How Terminal Brain Cancer Saved My Life

The timing of my diagnosis was magical.  I had , just a year earlier, signed up for EVERY benefit the insurance our work offered us, since I was about to turn sixty and thought I should play it safe.

 THANK YOU PAST SELF1!

Terminal cancer gave me early retirement from the toxic workplace. As workplaces go, you can do worse than radio, although radio has its share of narcissistic dickheads, and the pressure of the job is to Be Brilliant without ever experiencing direct audience feedback, which is Impossible.  In that sense, it's an impossible job.  There are many impossible jobs that many brave people pull off every day, and while teacher, nurse, and firefighter com to mind,  I maintain that although it's much less heroic and substantive, radio is still one of the more impossible jobs.  You sit in a room by yourself and talk to EVERYONE, presuming you're making intimate, sensitive, relevant contact.  It's INSANE, now that I ponder it.  That's why so many old-fashioned announcers sounded so grandiose and fake.  They had to bluster to keep themselves from feeling the existential impossibility of meaningful contact with EVERYONE going on a one-way feed from a closed box.  Of course the feedback comes on the phone, somewhat delayed, and often unnecessarily toxic.  

I've chastized myself for hundreds of painful hours over every bruising mistake I ever made on the air. Mistakes are impossible to avoid, but that's what I spent most of my energy in prep time doing.  After being literally SCREAMED at by my first listeners when I got artist facts wrong (doesn't matter if you get the "facts" from Creme magazine interviews with the artists themselves.  YOU are supposed to KNOW more.  You're On The Radio, aren't you?) But air personalities are hired for their voices, not necessarily their degrees in musicology.  (Magazine models, if you'll pardon the grandiose comparison, are not usually great seamstresses, photographers or makeup artists; they get hired due to genetic "gifts".)Most of us on the air had to fake it, because most of us, like most other real humans, had our favorite bands whom we could hold forth on with accuracy, but not ALL bands.  At some point you have to look shit up.  And it doesn't always go well.  There's a lot of faulty, drug-addled music "journalism" out there, especially circa '60-something thru seventy-something, although the cocaine/or meth-fuelled eighties had their moments, too. Rock fans are especially VICIOUS when they attack, fuelled by cultural righteousness and Hell Bent For Leather.  Not only that.  Men (the bulk of rock listeners who also would qualify under the FBI profile as Most Likely to seal a woman up in a Rubbermaid tub and slide her into a crawl space just to Shut Her Up)and who are for whatever reason triggered by women's voices can be vicious to the point of evil.

For example, the very first studio phone call I ever answered was from a guy "in the parking garage" who promised to cut off my head "and fuck the throat hole"because at least "that should shut me up."

I was a veteran of nightclubs when I arrived in the air studio that night, so this didn't shock me like the guy "in the parking garage"(doubtful- in the late 80's most people who weren't James Bond didn't have cell phones yet, and parking garages didn't have phone booths, but he probably figured he was terrifying enough that I wouldn't put those facts together.  He also probably figured I wouldn't park on the street. I hate parking garages.  He guessed a lot of things wrong).

I also wasn't thrown off by the way I was greeted by the co-worker whom I was told was going to train me on the board that night, a dude I will refer to as RM, since he may be a different person now.  People do grow.   I also wasn't thrown because I had taken it upon myself to be prepared; I had made friends with the sista-woman who did middays on the Fox, Rachel Wilde, and she was more than willing to train me on all the equipment.  I myself am a sista-woman and a good listener..  She got to share what it was like working with all the dudes.  I worked with a bunch of dudes, too. and we commiserated.  She helped me out a lot.  I owe a fuck ton of my success to Sisterhood.  By the time I walked into the air studio for my first-ever show  and Mister RM looked me up and down with a bitter sneer and said, "Oh, yay, a woman, huh?  Well, you're so special, you figure it out,"slung on his motorcycle jacket and stomped out of the studio, I was in no danger of cluelessness.  Rachel had given me all the preset numbers I needed.  I had memorized them, but also written them in block letters on a sheet of lined notebook paper that I now pulled from my back pocket.  With shaking hands I carefully set the slide pots to proper positions: Microphone level, for my female voice:  11 1/2.  Board master:  11 even.  Denon CD players:  9 1/2.   I had them all. I knew where the liner cards were and how to taylor them to the overnight daypart.  I knew how to talk to one person when I popped the mic, how to picture that person, and had worked with Rachel to get comfortable with the ideal Person in the demographic I could aim my breaks to.  I knew who was listening this time of morning and what I wanted to say to him. (No parking garage creeps.  I pictured an Average Guy working overtime and just trying to finish out his shift awake to get the week over with, hoping some good rock and roll would help.  I talked to him.)

I found the correct date and time on the paper commercial and music logs and set them up (again, this was the late '80's.  No computer logs yet, no email yet.Of course RM hadn't, as a professional courtesy  pulled my first hour of music CDs or commercial carts, (I would find out in ensuing years the man had no courtesy of any kind)but it gave me more practice! I learned to find my way around the studio. I obviously pulled(the first TWO hours, for the morning show who came on after me.  They don't thank anyone, BTW...it's like royalty.  Morning shows tend to recieve favors done for them as Right of Rule.  Anything you did for them you just SHOULD have done.Lots of afternoon drive people are like that, too, depending on how many national teams they announce for....but I digress...

Terminal Brain Cancer Lifted the worry of living homeless (mostly that's on my boyfriend, though, who let me live under his roof rent-free for seventeen years).  I get close to half of what I used to earn in salary sent to my credit union account every month.  A friend of mine made the mistake of saying the gov't was "giving" it to me.  I regret the tirade I unleashed upon her, but I remember in my working years looking at the one-third of my paycheck that would vanish each payday and telling myself, "Social Security, I might need it someday."  

Well, it's someday.  And I paid IN.  For forty-six years of WORK.  I EARNED these checks, the way I see it.  From stuffing cars at fourteen to reading TV ads at sixty, I put in my half-century, or thereabouts.

Terminal Brain Cancer brought me The Magic of Medicare and Humana. Yes, Medicare takes around two-hundred a month from my account.  It also, through Humana, gives me over one hundred dollars on a med card for food and OTC goods.  Not to mention paying for all of my prescrptions and appointments.  My breathing has never been better.  When I was working my asthma inhalers, not just the emergency ones you see geek characters carrying in horror films(why did asthma become the mark of a LOSER?), but the kind that prevent attacks and give you an actual LIFE, those used to cost me $500.00 a month.  When I was working I couldn't afford to breathe.  I had to suppliment my lack of income by leaning at the end of pay periods and in unforseen disasters on credit cards, which I was  never able to pay off.  I'm working on that now.  If I die before they get paid off, I'm not stressing about that. I worked my guts out for fifty years, and if that wasn't enough, then the Powers That Be will have to fucking deal with it, since they rigged the game to begin with.  I have done my best, and at times stretched myself beyond my best into my own self-destruction, as have so many who were raised with, and obeyed, the Work Ethic.  I'm done with that now.  But that is what our financial system does to the workforce-it asks you for more than your best; it demands your slow, systmatic destruction.

Side Note:  the Work Ethic I had always bought into, which I was raised with in place of, or rather as, religion, I now believe turned out to be the most nefarious force in our culture and resulted in a variety of evils from income inequality to the golden idol of Trump. I believe this because I've seen the result of my own codependence in relationships with narcisists. The codependent rushes about trying to please, toiling thirstily, as the narcissist grows rich and self-satisfied at the clear evidence of their own superiority.  It's a sick schema played out, not only in meth-addled trailers, but in sky scraping offices.   I believe it is the End Game of Manifest Destiny.  Big White God said, "This land is yours.  It's all yours.  "It's all yours to eat whole without conscience or to just take a shit in. Take it all. Go for it.The women, the dark-skinned people without technology to match yours in battle, the oceans, the air, all the water.  All the women, all the children you can exploit.  Use them up, too.  Use 'em up.  Eat 'em up. They all belong to the GREAT YOU."  And they did.  And they don't want to hear any complaints about it now.  "God said it was OK.  I am made in his image.  That blue-eyed Jesus looks just like my cousin Carl.  Hell, I practically AM God!  I do what I want!  You women have complaints?  I guess we don't get to burn you alive anymore, but we'll find ways to shut you up." 

 The toxic work ethic that ruled my life, and what I did not see coming, since I was so thirstily rushing about, was the terrifying twenty-year financial spider hole that yawns for working class people older than fifty-five, when you've most likely already been fired and you've found out all that shit about "wisdom" is just crystal magic bullshit and really only applies to wealthy celebrities,, and the time when your SSI checks will finally pay you enough to live on  (for many working-class people not until age SEVENTY-SEVEN) threatens to swallow you in your worst nightmare, as you find yourself in physically gruelling, humiliating jobs while you wear out a lifetime of friendships couch-surfing or living in back yard sheds, eating from trash cans and shitting in buckets.Adding injury to insults, by fifty-five many people have a laundry list of injuries, from back and foot injuries limiting their ability to do jobs that pay decently, to invisible neurological conditions like depression (Gee, YA THINK?) to PTSD.  Then they've got politicians and their militias yelling at them for being Losers or a "permanant underclass"(I hope it's a hot day where you are, Limbaugh) or making them feel like they just weren't smart enough or didn't work hard enough.  And that is all unmitigated BULLSHIT.

Life is just fucking hard.  Especially if you're a woman, which means you were a lower earner most of your life and not part of the favored gender club, which only works in your favor if you're a Taylor Swift lookalike-and even she won't be at fifty-fucking-five.  But she'll be selling us songs about why we should love ourselves anyway(BUT will she be coIntinuing the vintage Vivtoria's Secret meat market in her concerts?  AND-bonus question-how will she eventually gracefully END that bullshit anyway?  Just tell the bellowing men who used to buy tickets to her shows to drop off their wives and fuck off to Hooters for a couple hours till the show is over?  Or will she open her own chain?  She certainly could afford to, and she could make BANK...but what would she call that chain of meat markets?  Tay Tay's Ta-Ta's?

The fourth way terminal brain cancer saved my life:

4.  Perspective.  It's a common question the bored ask each other:"If you knew you only had so much time to live, what would you do/care about?"  And what you care about and focus on does change.  For me, not a LOT, because I've always been a person who cared more about living things than numbers on paper (mainly because numbers on paper jump around and insult me) and more about relationships than reputation, but I became even more intensely focused on time with people I love and care about(and when I say "people" I include furry people like my dog, Georgie and my cat Lucille and I still dream of the day they can be in the same room quietly).  Love really is all that matters.  I feel that even more intensely every day now.  

I  knew a dog would bring me more expense and hardships of one sort or another, and it has.  But also, LOVE.  Dogs are just LOVE MACHINES(sorry, but I could have stuck a much worse song in your head, considering the subject) and they are miraculous.  They remind us what is important; they keep us connected to our essential selves.  When you adopt a dog you invite a Teacher into your home and promise to provide for them and learn from them, that's my view.  And cancer, in part, inspired me to finally make the leap and adopt a dog of my very own.  I don't remember when I've been happier.

In all of the above ways,THANK YOU CANCER!