It Might Get Messy

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for northern Europe, winter of 1944/45. Things are cold and dark and wet. Of course, that pretty much describes northern Europe any time, any season. But this year the cold and the wet are more intense than usual. 

It’s also dangerous. There are hundreds of thousands of people wandering around with weapons of destruction, both personal (pistols, rifles, submachine guns, knives, grenades, mines) and mass (artillery, machine guns, tanks, warplanes, warships, aerial bombs, rockets, even intercontinental ballistic missiles). Hatred, fear, panic, privation, starvation, resignation, fatalism, and near-catatonic oblivion are universal. 

It’s a bad time. Front line allied foot soldiers, the hunter-killer riflemen who are the blunt instrument of warfare, see and do things that no human being should have to experience. Most of them have been in the theater for at least a year, having arrived across the beaches of North Africa, Italy, Southern France, and Normandy. They live—those that did in fact survive—under exhausting, emotionally degrading, and physically shocking conditions [1]. Many—perhaps most—were at the end of their strength and abilities. Desertion, suicide, PTSD, addiction, and self-inflicted wounds increase at alarming rates.

But, these men, and some women (while the front line soldiery were universally male, there were substantive numbers of women subject to the same madness—drivers, pilots, correspondents, nurses, clerks, etc.), had risked their lives and their physical and mental health in a noble cause. They drove themselves to the end of endurance, but by springtime 1945, they could see the end of their journey, and a successful end at that. The timing of things couldn’t have been more propitious. Just as everybody was reaching the end of their tether, the war was ending. The human wreckage engendered by unceasing brutal combat were about to get what they most desperately needed. Time to return home to families and friends. Time to come to grips with the devastation wrought on their psyches. Time to watch their kids grow up. Time to watch their lawns green up while they slurped high-powered cocktails to blunt the razor-sharp edges of their wartime memories. 

Except they weren’t going to get these things. They were going to get a few weeks to contemplate their precarious condition while they sailed in crowded and uncomfortable transport ships to the Asian theater of war.

When it became clear that the end of the war in Europe was not going to end their horrors of endurance, it must have been soul-crushing. Devastating. They were going to move their desperate souls from the cold wet of Europe to the hot wet of the Pacific rather than to the bucolic warmth of Brooklyn or San Diego or Evanston . And go right back to seeing and doing things that nobody should ever have to see or do. Except that, by now, many of them had seen and done so many of those things that they could not see or do any more without incurring permanent crippling damage . I can’t imagine the horror of opening a new set of orders demanding immediate shipping out to the brutality of the Marianas when I was still shaking from the brutality of Bastogne.

And why am I subjecting you to this rather rambling discourse on the psychological nightmare of armed conflict? Because it is an apt metaphor for certain aspects of the devastation wrought by cancer and cancer treatment. 

I saw surgeon Dr. H and palliative care specialist Dr. S this week. Dr. H continues to be delighted—and surprised—that what’s left of my throat is smooth and healthy, with no signs of incipient malignancy. He was pretty upset when I told him I was having trouble with acute depression. I think Dr. H is a technician through-and-through. His vision is that we’ve saved my life, everything from here on out should be sweetness and light. 

Dr. S was quite sensible. He said “Let’s review. We’ve spent three years mangling your head and neck. We kicked the cancer, and now you can’t talk, eat, work, or function beyond a pretty low quality-of-life threshold. And you figured you shouldn’t be depressed why?” I explained to him that my depression wasn’t overt, weepy, withdrawn, sadness. Rather, it manifests as an inability to kick my butt into gear to start doing the zillion things I have to do personally and professionally. I told him that I am doubly disturbed by this because all the things I have to do are fun and productive. Some I’ve been waiting my whole life to have time to deal with. So finding myself parking my butt in the recliner with the TV remote, headphones blasting World Beat Death Metal, my computer, a book, and my basket of meds day after day and hour after hour is really disturbing. I should be excited at having the time to write prose and poetry, write and record music, work on pen-and-inks and acrylics, and especially pursue photography. But there’s no motivation for that. The recliner has trapped my psyche, along with my physical corpus, in a daily cycle of reading, taking meds, listening to music, watching TV and going to bed. 

This is a classic manifestation of depression, BTW. So I talked it over with Dr. S. In keeping with his practical, nonconvoluted approach, he suggested we up the dosage of my anti-depressants and anti-anxieties, make sure I take dilaudid when I need it (i.e., don’t be afraid of its addictive qualities, take advantage of its healing properties), and park my butt guilt-free in the recliner while I come to grips with the awful quality of life impairments I’m going to carry to the end of my days. He suggests I don’t panic over my inability to accept the physical nightmare of my post-cancer body. That it is going to take time for me to sort out and absorb the lifestyle degradation. That days are lengthening, and if I stop kicking myself around long enough to appreciate that, I should be able to bootstrap myself back to the functional world. 

Like I said, eminently sensible. Basically, he’s doing a workaround for my own parallel vision to that of Dr. H. It’s unfortunate, but having gone through three grueling years of physical and psychological insult, I’m not going home in triumph to the cottage on Staten Island. No, I’m afraid I’m shipping out, wounded though I be, to Saipan and Iwo Jima. My fight is permanent. Like some 22 year old Corporal trying to drink away the vision of Buchenwald while cleaning his Thompson for use in Pacific jungles, I do not get the luxury of going “home”. My “home” now has no tongue, a crippled epiglottis, and bucketsful of mucous. 

I hear exactly what Dr. S is saying. I appreciate the increased dosages of the pharmaceuticals. And I believe I can work my way out of this trap. It’s just gonna take some time. 

Time which I now have! Thank you all for being here. As I’ve told you before, I owe you my life. Without you, I never could have found the strength to survive to this point. Pat yourselves on the back. And please, please, have a slurp of an alcoholic beverage on my behalf. After carefully weighing all the impairments I now have to live with, I think not being able to drink may be the worst. So, all my love to you. Prozit!

References

[1] I am just finishing a remarkable three volume series on World War Two in Europe. The author is Rick Atkinson, the titles are An Army at Dawn (2002), The Day of Battle (2007), and The Guns at Last Light (2013). These books are incredibly, almost impossibly, dense and well researched. Yet the narrative Atkinson draws from the exhaustive research is so well written you will think it’s a novel instead of a work of awesome scholarship. I highly recommend this set to you. You don’t have to be specifically interested in the intricacies of World War Two history to benefit from this set. You will learn a ton, about the war, sure. But also about how to write an intensely documented work of nonfiction that reads like a good Young Adult Dystrophy cycle of novels.