Do you know what a Myoclonic Jerk is (besides my brave new insult to sound smarter than my foes)? It’s a sudden involuntary muscle spasm. When this happens on the diaphragm? the muscle under your lungs? you suck in air like you’ve just seen an ex that fucked your friend too soon after the breakup and you’re at an indoor mall wearing sweatpants and socks with sandals and your glottis vibrates and slams your wind pipe closed and you want to burp or throw up or shit your pants or slap a stranger but instead you simply make a ludicrous high pitched “UUP” sound like a four year-old drunk on Capri Sun? That’s a Myoclonic Jerk. Out of some deranged Neanderthal logic, we call these “hiccups,” but holy shit what a nomenclatural fallacy of cosmic proportions. Myoclonic Jerk is a perfect term. Screw the phonic association. Why must we include the stupid sound of something in its name? We’re humans. We’ve landed on the moon! We’re smarter than that. We’re better. These haunting, insidious, cruel, abject wastes of involuntary muscle fiber and energy deserve a title proportionate to their terror.
Uh, relax, dude, they’re just hiccups.
You’re wrong. They are not just hiccups. They are jerks. They are the biggest jerks. The only name more apt for hiccups than Myoclonic Jerks would be Myoclonic Douchebags. I know this to be accurate and true. This is not fake news.
No sooner had I pressed “post” on the previous blog about all those positive aspects of this ordeal, minimizing the experience as a tiny speed bump in life, overflowing with gratitude, blah blah blah, than that wretched “Uup” sound escaped my pie hole. It was the morning of Infusion Day +1, I had just eaten. Must have eaten too fast, a reasonable assumption for a novice chemo patient. Twenty minutes go by, every 6 or 7 seconds… “UP”. Ginger Ale. Hold breath. Drink water upside down, backwards. Slap self. Yoga chest stretches. Meditate. Please burp. I do, thank god. Let it be over. It must be over. I’m being a baby. Wait. Count to seven. Get to five — “UP” — nooooo. Repeat all known hicc—myoclonic jerk cures for next hour, then two. Just as I was ready to wander into the 30 mph small town traffic outside my brother’s house to end it all under the wheel of a yellow school bus filled with future apocalypse refugees, my girlfriend Alyssa had the wherewithal to google, “Chemo Hiccup Side-effects.” There, in the shallows of the internet, an explanation that the anti nausea steroid meant to last 3-5 days can sometimes induce chronic hiccups in its victims. The oncology nurse called me to check-in and I relayed to her my condition. She knew this could happen. She told me to take a lorazepam and that they should go away in two to three days. Two to three days. “UUP!” Every 6ish seconds. A joke, I ask? Fake news? No, she knows this to be true. And as hour 8 passes with the MJ’s, I understand — the girl had reliable sources for her information. She. Was. A professional.
I take the Lorazepam. We eat dinner, go see The Nun, maybe that’ll scare them away. Oddly, it did. I was fine throughout the movie. Maybe they were over. Maybe a prequel to a prequel to a prequel starring an actual younger sister as the younger self character was the secret cure. But walking into the brisk air outside the theater… “WoohUUP!”
I take another Lorazepam, I assault my bed, press my head into the pillow, and I pray. I continue to spasm and sound like an over-served toddler until I pass out.
2AM, I wake, pee, count. 7 one-thousand, 8 one-thousand. 9 seconds. 10 seconds. 15 seconds. Sigh, it’s over. The hurricane has passed, the house is still standing, I no longer want to be run over by school children googling in seconds what took me four hours to find in a history text book two decades prior. I look toward the street and bid their spirit a silent apology, lie down, and close my eyes.
“HuuuWOOP!” No. no. no no no no. But of course. Yes.
Fucking Jerks.
It’s at this point, the MJ’s still wreaking havoc, staring at the long angular shadow drawn on the ceiling by the neighbor’s porch light, that I realize 2 things:
First, America has this “sanctions” thing all backwards. If we want Russia and North Korea to bend to our will, shutting off the lights and the heat and food and the bank accounts? Kid’s stuff. Inject the water supply with something that gives the leadership or any portion of the population chronic Myoclonic Jerks, and you’ll have nuclear disarmament, favorable trade deals, and personalized gluten free frosted bunt cakes delivered by nude Instagram models in a matter of hours. Watch.
(Okay, let’s NOT do that. But I’m just saying, there’s a quick-fix for all this diplomatic hoopla that doesn’t involve mass casualties.)
The second thing I realized is what I knew instantly when I heard the results of the first CT Scan about the tumor in my chest. It couldn’t have been more obvious, I just put my head down and didn’t think about it. But here, staring at the ceiling at 2AM, my diaphragm spasming every 5 - 7 seconds for the past day and for the foreseeable future, a chemo port protruding from my chest, constipated, jobless, near-broke, soon to lose my pretty actor-hair… the fact finally took root.
I deserve this.
Yes, you read that right. This is Karma, ladies and germs. And not just the chronic MJ’s. The joblessness, the financial stress, the constipation, the complete helplessness, the chest pain, chronic cough, shortness of breath, nausea, confusion over my condition for so long, and abso-fuckin’-lutely — the cancer. I deserve it all. In fact, I’ve had it coming for years.
For those who don’t know me as well, I’m not being funny or throwing a pity party fishing for “don’t talk like that” etc. I know of which I speak. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that for years, while I was supposed to be in a monogamous relationship, I was unfaithful and dishonest. Not in a conventional, setting-up-franchise-families-in-other-states kind of way, but I betrayed the trust afforded to an intimate couple on countless occasions. I lied about my whereabouts more times than I can remember. 10 months before we were to wed, I got caught. In the aftermath, I endured my share of hardships, panic attacks, losing friends, moving, moving again, again moving, moving again, where do I live now?, etc. But in hindsight, I came out relatively unscathed, with new friends, and a new lease on life. I jumped into a doomed relationship 3 months later. I even shopped around a book proposal about the experience. What a lying, no-good son-of-a-bitch. I hope he gets cancer. Right?
I can rationalize my actions as those of a young man mistakenly subscribing to a convention in which he didn’t believe, sew your wild oats before you settle down blah blah blah, but that doesn’t excuse years of dishonesty and betrayal. And I do mean years. You can’t just skate on that.
The 2nd dumbest part about this is I don’t believe in Karma, at least not in the way it’s been canonized in our culture. This whole 1:1 ration of good begetting good and bad getsya bad is too simple. The Karma new-age part-time yogi fanatics try to put themselves above the “God’s Plan” and “Everything Happens for a Reason” hoards, but it’s all in the same “alas, hide from thine confusion hereth” basket. These concepts are human explanations for the unexplainable. Placebos for the questions our brains are simply too small to answer. I apologize to the religious and mindful practitioners reading who’ve been guided through terrible times with these cozy stories and I’m truly, deeply sorry that I offend all the wonderful people praying for me, but I don’t personally buy these belief systems. Before we had telescopes and microscopes and math and science and ISIS, I might join you in imbibing these faith and karmic energy opiates, but knowing what we now know about what we don’t know, it is dishonest, delusional, and species-wide narcissism to subscribe to anything of the sort. It is the Narrative Fallacy in full effect.
God didn’t give me cancer as part of a grand plan. Neither did Karma. The universe is chaos. We’re all dying. Life is meaningless. Act accordingly.
AND YET — the number 1 dumbest part about this is that while I don’t believe in Karma, I do believe that its teachings are an excellent means of moral betterment. Is that the most hypocritical sentence you have ever read in your life? Can I believe both of those things at once? Jesus, I need a priest. No, I don’t. Despite my suspicion in the scientific basis for Karma and religion, I cannot deny a deep rooted cultural or perhaps innate acceptance of their most basic metaphors — that I deserve this cancer because of something terrible I did in the past. That I am repaying a cosmic debt. What metaphor could be better than every 5-7 seconds to be besieged by a mildly painful and uncontrollable reminder that I royally fucked up?.
“WooUP! (You deserve this)”
4 one thousand, 5 one thousand, 6, one thousand--
“WooCUP! (asshole)”
3, 4--
“AhfuckYUP!(hehehe, bastard)”
AND YET — might I offer one alternative. Could this simply be an invasion of a foreign species?
Of the TROLL variety perhaps?
Could this Troll be drunk on power and bleomycin and railing against our first wave of attacks by stomping on my diaphragm with the consistency only brought forth by the most formidable of enemies? I’m only human, I guess it’s plausible. Pray for me. I have been invaded by a Fucking Myoclonic Jerk.