“The truth of the matter is, Mako,” I told him, “if I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough.” That fact is entirely due to Jake, who dreams big and then connives ways to make things happen. We have gone many places in the world, on assignment, our adventures paid for by the editors of various magazines, often the generous (and fishing-obsessed) Pat Walsh, editor of Outdoor Canada. Jake and I call each other “Mako” and “Thresher,” both appellations being species of shark. If that seems hopelessly ten years old to you, well, it kind of is. When I’m with the boys, I’m ten years old. When I’m with a woman, I mature slightly, and I mean ever so slightly, to fourteen or fifteen, giddy and hormone-addled, unable to believe that I am actually with a woman. Anyway, I said to Jake, “If I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough. So I’m thinking maybe . . . Paris?”
But you lose most control, I think, to the doctors. A couple of days after my diagnosis, I went to meet the team who would be looking after me. That’s how Toronto East General Hospital works. There was a team of doctors, consisting of Dr. Li (the chemo doctor), Dr. —— (radiation), and Dr. Simone (the thoracic surgeon). Of them all, I liked Dr. Simone—Carmine Simone—the best. He was a dark-haired young man, a touch on the burly side, who shook my hand and greeted me warmly as “the guest of honour.” Dr. Li was quite an attractive young woman, so you might think I would have liked her the best, but she was a bit reserved. She spoke using statistics, and you know what Mark Twain said about statistics. For example, one of the first things she said was that the median life expectancy for someone with my condition was one year.
It took a while, a few weeks even, for me to realize what this meant. Not the “you’re going to die” part. I got that. But the mathematical meaning—that half of the people with stage I V lung cancer live less than a year, half of them more than a year, with no cap or restriction on the time thereafter— was long in coming.
Dr. ——, the radiation guy, dismissed himself from our meeting early on. In a friendly enough way, he said that I was not a candidate for radiation, unless they were to discover that the cancer had already spread to my brain, in which case they would radiate before they did any chemo. The plan was to hit me with first-line chemicals, the ones that were most successful in most cases.
“But,” Dr. Li said, “the statistics show that this chemotherapy on average extends life expectancy by only two or three months.”
“Okay,” we asked. Dorothy, Martin, and Jill were with me. “What does that mean?”
“It means that if two people both have your condition, and one receives chemotherapy and one doesn’t, the first will outlive the other, probably, by two to three months.”
“Oh,” said I.
Still, I was more than willing to undergo chemotherapy, because, well, I was scared, and it seemed time to fight like a puma with its ass backed up against a wall. “Besides,” I announced, “what’s the use of being a big burly boy if you can’t take a little chemo?” I have always bounced back and forth between “stocky” and, well, “fat,” but all of a sudden this was a good thing. The chemo might very well have a negative effect on my appetite (let’s see it try, said I), and I would lose weight, so it was good, Dr. Li observed, that I had something in reserve. My friend (and the Porkbelly keyboardist) Richard Bell died of cancer, and before he did he lost an appalling percentage of himself from the therapy. True, Richard recovered enough to play on our second album, but then he died. It seemed somehow to me that he had simply vanished into thin air.
The first couple of weeks following a dire diagnosis are pure and utter chaos, and chemotherapy seemed like the best path to follow. Indeed, the doctors took me on a tour of the chemo centre at the hospital, and it was a strangely upbeat place. People sat in comfy chairs, attached to the apparatus that delivered the chemicals, and read books or played board games with their visitors. The woman in charge said that in a recent survey, the chemotherapy ward had received a 100 per cent patient satisfaction rating. That’s pretty impressive for a place where people are getting various poisons pumped into their bodies in order to destroy wild, rampaging C cells. We were introduced to a man named Wilson, who, when he was admitted to hospital, had been emaciated and spitting up blood. (See, if I’d been emaciated and spitting up blood, I might not have been quite so dim-witted with my self-diagnosis.) Wilson was on his last round of chemo (he had stage IV lung cancer, like me, so he got six doses, spaced three weeks apart, also my designated course), and he looked great. He was bright-eyed and smiling, and he’d actually put on weight!
But then something happened. Not long after D-Day, I went to interview Joe Hall, in whose musical ensemble, the Continental Drift, I had played throughout much of my twenties. In those years, Joe was typically wild-eyed, and he trailed liquor and pharmaceutical effluvia in his wake. But for the past many years, he has been sober and living in Peter-borough, Ontario, where he’s raised a couple of new kids and written some wonderful songs. The local arts community had decided to honour Joe, and I was asked to interview him onstage as part of the process.
Joe was always lean, but maturity has rendered him gaunt, his face a chiaroscuro, light beaming from his eyes, shadow in the shallow of his cheeks. He was very excited about this celebration of his life, which he referred to as Putting Joe out to Pasture Day. Many local musicians were on hand, and all of the former Continental Drifters were there. Indeed, George Dobo, the original keyboardist, and his wife had been living for several months in the house directly beside Joe’s.
I would like to transcribe some of the interview for you, but in order to do so I would have to revisit the taped version, because I have very little memory of what took place. It is not so much that I was drunk or anything; the problem was that I was in some discomfort and labouring for breath. I didn’t like the sight of even small flights of stairs; five or six risers, and I was huffing and puffing. Being me, of course, I put this down to a hangover—or, at least, I was unable to distinguish hangover pain from cancer-related pain. But here’s a brief exchange:
JOE: I remember sitting in the Dominion Hotel in Vancouver, and I said to you, “We need drugs.” And you responded . . .
PAUL: We are drugs.
JOE: And that’s where the title of that song you and I wrote came from.
PAUL: Right, right. You know, I suppose I meant “our bodies are made up of chemicals . . .”
After the interview, the newly reconstituted Joe Hall and the Continental Drift played “Nos Hablos Telefonos,” one of the band’s most famous tunes. It was just like old times, except that George played the guitar, as he has for some reason abandoned the keyboards. The song was still programmed into my bass-playing fingers, since the group played it at every show we ever gave. Then I cleared off the stage, making room for J.P. Hovercraft, my bass-playing successor, and Jill said, “Come on, I’ll take you back to Toronto, and we can go to the hospital.”
Now, I don’t mean to be giving such a matter-of-fact account, but it was this little setback that put me on the real journey. At the hospital, a doctor poked a long needle into my back and drew off another three litres of fluid. I wasn’t even admitted on that occasion. I spent most of the night in emergency, then managed to convince the doctor in charge to let me loose. Not that I was developing an intense hatred of hospitals or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was reforming my opinion of them, which had previously been quite low. When Richard was in hospital, for example, I only visited on a couple of occasions (one of which he slept through), and I found the experience depressing. I even announced to some friends that, when my time came, I was going to eschew the institution, because I didn’t want to be in a hospital, and I didn’t want people to come visit me in a hospital. I think now what I was really reacting to was the fact that Richard was dying, cancer slowly draining his life force. Hospitals are pretty amazing, and the people employed there, everyone from the surgeons to the guys who pushed me down the hallways to radiology, are overworked and caring. But I managed to get sprung on that occasion, sometime around dawn, and I went back to the house on First Avenue.
Dr. Li was concerned