. 

- TV news has it's place, and it is valuable, but unless you take the time and mental muscle to read a good newspaper you still won't know what is actually going on in the world. I am now an expert on TV cable news, having just watched it 18 hours a day for the past twenty days or so. There is a lot of repetition of content, bloviation, and a lot of really dumb viewer input. I understand why; it is a matter of economics, ratings, viewer interest. Still doesn't alter the fact that TV is mostly eye-candy in bite-size bits, repeated as necessary to fill time. MSNBC does excellent night-time programming; CNN also, but less skewed towards my biases, and Fox should be hosed off the field into a swamp of their own bilge. Yeesh, what nonsense they peddle. Is there anything more amazing than the self-satisfaction of the know-nothing? Or worse, the professional pretend to know-nothing?

- Nurses rule. Literally. They make the rules on the ground. We need more and the job finally pays good money, so think about it. Thanks to you all for your dedication, knowledge, and aid to the sick and helpless. 

I shall return!

Joe Gracey, Jr.

It has been a hard week. I'm down to the last supper before my surgery at 5am. Today the doctors laid out all the different things they are going to cut and splice and paste out, onto, and into me. I still feel eminently lucky to be here at this amazing hospital and am thankful for the dedication and ability of  these people, but I am a little scared as I get closer to the reality of the thing. 

I have learned a lot about dining out in Houston this week- Houston has become a much better food town in the past few years and we have had some truly memorable meals here in preparation for a month of taking food in through a little plastic tube that will run into my nose and down to my stomach. 

Today a nurse wrote on my skin "this side" so they would cut me on the correct side of my neck. I was reminded of thirty years ago when I had big red squares on each side of my jaw to aim the radiation machines at, and when Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bobby Earl Smith saw me, they went upstairs at the Rome Inn and got red markers and drew big red boxes on their faces in solidarity with me after some asshole at the bar made fun of me.  I loved Stevie, he had a large, sweet heart. 

And, as Paul Bumgartner would always say, "And so we go..."

See you on the other side!

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey, Jr.

What, Again?

Joe in Lyon, France with chicken liver salade, happy

I figure it’s time to talk to my friends and readers who may be interested in what I’ve been up to lately. The quick answer is I learned that I have cancer. Again. After thirty joyous years of being a proud “survivor” I’m back being a “patient” again.

As I have written about here in the past, my first experiences with cancer and recovery actually led to some good things, like my intense interest and pleasure in food and wine and “life its own self”, to quote the sainted Dan Jenkins. Most of my cooking and eating experiences since 1979 are the outgrowth of those battles with cancer and the aftermath in which I began to reprioritize my new life.

Since then my wife and I wrote a quirky little cookbook/novella, “The Amazing Afterlife of Zimmerman Fees”. We teach cooking classes at Central Market in Austin and we have been known to cook for parties and dinners for money, and to be serious about it. I have written for Saveur magazine and others. We cook for our own pleasure and the pleasure of our friends and family and guests, as another expression of our artistic personalities. Cooking is fun, is expression, is life, family, reunion, reinforcement. And, as one of my writer heroes Jim Harrison says, “Eat or Die!”

So, to find out I have cancer now is rather unnerving. I have a small cancerous area on the inside of my gums, next to my jaw. Nobody knows yet just how large or deep it may be. I plunged into fear- fear that I would lose the ability to eat at all, much less slowly and laboriously as it is now. That I would lose my lower jaw, that I would lose my face, or my life. When you learn something like this your imagination runs as wild as a pet chimp let loose in a mall of horrors. What if this? What if that? What will they do to me? How much pain? Horror? Misery? Blood? The human mind is capable of both soaring sweetness and mindless blundering fear.

However, there is a vast beaming City on a Hill (a hill of hope only, since Houston is so flat the gutters don’t flow) called M.D. Anderson. On going there last week I met a team of brilliant doctors and speech pathologists and nurses and beaming staff, smiles and kindness at every turn. Capability everywhere brought to an acute point- you realize you are in the place where the best people are doing the most advanced and specialized things.

Instead of sadness and despair, people are undergoing treatment with hopeful eyes and confident faces. Treatments that out there in the world look sci-fi. Chemo, radical surgeries, skin and tissue grafts, skin radiated until it is literally glowing red. Out there we are great oddities and people stare at us uncontrollably (more on that later, I have thought about that a good deal over the last 30 years) but inside MDA we are all just people being worked on, no big deal.

In a week I went from runaway terror to runaway giddiness after I finally got a dose of reality. A brilliant lady surgeon who made me feel a hundred times better within an hour. A chemo specialist whose intelligence and sense of humour were like a cool drink of water on a West Texas summer day when the grasshoppers are louder than the oil derricks. I am apparently to be surrounded by a team of doctors and researchers all of whom would be considered the best in their fields in any hospital in the world. An oncological dentist whose mind, while examining me, begins to fly through vast expanses of possibilities and then quickly draw up tentative plans and ideas to make me better, almost whole, again. We ask her what she is going to do and her answer is “I’m going to think!” And when she thinks, big stuff happens.

I like being in the care of women. It reassures me. There is nothing in the world more competent than a woman who has triumphed in a man’s world, as this Western medical world surely has been for hundreds of years . As I observed to Kimmie afterwards at late lunch at our favorite Houston bistro, Café Rabelais, you can bet that any girl who makes it this far would have been able to kick the classroom-ass of any guy in school, both because she is really, really sharp, and because she has had to work harder to prove it.

And, now, as the final, wild, impossible cherry on top of this sudden Gulf Coast Good News Sundae, the women (again) in speech pathology say I should be able to speak again. Uh-huh. I, in my sternest fashion, say that I come here with very little hope of that possibility. Jodi the speech pathologist is not fazed by my fatherly gravity. She sneaks up on me and jams a little white tube up my nose and down my throat and tells me to loosen up and quit whining. When she has it halfway to China, she tells me to breathe in and when I breathe out, say “One, Two, Three”. Ok. I breathe in, open my mouth which I haven’t used to speak a word in exactly thirty years, and out comes a gurgling, deep “one, two, three” and it is me, talking quite clearly. I look over and Kimmie has tears coming out of the corners of her eyes and down her sweet cheeks and she says “that is the first thing I ever heard him say”. I laugh and say I sound like one of those movie swamp monsters. They ask me if I want to say anything else and instead of saying “I love you” to Kimmie like I, played by Russell Crowe, will say when they make this movie, I just raise my hands in claws and gurgle “AAAaaaaarrrrghhhhh” like a swamp monster. It gets a big laugh but I notice the other speech lady also has tears and she has to leave. My nose-tube taskmaster Jodi tells me about this patient she has who is in exactly the same shape I am in- no larynx, no tongue, but he is, like me, shaped correctly to be able to use this method to “speak” and has been now for six years. She will put me in touch with him so I can get it from the horse’s mouth, via email.

Yikes. As of today, I’m still walking around this one, kicking the tires and wondering if I can drive this baby or not. It is the Porsche Cayenne of my dreams, as Rodney said later. I am imagining the comic possibilities of this new toy, saying ridiculous things, cursing, singing in a monotone in a voice like Tom Waits. Let me at it, I can’t wait to try this out. Surgery, smurgery. Pain? Gimme morphine for my pain and red wine for my brain. The memory of pain is short. Me talking again? The crazed wonder of it is carrying me away on a river of impossible happiness.

So, that’s what I been doing while school was out. Wish me luck and wait for the audio file of me singing “Picture in a Frame” to appear soon in this space.

Peace and Love,

Joe Gracey, Jr.