Cancer is a battle. I have good days and bad days. People tell me that I look great, and I don’t have looks cancer. I will be a good-looking corpse. I’ve always been good-looking. My noble features will not be affected by this horrible disease.
I was given three to six months to live six months ago, and I just got my scans back. After six months of chemo, which is just so awful. I can’t even tell you. Right now is the best I feel, because I’m a week on chemo drugs, and then I get a week off, and over the course of that week, the last couple days I’ll start feeling pretty good, and then Wednesday morning I go in and I start the whole thing over again.
But the scans say that my tumors have shrunk, and what does that mean? I don’t know, because my doctor refused to explain it to me. He said, “Look, we’re meeting on Wednesday. Can’t I just do this on Wednesday?”
Does it mean they’re going to all shrink and go away? Does it mean the chemo … I don’t know, but I will accept it. He told me it was good news and he told me he was very happy with it, so I’ll just take his word for it for a week.
Marc
Do you think about it a lot?
Sam
I would say it enters my mind every three minutes. You think about it constantly. Most of the time I don’t feel good and most of the time I can’t really do anything. With dogs, I’ve had to euthanize all my dogs. People get upset about euthanizing animals, but I love my dogs, and I’ve killed every one of them. I’ve done it when the time was right, and what does that mean? It means you write down the three things your dog likes the most, and when they can’t do that stuff anymore, it’s time to put them out of their misery.
One of my three things would be lying in bed and watching TV.
By that criterion, I will never be euthanized, but I do wish I could do something. I can’t drive. There’s a lot of stuff I just don’t feel up to.
I always had authority issues, and I always felt rules didn’t apply to me. I always thought I was special, and I’ve always been kind of combative. My whole life, I’ve been labeled as someone that has a bad attitude, but now that I have cancer, all those qualities have helped. My doctors, they say, “You have a really good attitude about this,” and it’s all the stuff that made me a shitty person.
Now when this doctor said I have three to six months to live, for whatever reason, when the doctor said that, I just didn’t believe him for a second. I plan on getting better. I’m not sure exactly what that means.
You just get thrown into this. I’ve been feeling sick for a long time. I went in and got some tests. I was misdiagnosed with a virus or something, but I didn’t get better. I went in. They found something in my blood.
Then I meet the doctor. For the first time, I meet him, and he shows me my scans, and I don’t know what I’m looking at. I say, “Whoa, that’s really cool.” He goes, “All the white parts are cancer.”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“It’s in your liver. It’s all through your connective tissue. It’s in one kidney. It’s in your colon, and it’s in your lymph system.”
As a writer, I should avoid clichés, but I was in the moment, and I said, “Is it curable?” That’s what you ask, and he said, “We don’t use that word.” I went, “Oh, fuck. That’s not good.” Because they’d be happy to use it if they cured anybody.
I said, “How long do I have?” Another cliché.
“We don’t answer that question.”
I got upset. I said, “Look, I’m not going to hold you to the answer. I don’t know what these rules are. This just seems ridiculous to me. Just, as a hypothetical question, if you saw this scan on somebody, worst-case scenario, how long do they have?”
He says, “Well, I suppose under those circumstances, I can answer the question. I would say you have between—”
Then his cell phone went off.
There was some confusion between him and his wife over who was going to pick his daughter up after judo class, and he straightened that out, and then he says, “Where were we? Okay.”
That’s when he said three to six months.
Then he said, “Are you all right?”
I say, “What?”
He says, “Your eyes look unfocused,” and I said, “Well, yeah, that news you gave me, with your great bedside manner, that stuff you broke to me so gently. I’m about to faint.”
TOM GREEN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, TALK SHOW HOST
Everywhere I go, when I’m on tour, there’s always inevitably one kid every week, and he’ll come up to me and go, “Hey, man. You know, I have testicular cancer.” I had it, and we talk about it, and it’s sort of an emotional thing.
On the other hand, every time I go anywhere, someone else will probably yell out of a cab, “Hey, how’s your nut, Tom?” You know, “How’s your ball doing, buddy?” Which happens so frequently that you wouldn’t even believe it, and people think they’re being funny. Because I made a joke about it myself.
I don’t think people always realize that part of the reason, I think, we make jokes sometimes about things that are scary is because we’re sort of using it as a self-defense mechanism. Cancer is scary, and crazy, and sort of surreal, and it changes you forever. You sort of realize that, you know, we could potentially be dead at any moment, so.… On one hand, you’re like, “Okay, this is great,” you know, “Let’s live life for the moment. Let’s be positive. Let’s enjoy every moment, because life is short.” On the other hand, you’re also in a panic.
You feel that sort of very real possibility that something could go wrong with your body, which you don’t normally think about when you’re twenty-eight. We’re going to die. It’s definitely going to happen, but I always assumed it would be, “Okay, I’ll live to be eighty, like my grandparents, and I got a long time to screw around until then.” But no.
Now I’m completely cancer-free, and there’s no issue or no chance of it returning.
They go in from above. They don’t, like, hack apart your scrotum or anything like that. The sack is completely intact. They go in from above, they kind of reach in, and they—this is what I say—they shuck it out like an oyster, is what they do. I looked at the prosthetic balls, I looked at them. My doctor said, “You know, some people elect to do this, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s important.” I’m glad I didn’t do it. I can’t imagine having a piece of plastic in there, because you’d be squeezing it all the time, but then you’d be probably squeezing, like, the scrotal skin, would probably be getting it all bruised up. I’m glad I didn’t get it.
The thing that happened with the cancer, which I think is something that I’m really only kind of figuring out now and I’m still kind of coming to grips with it, is that it was just a physically very demanding thing. It took a major toll on my body, on my physical energy level, and so I went from being this sort of really hyper person to being more calm. I have a bit of a lack of energy.