WRITE A BOOK, IT’LL BE FUN, UNTIL IT’S NOT

Fans, followers, and one-timers on boomerpdx have seen my book writing posts. It’s not exactly how-to-write stuff, but it helps show process.

One nice piece of advice I’ve heard: You’d better love your book topic, because you’ll eventually hate it.

Since my book is a guided tour of what to expect after a cancer diagnosis, I f-ing hated the topic from the beginning.

Who needs another hate book? No one worth two damns, so I’m writing a love book instead; lovey dovey since I got through the treatment part of cancer in one piece.

What about the other parts? That’s the book part to write out.

Instead of a touching memoir about a genius brought down by an insidious disease, like When Breath Becomes Air, I’m taking a different path.

With reviews like this on Goodreads, it could be a big mistake:

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. 

Who doesn’t root for the good guy to pull through? When it’s a cancer deal, everyone is a good guy. Paul was exceptionally good.

On the other hand, instead of a genius level young doctor, I was a sixty one year old, unemployed, househusband reject, which is true, but not exactly a healthy mindset against cancer.

My story won’t be like Michael Becker’s A Walk With Purpose, either. Another wonderful guy in the big lights who got tagged with HPV16 neck cancer and told his story.

Mike took it another direction with the full title: A Walk with Purpose: Memoir of a Bioentrepreneur.

His story is closer to mine since it was a similar cancer that brought him down. Like any decent person, I reached out to a fellow victim.

It didn’t go well. We had a nice email exchange, his last one wishing me luck, which in the polite world is a way of saying “Stop emailing me.”

Write the book

What happened was I asked him if he knew how he contracted cancer. I already knew, but I asked anyway. He said it was ‘deep tongue kissing’ in college. Maybe it was, but his opinion was not a helpful sign.

In my book I encourage people to confront the cause of their disease, at least those with a cause and effect thing, to aid them in a cure. Yes, it’s mental deception to tell yourself a quiet story of what probably happened while getting fixed up.

Mike didn’t agree, so I asked him why he wouldn’t just come out and say he exposed himself to sex cancer by way of a sexy act. I knew the answer before asking.

It’s the wife in the equation. No one wants to talk about the past in terms that might upset the wife into saying, “Oh, how could you,” before cancer treatment. That’s no way to kick off the radiation and chemo game.

When the time came to talk it out with my wife I said something like this: “Someone I dated in my past had a killer problem they didn’t know about. All I’ll say is I hope they caught it before it killed them.”

Pretty simple, but it went on and on, because when it comes to explaining things, I go on and on like a bad salesman after the sale instead of shutting up.

Why shut up?

I write with a special purpose because I don’t believe anyone with cancer anywhere near them in terms of family, friends, friends of friends, anyone on the family tree, gives a hoot about the great life a writer leaves behind due to f-ing cancer.

What about cancer guys who become a force of nature, like Superman HPV?

The link above points to survivor stories on Jason Mendelsohn’s cancer blog. It all rings true, but something is missing in these men’s stories.

I make the corrections in Licking Cancer In The Beaver State. Why Licking Cancer as a title? Because it works better than the guys who include their job description in their story.

My readers will know what it’s like facing cancer dead on, and how to help others by making them laugh. Yes, laugh. Not laughing yet? Leave a comment after reading this:

Part of enduring HPV16 neck cancer treatment is keeping up with exercise. Cardio? No. Weight lifting? No. Then what exercise? The tongue exercises the occupational therapist taught.

Michael Jordan?

If I didn’t keep up with tongue exercises I had a good chance of ending up with a noodle neck devoid of muscle, and a swallowing problem due to the narrowing. I didn’t welcome cancer at all, but the idea of a chicken neck was also a fear.

The therapist put me through the tongue workout.

“Try and stick your tongue out as far as you can,” she said.

I gave it a Michael Jordan effort.

“That’s quite a tongue,” she said. “Now try and touch your tongue to your nose.”

Try? Easy reach here, but I wondered if she knew what I was in for?

“Now push your tongue against your cheek as hard as you can,” she said.

I asked her to demonstrate. We sat across from each other pooching our cheeks out. It was an exercise and so much more. I watched her watching me and knew I was on the right track.

“Do this regularly and you’ll make progress,” she said.

I made the progress. She helped. In my book I told the same story to a guy in the radiation waiting room. It didn’t help him, which I saw as a problem. Was it fun sticking my tongue out together with a therapist trained to help?

Yes, it was fun. I’m not going to lie. It was an unexpected freaking delight to find anything good while I slid down the radiation and chemo pole to the fires of hell. Oral cancer from oral sex may have put me there, but oral exercises with Kim Bassinger’s twin would lift me out.

Instead of a story about cancer and lives changed, cut short, or ignored, the story I write is one of revelation and keeping on. It’s a book to share with people like those who wrote the books I’m using as comps in my proposal.

Too much? Not enough? Or just write?