The doctor had some tests she'd need to do on Monday before she could find out if the cancer had spread. That is a very surreal sentence to hear someone directing at you. There was nothing else to do. They brought my wife in. I told her what they had told me, which wasn't much, other than the "I have cancer" part. We went home and both took a handful of the pain pills my surgeon had given me. 

I can't be certain who got a call from me, or when. What I do remember is I didn't call anyone in my band, so as not to disrupt the flow of work that was going on across the country.  A lot of my focus and motivation over the next year in regards to recovery, be it from surgery or chemo and radiation side effects, would be born out of my necessity to continue performing during my treatment. 

This was supposed to be OUR year. Top Heavy Crush's, that is. We were going to make this record with a real guy twiddling the knobs, in a couple different world-class studios, and we were going to MAKE IT!!! It killed me not to be able to take the time off work to go to Memphis with the guys, but a wife, a kid and a day job are not always conducive to the spontaneity of rock opportunities.

Turns out I was going to need the time off form my first round of chemotherapy. It would be piggybacked, with five-six weeks of radiation. 

Slowly word of my condition got back to the band. I continued to down play the severity of my situation, even though I had been told that while the cancer hadn't spread to my liver (the first place col-rectal cancer tends to spread to, leaving you with a five percent survival rate), the tumor was a stage three (out of four) and was so big that my surgeon told me it was very likely that at some point during my treatment it could fully block my colon altogether, leaving me in need of surgery to install a colostomy bag. 

By the fifth week of chemo and radiation, I was a mess. Radiation blisters all of your orifices. All four. My bottom lip was three huge blisters. It wasn't terribly painful, it just looked really bad. The inside of my nose (which I always had a hard time keeping my fingers out of anyway) was always cracked and tender. Below the belt, it got really bad. Not so much for my ass, which due to my near plugged condition wasn't seeing all that much action anyway, but my Johnson.... well, it had seen better days. Those blisters were incredibly painful to the touch, so ALL pants had to be very loose fitting so that I could hold them away from making contact when I walked. It was complete torture.

None of this was going to stop me from flying to Memphis to put back ground vocals on our breakout record. When I started wondering if I was going to be strong enough to make the trip, the test I gave myself was whether or not I could complete a much needed mowing of the lawn with my son perched on my shoulders for the entire job. He was too young at the time to leave unattended and, and having taken sick leave, I was home alone taking care of the two of us while my wife was at work. I passed the test. The lawn looked great, and I was going to Memphis. 

I was two days shy of my Friday flight at my weekly Wednesday Oncology/chemo appointment.  I would see my doctor, talk about how I was doing, get my blood work done, and then if they hadn't fried all my white cells, I would be cleared for my new week's bag of poison. Dr. Lorin Yee (male) took notice of my blistered lip. I told him it didn't hurt but it is was just starting to get in the way of eating. Stating the desire and need for all treatment to do "more good than harm," he called off my final week of this round of chemo and also my last session of radiation. I was ecstatic. 

He did, however, need the nurse to swab and test the blisters on my lip. I asked about the test and was sure I heard wrong, when the nurse swabbing me answered.... "for herpes."  

"I'm sorry... did you say herpes?"

She went on to inform me that it's possible I could have contracted the disease when my immune system was nice and bulletproof, but now that the cancer and treatment had taken it down to non existent, the disease could be manifesting. I said "Lemme get this straight. I come in here to get treated for cancer, and you guys give me herpes? Talk about doing more harm that good."  

The test came back negative. They were just blisters. I didn't/don't have herpes. Let me say that again. I DON'T HAVE HERPES!!

By this point, my guts were constantly churning. The blockage was getting worse. It was REALLY painful. The cramps that would come sent a signal to my brain that for 39 years had meant "You better get your ass to a toilet RIGHT NOW."  So I would.  If I had to be out of the house for longer than a short drive, I would where adult protective undergarments. 

A what?

A diaper. 

Oh. Wow that sucks. 

And it did suck.  But I put one on, and got on board that plane to Memphis. I took another handful of pills and washed them down with enough Bloody Mary to knock me out for as much of the flight as possible. Even so, I must have made at least a half dozen mad dashes to the back of the plane, my brain having gotten the signal. I didn't realize it at the time, but something had changed. While on the plane, every dash for the can was a false alarm.  I hadn't yet put it together. 

Andy, Top Heavy Crush's singer, was the first familiar face when I got to the hotel desk. When we had last seen each other, I was the regular me - the tall, strapping asshole he'd known for ten years. He was not prepared for the transformation. I was the walking dead. I waited to see his reaction. He was visibly shaken by the deterioration of my condition. I didn't have the time or energy (or probably even the ability) to sugarcoat how I was doing. I needed to be in a horizontal position immediately. 

I got up to the room I would be sharing with one of them and laid down. I had never been so wrecked in my entire life. That trip had taken more out of me than I ever would have thought possible. And still, every twenty minutes the excruciating pain hit, with the signal to get to the can. It was Friday night and I spent the next two days locked in that cycle, waiting for enough energy to return to me so I could make the trip down to the studio to sing my precious back up vocals. 

It had been nothing but false alarms ever since the plane ride. NOTHING. At some point on Sunday night I stopped getting up. I just stayed in bed. My legs stopped listening to my brain when it told them to run to the bathroom. I was getting the picture. I called Dr. Yee and filled him in, he made an appointment to see me first thing Wednesday morning. 

Somehow Monday morning I emerged from the room. I had made the trip, and (with irony still months if not years away) I was going to have my vocals on this record. I truly believed that without them, there would be something missing I would never be able to get right with myself if the record wound up doing only mildly well. So I did them, for what it was worth. And they were fantastic.

I got home Tuesday night. I was in bad shape.  Really, really bad.

Wednesday morning I went to see Dr. Yee, who prodded me for about two seconds before sending me over to my GI specialist/surgeon Dr. Terem, whom he had informed of my pending condition. She did a tiny bit of prodding and took an x-ray. She came back 20 minutes later and told me to go home and get some things. I was going to need emergency surgery TODAY. My colon was fully blocked and they needed to put a colostomy bag on me.  I would be in the hospital for four or five days. She described the procedure as "highly invasive," and there was to be extensive recovery time.  If all went well, they could reverse the process at some point in the future. If all went not so well, it would be permanent.

Then she left us alone to digest that for a few moments. I held my wife. The first and only thought in my head was now I would be immobile. Now I would be wounded.  Now I would be unavailable for my son to jump on, and wrestle with and tickle. Now my son would KNOW Papa was sick....

For the first time since I had been diagnosed almost two months earlier, I cried. 

Drummer Geoff Reading - who writes a bi-weekly online column (Fridays) for the Weekly Volcano called "Holding Down the 253" in addition to his weekly Wednesday music column - has played music in tons of Northwest bands - Green Apple Quick Step, New American Shame, Top Heavy Crush and most recently Duff McKagan's LOADED - to name but a few. He's toured the world several times over, sharing stages with the likes of Slipknot, The Cult, Buckcherry, Korn, Journey, The Sex Pistols, Nine Inch Nails and on and on. He has called Tacoma home since 2005, and lives in the North End with his wife and son.