Close encounters

I've always believed that I amble through life anonymously —just another schmo with one tube drilled into his neck and another dangling from his belly.

An incident last night suggests that I may not be as anonymous as I think.

I was sitting in the third row at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, waiting for the 30th anniversary screening of Bette Midler's "The Rose" to begin, when I decided that maybe I should make a quick trip to the bathroom to slam 30 ml of Extra Strength Liquid Tylenol down my G-tube.

While weaving my way through the crowd up the aisle, I heard someone shout, "I read your blog!" After assuming that someone had spotted Nikki Finke or Ariana Huffington in the mass of people, I was startled to realize that the person who shouted was talking to me.

He went on to explain that he learned about this blog from Dana Miller's Out and About column in Frontiers IN LA several weeks ago. Naturally, I was speechless —and embarrassed because I didn't have a pen on me so I could chat with this reader. I couldn't even ask him his name.

So I just shook this reader's hand, tried to contort my lips into a smile, and then made my way to the john to do the deed with my G-tube and Tylenol.

Reader, if you are out there, I hope you don't think I was being snooty. I really did want to chat with you. Heck, I could have used your assistance in the bathroom. It was quite a challenge to juggle a G-tube, syringe, container of Tylenol and a bottle of water in a bathroom stall with only two hands and surrounded by bacteria-contaminated surfaces.

After the film, it was my turn to approach someone. In the lobby of the theater, I spotted the actor who performed the voice of Oogie Boogie in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.

This time, I was prepared to strike up a conversation. I whipped out my note pad and gushed "Loved you in The Nightmare Before Christmas!" on a clean page, and walked up to the actor and held up the note for him to see.

He was gracious and reminded me that Halloween was coming so Nightmare would be making its annual run at the El Capitan Theater. He even sounded like Oogie Boogie.

What I shoulda done was ask him what he charges for a day's work. It would be pretty cool to hire Oogie Boogie to be my voice.

Now that's what I call service

I had planned to meet a friend in Los Feliz on Tuesday night so we could walk together up the hill to the Greek Theatre for the Elvis Costello show.

The Greek is just a short hike from the the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Los Feliz Boulevard, but my buddy told me to make sure I was well hydrated. After parking my car on a side street off Vermont, I sent a text message to him to let him know I was going to sit in my car long enough to slam a bottle of water and a liquid Extra-Strength Tylenol chaser into my belly before meeting him on the corner.

I poured the Tylenol into the measuring cup and placed it on the dashboard, and unscrewed the bottled water. Then I opened a few buttons of my shirt and pulled out the G-tube, drawing some curiosity from a woman walking her dog on the sidewalk.

The dog yipped a few times and the woman looked at me funny. I can't imagine what she thought but a man feeding himself with a G-tube may not be the element that she wanted to see in her neighborhood. But hey, I wasn't the one pooping on the sidewalk.

The woman hurriedly moved on —possibly to ring Chief William Bratton's doorbell— and I starting digging around in my backpack for my syringe so I could get the fluids down the tube and meet my buddy.

In my backpack, I found loose change, a few unpaid bills and a packet of mayonnaise from 2008, but no syringe. I left it behind on my desk at the office.

Driving back to the office or going home to get another syringe wasn't a practical option —both destinations were at least 10 miles away and I didn't want to miss Elvis' opening act. Then I remembered that there was a service station with a small market at the corner of Vermont and Los Feliz.

Surely the service station would sell me a plastic funnel that I could use to pour my fluids into my belly, I thought.

I scampered up the hill toward the service station. After spotting my friend sitting in the grass waiting for me across Los Feliz, I shot a text to him to let him know that I needed a few more minutes.

I walked into the service station market and scoped the shelves for a funnel. There was a rack of motor oil, but no funnels to use for pouring it.

I opened my note pad and drew a sketch of a funnel. Below the drawing, I wrote "You sell these things here?" and handed the note pad to the attendant behind the counter.

He stared at my drawing, took a glance at me, then looked again at the sketch. Then a broad smile came to the attendant's face.

He took an empty Marlboro carton and tore it in half. Then he shaped the cardboard into a cone, and punched a few staples into it to hold it together.

I could tell just by looking at it that the tip of the cone wouldn't fit into my G-tube. Even if it had, the home health nurse who told me to use my G-tube only in sterile environments would be appalled if she knew I would even consider contaminating my tube with cardboard that was laying around on a service-station counter. But I was certainly impressed by the attendant's ingenuity, and I hope you are, too.

I accepted the makeshift syringe, gave the attendant a buoyant thumbs up and walked out the door.

If he had known that I needed it to shoot fluids into my belly, I bet he would have called on Chief Bratton, too.

Meanwhile, back on the HIV front . . .

If I had teeth, they would have been clenched tight when I clicked on the email I received from Dr. B1 early Wednesday morning.

Results from last Friday's biopsy were promised by Wednesday and I wasn't eager to get any bad tidings from my doctor. But even as I opened the email and read the words "Good news," my reaction fell short of unbridled joy.

Dr. B1 was telling me the best news I could have possibly expected to hear, but there was a cloud beneath that silver lining.

The night before, while poking around in my online medical records at Kaiser's member website, I saw that my latest HIV lab results were available. I clicked on that email and scrolled through the numbers. They didn't look good.

As I've been grappling with this cancer offensive, it looked as if my HIV had been running amok. According to the lab results posted online, my CD4 count had taken a deep nose dive, plummeting to 80 from more than 400 just seven months earlier.

I nervously clicked out of the lab results and sent a message to HIV provider: "My HIV numbers don't look very good," I wrote. "What do you think?"

The next day brought the good news about the biopsy, but my HIV situation weighed heavily on my mind.

Later that morning, my HIV doctor sent a reply to my email: "Your HIV is perfect," he wrote. "The HIV viral load is less than 48 copies, indicating complete suppression of the virus by the medications. Your overall 'infection fighting cell' number (WBC) remains slightly below your baseline, likely due to a residual effect of the chemotherapy. This is normal. It is not by any means at a critically low level. Because of your lower WBC numbers, your absolute T cell number is lower. However, the percentage of T cells (19 percent) is virtually unchanged from the values in January (18 percent).

"In other words," my HIV doc concluded, "your HIV is exactly the same, still doing great."

The lesson here is to let my doctor interpret my lab results before I leap to any conclusions.

So with HIV laying low, and cancer apparently having flown the coop, I can concentrate on my recovery while watching the undetectables, to paraphrase that doctor of rock 'n' roll, Elvis Costello.

It may still be some time before I can shed my trach and G-tube and talk and eat and drink through my mouth again —and there remains a possibility that the damage caused by cancer and radiation will be permanent— but I've come this far and I'm prepared to go the distance.

A sudsy summit

Cancer wants to have a beer with me.

His invitation popped up as a text message on my cell phone while I was driving around town on Saturday. Creeped me out; it really did. Almost made me crack up the car! I pulled over and parked to make sure that I read the message correctly.

Seems fishy, coming on the heels of the fiasco in Cambridge and Obama's "teachable moment" with that cop and Skip Gates.

Does it sound like a trap? Is this some kind of clever marketing gimmick, a mass text message sent to thousands of people at the same time? City of Hope and Kaiser have been doing a lot of radio buys recently, so maybe this is Cancer's way of striking back. I imagine Cancer would have a hard time buying a spot on KNX-AM, even with the Fairness Doctrine and all.

Or maybe this text message was directly solely at me. I have been dissing Cancer a lot in this blog. Maybe Cancer wants to give me his spin on what I've been spewing.

Or maybe Cancer wants to go mano a mano.

Call me crazy, but I'm tempted to take the bait. It would be quite a beer date. I'm confident that I can handle any questions Cancer has for me, and this would give me a chance to get Cancer on the record about things that I want to know.

At the top of that list: Dude, are you still in me or not? And if you are still lurking in me, when are you gonna pack it up and leave?

Oh, and I would love to see Cancer's reaction as I unbutton my shirt to pour my brew into a syringe attached to my G-tube.

Still, I don't want to act hastily. After almost 20 years of kvetching publicly about HIV, I've never gotten invited on a beer date with AIDS.

So it just seems odd.

I sat in my car, reading the message over and over, while tapping my fingertips on the dashboard. I didn't want to blow Cancer off right away, and risk pissing him off. Cancer went to the trouble to text me; Cancer deserved a timely response. So I hit Reply, and texted back to him:

"OK with U if I bring along Joe Biden?"

I'll let you know if I hear back.