Not Even Not Zen 430: Aleksi, Note 3 - Remissions and Decisions

Remissions and Decisions 

In the spring of 1989, I got a call from Donna. I'd known about Aleksi's cancer since about a week after I met him, so it had been five years. It had become, in my mind, another part of who he was. He was always dealing with cancer. 

For all those years, he had been treating it through an envisioning practice. Basically, when tumors got bad, he would envision them getting small. He would picture his body, his whole self, as healthy. By force of will, he succeeded with some tumors. At least, that's how it seemed to me. I'd used envisioning techniques myself for a decade with good results — conquering my fear of heights, for one — but my modest successes didn't stop me from worrying about Aleksi. After all, visualizing yourself stepping up to a cliff edge is a different proposition than visualizing yourself beating cancer.

Aleksi didn't want to hear about any of the standard, prescription medicines. As it turned out, he had good reasons for that. What was available for his cancer was known to be crap.

Although a few cancer treatments had started to work in the mid 1970s, after decades of development, no treatment had been devised that was able to beat the type of lymph node carcinoma Aleksi had. Relying on doctors to find a successful treatment in his lifetime was an uncertain hope at best. Except for Donna’s support, he was really on his own. 

In addition, Aleksi knew the available treatments meant getting mustard gassed - not metaphorically, but literally. Chemotherapies in the 1980s were a series of attacks on the body. They descended in spirit (and in science) from World War I, when doctors learned that mustard gas destroyed white blood cells. The ideas developed more during World War II, when doctors found that nitrogen mustard reduced tumors. From those initial observations, and after a lot of trial and error, researchers pioneered the first medically tested chemotherapy. The treatment killed enormous numbers of body cells. The hope was to kill the cancer cells among them, then let the body regenerate. Aleksi didn't relish the idea of subjecting his body to the attack when there had never been a successful treatment. 

But when Donna called me, she told me there was something new. 

“This is for Al's type of cancer,” she said. “Specifically. Someone has lived through the treatment. The patient has gone into remission.”

"Fantastic!" It was a huge surprise. I had never wanted to voice pessimism but I'd also never believed we would all make it to this point. "He’s enrolling in a trial, right?”

“We have already enrolled him. That means we're coming down to your area."

"Can we see you?" My spirits soared at the idea and I could feel my eyebrows go up. "When?"

"We’ll be busy with the cancer treatments a lot of the time," Donna sounded thoughtful. "But, yeah, that's why I'm calling. We want to see you. We want to drop by your place. And we want you to come by the hospital and visit."

I asked if I could talk with Aleksi. Donna admitted he was reluctant to speak with anyone. He was still in shock, apparently, about the existence of a real treatment and its single but important success. He heard us talking, though, and his voice grew closer as he asked for the handset. When he got on the phone, Al said only a few words. But he sounded committed to going to the NIH. He reassured me despite the hesitation I heard in his voice. He seemed to be still catching up to the fact this was happening.

In Maryland, we got a brief visit from Donna and Aleksi. At the end of it, they told us they would be busy for a while but they would keep in touch. It took me a couple of weeks before I broke down and made the call to them so I could find out what was going on. 

After a long conversation, confusing for me, we arranged a trip. It was not for them to visit us, as we had originally planned, but for us to drive down to them in Bethesda

"Your place in Frederick is a little farther from the NIH than I pictured, at home," Donna admitted.

I was a long highway trip but to me, it didn't seem too bad. I had grown up in the area, loosely speaking. To my girlfriend it was a bigger deal but she never complained. We scheduled it, planned for coffee during the drive, and after a few wrong turns at the end, we managed to visit Aleksi and Donna at a Bethesda apartment. 

After our initial visit, we kept making phone calls. Eventually, we arranged another visit, this time to see Aleksi in his hospital room.

"I have to warn you," Donna said. "He seems sort of down. Sometimes he gets cranky."

That's why we're visiting, I thought. He can be cranky at us instead of Donna or his nurses. Or we can just take his mind off the treatments for a while. 

Donna was right. When we got there, Aleksi looked tired. It had been a confusing drive, too. The sign outside the hospital said National Naval Medical Center, not National Institutes of Health. I didn't understand. I had to guess they were the same thing. (In fact, there had been an overflow of beds in the NIH Clinical Center, so Aleksi had been moved to the Naval Medical building. The two institutions cooperated often and, although Donna probably told me about it, the fact didn't sink in. I had no clear concept of what was going on.)

This was how I got to know the NIH for the first time. I sat in a hospital room. We talked about how the treatment was proceeding. Aleksi sounded upbeat, actually, or maybe he simply felt better for having friends visit. In every aspect of his progress, he had good observations to make. He felt well treated. Donna thought he was getting attentive care. Aleski said he stood a good chance of beating his cancer. 

I left feeling better about him. On the way home, my girlfriend and I reinforced our cautious optimism. 

After more time and more phone calls, we met again. This time, we gathered with a couple other friends of Aleksi, although they were strangers to me, and we started by sitting on chairs and chatting around a coffee table. Donna and Al had coordinated an event. After we discussed what we were going to do, we started an organized support session. 

Aleksi had lost his hair. He still looked healthy, otherwise, if a bit worn down. He lay on the floor in a comfortable position while the rest of us lent him energy, touching him or not, and we all envisioned him feeling better and getting healthier. For his part, he did the same. He tried to feel the human connection and love. He tried to feel his body getting better. 

It went on for what seemed like a long time, although it was probably only fifteen minutes. I did a lot of holding Aleski's right hand. I tried to send him all the healing I could. I remember feeling very in tune with my surroundings and my desire for Aleski to heal - to attain a sense of complete well-being. I think I slipped off into a trance state for a while, just maintaining contact and giving, as simply as possible, from my spirit. 

Somehow, I think with signals passing between Donna and Aleski, Donna managed to call an end to the session. Everyone backed off by a step. Aleksi took a spot on a sofa with Donna by his left side. 

"I felt really good energy from someone holding my hand," he said.

Everyone pointed at me. I had no idea if they were right. I knew what I wanted for Aleksi, though. I walked over to him. He took my hand again.

"Thank you," He nodded. 

We socialized for a while. However, Aleski had limits. He was in the toughest cycle of his chemotherapy. It felt like barely a minute later that Donna started escorting people out. My girlfriend handed me my jacket. 

A few years later, I got my Master's of Computer Science degree. I had gone through a lot of girlfriends in the meantime. I'd decided I wanted to have children and a family, a reversal of my previous mindset, and my previous mostly-goth crowd didn't seem to harbor many women who agreed with my new goal. I had to learn to socialize with different sets of people. Then I got a young woman pregnant, got married, and bought a house, It was time to go out on the job market and try to pay bills.

A head-hunting company said they had two offers for me, one working for the Department of Defense, the other working for the National Institutes of Health. At the NIH, I would be making less money, I interviewed there, anyway. I could see the work there was good. In my previous interview for the Defense department, I saw I'd have to evaluate computer configurations for a company delivering and maintaining military systems. At the NIH, I would get to be in the hospital and in the labs. I would fix the machines with patient data and make it possible for the doctors to take medical images of their patients.

And I remembered Al in his hospital bed. I remembered his remission. And I thought about having something to do with that, anything at all. And I said yes to the NIH and trying to do my part.