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" RE-INTRO, RE-ENTRY Two years since diagnosis, and I am cancer-free. Don&amp;#039;t call myself a survivor . . . yet; feels too early. Don&amp;#039;t call myself a &amp;quot;warrior,&amp;quot; either. That&amp;#039;s for the charity-fund appeal and pink-ribbon ad-campaign writers. But I&amp;#039;ve taken nine months of treatment (&amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re gonna pound you,&amp;quot; my radiation doc said); recovered from life-saving surgery with most of my body intact (&amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t stop cutting till you see the table,&amp;quot; my colorectal surgeon said [in jest]); adopted a child; and I have started hugging my family and friends a bit harder. Call me middle-aged guy in remission--make that recovery--because the way I see it, remission only means temporary absence of disease. Call me healthy but wary. Been bouncing back and forth from the U. S. to London, where [my wife] Paula is once again working as associate producer on the Harry Potter films. Been writing again, even some new kinds of stuff for a documentary I&amp;#039;m trying to get made. Been getting used to getting cancer behind me, even if it&amp;#039;ll always seem ahead of me. Also been getting used to being a new dad, to giving all sorts of care at all hours to Baby Josh, kind of like Paula did for me. Still don&amp;#039;t feel, though, that beating advanced colon cancer has made me &amp;quot;a better man.&amp;quot; Even if I am, I&amp;#039;ve noticed, more apt to sign off letters, cards, and notes with &amp;quot;love.&amp;quot;  PULP FRICTION . . . Whirrrr-chop-chop-vrruuuuuuuhhhh!!! Got a juicer the other week, a bona fide institutional kind that weighs a ton, cost nearly $300, and grinds the shit out of pretty much anything that grows on trees or out of the ground. Vruhhhh-chop. There&amp;#039;s no scientific proof of freshly extracted juice adding 6.2 years to my life or anything; just advice from a good friend from Tulsa and a reasoned attempt to keep things that shouldn&amp;#039;t be growing inside me from growing inside me. CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE &amp;quot;You ever get pissed at me that you ate healthy all those years, and I didn&amp;#039;t . . .&amp;quot; asks Geoff on a rare day of candor-studded best-friend banter, &amp;quot;and you got cancer?&amp;quot; Truth is, I don&amp;#039;t get ticked at Geoff for that; I actually worry about his health. And he is allowed to say stuff like this, we agree, because his mom died of cancer when he was thirteen (and his dad, of diabetes complications, three years later). Have another bacon-cheese, pal-o-mine. CELEBRITY AND MY CANCER Walking down skinny England&amp;#039;s Lane, six weeks posttreatment, passing by a suitably Brit street sign: DEAD SLOW PLEASE--CHILDREN. Eyeing a guy wearing, of all things on a warm day, a red beret. Thinking I wouldn&amp;#039;t bug the guy in New York or L. A., but this is London for chrissakes, and he isn&amp;#039;t exactly blending in. I introduce myself to Tim Burton, without going googly or mentioning Beetlejuice, and end up inviting him to the premiere of Harry Potter. Then I speed-dial Paula to warn her what I&amp;#039;ve done without checking with any Warner Bros. honchos.  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve lost your filter,&amp;quot; she says. Meaning I&amp;#039;ll say pretty much anything I want these days, to pretty much anybody. Even to a guy who had the gall to remake Planet of the Apes with Marky Frickin&amp;#039; Mark.  &amp;quot;HE&amp;#039;S LIVIN&amp;#039; &amp;quot; [EXCERPT FROM PAULA&amp;#039;S JOURNAL] Back in England, I find I&amp;#039;m living with a forty-four-year-old teenager. Curt won&amp;#039;t be where he doesn&amp;#039;t want to be; or with who he doesn&amp;#039;t want to be with. He&amp;#039;s spontaneous and seizing the moment, not wasting time with small talk, pretending he&amp;#039;s interested. He went to a play on a whim on Friday . . . Rent (again) . . . with some college kids he didn&amp;#039;t know who had an extra cheap ticket to spare. He ran into them in Leicester Square. I tell him I was worried. Couldn&amp;#039;t reach him for hours. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m livin&amp;#039;!&amp;quot; he said, and thank God he is.  WORDS YOU DON&amp;#039;T WANT TO HEAR &amp;quot;. . . She will be cremated today after the medical specialists learn what they can to assist other warriors against cancer.&amp;quot; --E-mail from a friend, about another friend, on a day I wasn&amp;#039;t planning to think about my cancer. Much. WORDS YOU WANT TO HEAR &amp;quot;I recently read your articles this spring and was compelled to write to you to express how I was moved by your story and your writing. I will keep you in my prayers. If there is anything I can provide from my meager life in the Midwest, please don&amp;#039;t hesitate to contact me. Very Truly Yours, Chris Jensen&amp;quot; Didn&amp;#039;t contact him; he provided it anyway. SOMEBODY ELSE&amp;#039;S TROUBLE Every Thursday, when I read the BBC.com weekly series by science writer Ivan Noble, about the malignant &amp;quot;tumour&amp;quot; that&amp;#039;s found a home in his skull, I . . . read . . . every . . . word . . . incredibly . . . slow-ly. More slowly, perhaps, than anything I&amp;#039;ve ever read on my crappy Apple laptop. As if by doing so, I&amp;#039;m showing this guy in his mid-thirties--newly married with a baby daughter for God&amp;#039;s sake--some extra respect. Or by my doing so maybe his &amp;quot;fast-growing&amp;quot; tumor will somehow grow more slowly. Because, as he says, he doesn&amp;#039;t expect it to go away anytime soon. Not to compare, but I heard the word curable from at least one doctor during my diagnosis. Noble heard no such thing from his esteemed neurosurgeon. &amp;quot;There are no good brain tumours to have, [the neurosurgeon] said, but if there were, mine would not be one of them.&amp;quot;  NEW LANG SYNE 12/27/02 TO: Chris and Monica FROM: curtpmail@aol.com Dear monica and chris,  i went skating the other day, skated on the same rink i skated on two years ago this week, when i found out i had cancer. . . . i went skating the other day, skated with the same friend i skated with two years ago in boulder, the one i didn&amp;#039;t have the strength to tell that awful day i just found out i had colon cancer. . . .  i went skating the other day; did laps around the rink one way, then the other, while watching a mom with her 2-year-old and his double runners--double runners that didn&amp;#039;t seem to be working very well. i went skating the other day, as a new dad with clean CT scans. . . .  i went skating the other day, thinking about joshua joining me next year on that rink in colorado; thinking about paula who will be there worrying if he&amp;#039;s going too fast around the corners, and I&amp;#039;ll be thinking, &amp;quot;all&amp;#039;s pretty much right with the world,&amp;quot; thanks to good doctors, truly great friends like you, and some powerful, prayerful, medicine. i went skating the other day, and this time the christmas tunes didn&amp;#039;t sound tinny, false, taped. this time they echoed off the ice and into my ears, into my heart. now, everybody off the damn ice, so they can scrape it . . . clean it . . . and let everybody start over . . . doncha&amp;#039; know? happy new year, guys, to you and your amazing family, love, curt THREE TIMES A YEAR [EXCERPT FROM P.&amp;#039;S JOURNAL] I&amp;#039;m in a lot better place now, I guess because it&amp;#039;s January. Next scans aren&amp;#039;t till the end of April. That&amp;#039;s because Dr. [Allen] Cohn says, &amp;quot;every three to four months (for the first two years after surgery, then every six).&amp;quot; And Curt&amp;#039;s figured out, if we stretch it out till four, that&amp;#039;s one less per year, plus less radiation.  I find myself now living my life with this benchmark. So far relieved, and filled with joy, but as the weeks pass, feeling the dread that so slowly creeps up on me, as the next trip home gets closer. When we sit in the oncologist&amp;#039;s office, trying to anticipate and read into his every expression . . . hearts-are-racing . . . then learning he hasn&amp;#039;t read them yet; will be right back. . . . Trying to hear the pace of his footsteps as he returns to see if they will give me any insight as to the news about to be delivered. Do we get to continue our lives as they are--so full of love and joy, and our new baby, Joshua . . . or do we put on our gear again and go into the fire and fight for life? AS A JAYBIRD One thing I&amp;#039;ve noticed: Ever since cancer, ever since surgery, ever since I&amp;#039;ve owned a post-op stoma protruding ever so slightly from my torso, I don&amp;#039;t flit about the house so often as I used to, naked. MY ADOPTION STORY You don&amp;#039;t enter the world of adoption lightly. But in the summer of &amp;#039;96, after Paula almost died following an ectopic pregnancy that exploded, sort of, into her uterine insides, where some nasty arteries reside and where she internally bled quarts of blood for way too long before they figured out why her blood pressure had dropped to &amp;quot;0&amp;quot; . . . we thought of it. No, you don&amp;#039;t enter the world of adoption lightly, so we have been in it heavily now, for two years running. And we have a son who wasn&amp;#039;t born when I had my Big Run with colorectal cancer, and what am I going to tell him about it, not yet sure. Yet when he sees me in the shower wearing a Band Aid--colored bag on my lower torso, he&amp;#039;s gonna ask eventually, so I will tell him what makes sense, what is true, along with the fact that were it not for my cancer, or Paula&amp;#039;s ectopic, we may not have found Joshua Daniel, ever. FALSE ALARM? Waking on a cold morning, early winter, with a twinge astride my right testicle that ranges from groin to lower torso . . . uh-oh. Feels a little like a groin pull, but higher, and connected to the dull, lingering pains I feel in my lower abdomen when I do push-ups or other ab work (not that I do a lot of &amp;quot;ab work&amp;quot;). Surgery scar tissue, maybe, or worse? Make a note to ask about this pain at the next CAT-scan checkup in two months. THE FIRE THIS TIME &amp;quot;You smell something burning?&amp;quot; Paula says [July &amp;#039;02]. &amp;quot;You see the fire out there?&amp;quot; Hard to believe, hard to miss, but after three years of trying to get pregnant, and two years of trying to adopt, we finally bring our seven-month-old baby home from his poverty-ravaged Guatemala. . . and the neighborhood&amp;#039;s nearly on fire.  Fewer than five hours after landing on Josh&amp;#039;s first night in the U. S., without warning, another Colorado wildfire erupts and crawls down the nearby foothills toward Wonderland Lake--and our backyard. &amp;quot;Fuckin&amp;#039;-A,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m thinking from the upstairs back bedroom window, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s not burning itself out. . . .&amp;quot; Instead, it&amp;#039;s looking like molten lava moving over drought-starved grasses. Phone rings, we pick up. Friends up the road, forced out of their home. They&amp;#039;re on the way over. Paula&amp;#039;s in bed with Joshua, trying to let him sleep. . . .  Phone rings again later; I pick up. &amp;quot;You are being advised to evacuate . . .&amp;quot; recorded message from the sheriff&amp;#039;s office drones. It&amp;#039;s 2:00 A.M. and we&amp;#039;re haphazardly packing photos and bags furiously . . . aided by Nancy, Cory, Amelia, and Aidan and their Lab/Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy that doesn&amp;#039;t have a clue. No time to ponder the tragicomic timing--&amp;quot;Do we take the [big] wedding photo or the album??&amp;quot;--as the next chapter of our storybook life unfolds. We stay put. I stay up until 4:30 A.M. Next day we learn four hundred acres got torched; nobody got killed; our property got a free pass. . . . Welcome home, son. The Scans Game Driving south on Highway 36, heading out of the Boulder foothills and down to Denver to see my oncologist, my reader of CT scans of abdomen, of pelvis, of chest, who checks for signs of rogue cells. Passed the one-year mark okay, then the year and a half . . . but for some reason the year and nine months has me jittery. Maybe it&amp;#039;s because I&amp;#039;m a father now, maybe it&amp;#039;s because I had that twinge . . . (though ex--cancer patients, I learn, are forever mistaking twinges for recurrence). Here we go . . . and turns out I have no reason to worry. No &amp;quot;evidence for . . . metastatic disease&amp;quot;; no changes, apparently, from the study four months prior. Dr. Cohn walks into the exam room and starts chatting with me about my recent stint in England. &amp;quot;You likin&amp;#039; it over there?&amp;quot; Good news. If I had cancer signs, he wouldn&amp;#039;t be talking tourism. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re healthy,&amp;quot; he says. I ask him to repeat this into my Sony microcassette that I have placed on the chair next to me . . . (in case of bad news and my notetaking/thinking/reasoning all going to shit). &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s healthy!&amp;quot; Dr. Cohn says loudly to the Sony and thus to Paula, who will hear this tape at home after the baby wakes up. I smile as if I knew all along all would be okay (as if) and hop out to the car to call home. (You don&amp;#039;t shout the good news into a cell phone in the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center. . . . Too many ill patients in attendance.) Now I&amp;#039;m back on the road, rolling north, toward Highway 36 and home, feeling like I have just graduated from something big, singing along to a Springsteen CD, pounding the steering wheel as a snare drum, or cymbal, as if I&amp;#039;m goddamn Tony Soprano. &amp;quot;These are better days, bay-buh / These are better days it&amp;#039;s true / These are better days, bay-buh / There&amp;#039;s better days shining through.&amp;quot;  Sex and My Cancer Viagra this, Viagra that. Didn&amp;#039;t think, when I was fighting cancer so fiercely, that it would have made a huge deal if I had come out of surgery okay but learned I&amp;#039;d be Viagra-dependent for life. I was flat-out wrong (and glad I had crack surgeons). Spontaneous sex is thrilling, more so when you realize you nearly lost the chance to have it. Even so, to come clean, I don&amp;#039;t have it nearly as often as I used to: The twice-a-week standard I&amp;#039;ve seen quoted so often hasn&amp;#039;t applied to me or my partner, if she doesn&amp;#039;t mind me saying so, for at least six months. And it doesn&amp;#039;t totally have to do with us being new parents, zonk-tired, up at 4:00 A.M. It&amp;#039;s partly due to the lack of spontaneity I feel when it comes to sex, now that I have one more thing (a fairly big thing, actually) to consider . . . besides time, place, baby feeding, who&amp;#039;s gotta get up in the morning. I mean, I gotta think about going into the john, emptying, folding, and medi-taping my ostomy bag to my belly so it doesn&amp;#039;t get in the way of, sorry, there&amp;#039;s no other way to say it, Hon, thrusting.  Golf and My Cancer  Standing on the first tee at St. Andrews Old Course, 6:30 A.M., under leaden Scottish skies, one year after surgery, alone with my friend Renny on a course not yet open, here because he&amp;#039;s pulled some strings, told some sad-true tale of an American friend who battled bowel cancer and came out of it alive, who&amp;#039;s now waggling his Big Berthas and itching to play a round by the Firth of Forth (at the firthst available opportunity). As if the links gods are watching, shit you not, there&amp;#039;s a break in the clouds and the sun decides to join us on golf&amp;#039;s shrine, if only for a moment. The Endorsement: The Bag Friend asks how everything&amp;#039;s going--I can tell he means with the stoma, the ileostomy, the not-exactly-colostomy I had during surgery. . . . &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;I go to the gym, bike, hike, eat pretty much anything. . . .&amp;quot; Turns out his mom&amp;#039;s friend has a bag, got blocked up and she had to go to the hospital, twice, from peanuts. Twice??!! I&amp;#039;d give up the peanuts if I got blocked up once. Don&amp;#039;t wanna know how the thing gets flushed. Choosing My Religion A Jewish family friend writes: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if you remember me, but I do you. . . . When my mom had breast cancer, I didn&amp;#039;t understand a lot of what she was going through. Reading your articles allowed me to feel it for the first time. . . . God chooses people he knows can handle it. He chose you. . . .&amp;quot; Thanks, G-d. Got my colon carved out in an eight-hour surgery, lost forty-five pounds and nine months of my life in a freakish/mawkish/radiated/toxic-chemical/narcotics-infused blur of an assault, and as far as I know, Osama&amp;#039;s still doing fine, humpin&amp;#039; it round the Afghan/Pakistani border, with a leaky frickin&amp;#039; kidney. Still I pray.  Nap Time Sometimes when Joshua sleeps  in my arms, his warm head  cradled in the crook of my elbow  I want to cry for the joy I feel. Or maybe for the pain  I didn&amp;#039;t let myself feel  when I thought I might die  ahead of my time. And his. Stats All, Folks Two years post-op, two and a half since diagnosis, sitting on Doc Cohn&amp;#039;s tissue-paper-covered leather table one more time. Learning, on April 22, 2003, that there are no lesions visible in my latest set of scans. He says I am healthy, then serves up a best-supporting statistic: &amp;quot;Eighty percent of the people who develop a recurrence [of colorectal cancer] get it in the first two years,&amp;quot; he says. Which means just 20 percent develop it later. Handshakes and hugs all around; pretty good odds, I figure. Until later that day, when I realize: Before I was first diagnosed, people like me, ex--colitis patients, had less than a 20 percent chance of developing colon cancer in the first goddamn place. . . . Quick call to family, with Paula at my side; then dial Geoff in L. A. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have can-cerrrrr, I don&amp;#039;t have can-cerrrrr,&amp;quot; I sort of white-man-rap at him. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have can-cerrrrrrr!&amp;quot; Pause. Then he answers: &amp;quot;This month.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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