Free Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life by Robert Schimmel Page B

that tomorrow’s the day. Right now, I have to get back to the house before I pass out and end up back in the E.R. Man, I must be building up quite a reputation back at the ambulance shed.
    Hey, you hear about Schimmel? He passed out trying to get his mail.
    That’s nothing. The other day he passed out taking a crap.
    I just pray that I don’t die from the hemorrhoids.
    Day three.
    I do it! I make it to the mailbox! Takes me half an hour but who cares? I squint into the mid-afternoon August Arizona sun, leaning on the mailbox, as jubilant as the heavyweight champion of the world. I take a deep breath, flip open the mailbox, and reach in.
    Mail hasn’t come yet.
    “It’s all right,” I say to a cactus. “I never get anything anyway.”
    I call Vicki to pick me up in the car.
    Day four.
    Establishing a new goal.
    Walking to the mailbox and back. Literally takes me two weeks, but I finally succeed, slapping at the front door as if I’m an Olympic gold medalist crossing the finish line. Eventually I build up my stamina so that I’m strong enough to walk to and from the mailbox twice in a row. I slap the front door each time.
    Yeah, it’s true. Walking to and from my mailbox becomes the highlight of my day. But it’s not just making it to the mailbox. The walk itself and all that comes with it are the highlights. The soothing heat of the sun beating down on my face and neck. The smell of the desert flowers. The sound of a desert animal, a lizard maybe, swishing through the sand. The sky, cloudless and blue as a swimming pool.
    Taking all this in. Taking all this in slowly, because slow is the only speed I know. But you know what cancer teaches me from these walks?
    Slow is the speed at which we should live. Always.

    At a certain point during chemo, I start to lose feeling in my fingertips. Numbness descends and my hands become, for all intents and purposes, dead. I stare at my fingers as if they’re attached to someone else. I consciously tell them to move, to pick up that pen, to touch that spoon. I coax, cajole, make idle promises to my own fingers. Finally, after what seems like half an hour, they respond, moving in extra-slow motion, the fingers of a stranger.
    Certain simple tasks that I’d taken for granted, such as buttoning my shirt, become difficult, if not impossible. I have to abandon my favorite pair of jeans because they have buttons on the fly instead of a zipper. If I needed to pee, I couldn’t undo the buttons. The only upside to my finger numbness is that when I jerk off, it feels like somebody else is doing it.
    It’s crazy. The one thing I never stop thinking about is sex. No matter how weak, dizzy, nauseous, or gross I feel. Sex is always on my mind. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a guy or because I’m me. In my mind, I remain a virile, healthy, horny guy. Doesn’t matter what’s going on with my body. I can be aching all over, weak, bleary-eyed, throwing up, and have diarrhea, but if a cute woman walks by, my mind goes, Boy, would I love to have sex with her.
    And then my body sends my brain back the following message: “Good luck, pal. She’s sitting on a bench ten feet away. Have sex with her? You can’t even make it over there.”
    Then at a certain stage my body trumps my mind. I get to the point where I’m thinking, I’m so horny. I really need to masturbate, but my body’s voice will jump in and say, So, what, I gotta get up, go to the bathroom, and get the lotion? You want me to go through all that right now? Screw it. It takes too much energy. It really does.
    Walking to the mailbox one day, I start making a mental list of all the things I used to take for granted that now require superhuman effort. Stuff that I do every day but never think about. Easy, no-brainer stuff. Like putting on my shoes.
    One of the toughest, most exhausting activities of my life. Takes forty minutes on a good day. And when I finally pull on my shoes, I collapse in my chair, totally wasted. But