It Might Get Messy

When I was in high school, Pompton Lake froze over every winter and was universally appreciated for its excellent ice skating. We devoted weekends and other days off to pickup hockey. When the ice was hard and smooth and there was no snow cover, we had to run down errant pucks for hundreds of meters following missed shots or passes. The best times were when there was cold snow on top of good ice. Then we could shovel out a rink, haul our goals made from salvaged lumber and chicken wire out onto the lake, and spend long days on the ice.

I loved tending goal, and since there was only one other goalie-by-preference in town, got to play as much, if not more, than I wanted to. My family couldn’t afford a set of full-size goalie gear, but one Christmas my folks pasted enough money together to get me a cut-down set of leg blockers. I used an old first-baseman’s glove (with a sponge in the palm) in my catching hand, and a regular hockey glove on my stick hand. This outfit worked fine for run-of-the-mill mixed-skill outdoor games. It was pretty painful in action for the few nights a year that we played against actual trained teams on indoor rinks.

The PLHS chemistry teacher at the time, Mrs. C, loved hockey herself and came and played whenever we were on the lake. Periodically we would put together a students-vs-faculty game. These were more formal, higher-profile events than our usual slapdash efforts. There were often spectators, and we played timed periods (the latter at the insistence of the faculty, remember these were the days when nearly every adult, and probably 1/3 of the students, smoked). Since none of the faculty were prepared to play goalie, I was invariably farmed out to the teacher’s side while Big Jeff handled keeper’s chores for the students. 

I recall one faculty/student game in particular. The ice was perfect, and we had cleared a full-size rink in the foot or more of snow, and the snow bank boundaries had frozen solid so the puck would actually rebound off the wall rather than bury itself. For some reason we ended up using somebody’s promotional novelty puck, with a maple leaf embossed in one side. It was a hellishly cold day and, per usual, I played for the faculty side. It was getting late in the afternoon, and we’d been out on the ice for many hours. The skin under my jeans was close to, if not actually, frost bitten. We were playing out the last few minutes of the final period, and the setting sun was directly in my eyes. When Ken L. unleashed a nasty slap shot from about what would be the face off spot to the right of the goal, I lost it in the sun. I found it when it whacked full-on inside my left thigh, hammering the smooth surface of my groin through the frozen denim. I managed to slip the puck underneath my body as I went down, at least saving the goal. Took me quite a while to get up, though. It hurt like hell. I’m pretty sure by the time I was functional we decided to call it a game. I think the students beat the faculty 5-3. Despite losing, I had a lot of saves.

When I got home, I slipped under my electric blanket set on “deep fat fry” and tried to warm up. When I pulled on some clothes to head downstairs for dinner, I noticed the perfect outline of a maple leaf, set in a bright red circle, on my left groin muscle. It took more than a week for that bruise to disappear. I got to show it off proudly to the fencing team when we suited up for practice and the week’s meet. 

I recalled that incident earlier this week as I contemplated the state of my health at the moment. For the first time in a long time—years, in fact—I don’t have anything that feels like it’s threateningly increasing in level of pain or discomfort. I’m incredibly weak—the “exercise” involved in walking around the house a bit and going up and down a flight of stairs leaves me winded and with leg muscles threatening to cramp. And I still have the pain in my throat and upper chest, although even that might be getting a little better. And my present level of comfort is, unfortunately, illusory.  The chemotherapy course I went through in the autumn could knock the malignancies back, but could not “cure” them. So over time, residual cancers in my chest, lungs, and/or lymph system are recovering, growing, building toward the time when they become symptomatic and put me back on the path to discomfort and death.

But for the moment, I’m fine with the painful stuff receding, following the model of the maple leaf tattoo. I’ll feel as comfortable as I can for as long as I can. Then I’ll go back to war with the cancer, having had this nice break to rest up and recoup.

And I’ll keep you plugged in to how things progress. Remember this, because it’s important: live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. But if you’re lucky, you might get to stretch ‘em out, kind of like I’m doing now!