I had cancer.  I had Hodgkin’s disease.  Everyone says, if you’re going to get cancer that’s the one to get.  I would’ve taken the sniffles.  Everyone treats you differently when you have cancer.  You’re still the same person but by no move of your own you now have some suck job disease that evidently changes everything.  I’ve been called a survivor.  I was called brave.  I was told to fight and battle.  All I did was show up to appointments.  I love that people see me now and they feel that the only thing I’ve accomplished in my life is not dying.  You won.  You beat cancer.  You didn’t die.

I lost all the hair on my body as a result of chemotherapy.  Every stitch of it was surrendered.  Bad news, I looked like an albino.  Good news, from the waist down I looked like a porn star...playing the lead in "Average Studs".  Problem, women are tough to come by when you're vomitting and look like a baby mouse.  People would see me and not know what to say, "Wow, you look great".  Yes I bet I do look great...to a hungry python.

Even my family and closests friends were weird around me during this time.  The were incredibly nice and sensitive.  They began to treat you the way they'd treat someone whose days are numbered.  Fear of death, to be treated generically.  In my remaining days, the last thing I'd want would be the unfamiliar.  And those close to you tip toeing around you is foreign.  My good friend came over and I found us talking about the weather.  He had brought me a gift...a book.  That's gay and weird.

I called my best friend Bill in Las Vegas and left him a typical offensive voice mail.  It was a par voicemail but touched on a few key points to raz and haze.  It involved his underground sexual preferences and highlighted his mother's true vocation and his father's favor of gay porn.  That's how it was before cancer.  No holds barred with your good friends.  But now things were different.  I got a return voicemail a day later.  "Aren't you dead yet?  When are you going to die?  I thought that stuff killed people.  God it's taking a long time.  Can you call back when you're dead please?  Yea I get it, you have cancer.  Now do something epic, like die."  I listened to the voicemail countless times with tears rolling down my face.  Bill wasn't checking out and at that moment I knew I wasn't either.  I felt human again.  

I have been cancer free for many moons now.  The voicemails continue and get more offensive with age.  If Bill were to ever fall ill and was bed ridden with a morphine drip, I would get to his side to be there for him.  And in his comatose state, I would draw a dick and balls on his cheek with a Sharpie.  I would photograph and post the jpeg.  Bill would want it that way.