It would be too harsh to say that “The Bourne Supremacy
” is a bad movie, but compared to the relatively straightforward plot of the first film, this was at times difficult to follow, with some explanations only showing up in the deleted scenes.
The basics are good: Bourne is living in India, still on the run (he thinks) from Treadstone. Then a CIA operation goes bad, agents are killed, and Bourne’s fingerprint is left behind … in Berlin. At the same time, his girlfriend is shot in a bullet meant for him, which brings him roaring back to the West to settle matters once and for all, unaware that he’s been framed as a traitor who kills CIA agents.
So far, so good. Throw in a ripped-from-today’s-headlines Russian oil magnate and you’d think we’d be in good company, but neither Matt Damon nor Joan Allen (in a stellar performance) can save this. Things get confused to the point where one suspects the director wasn’t really sure what was going on. Some loose ends are wrapped up, there’s a lot of really good action and other set pieces, but the whole does not add up to the sum of its parts.
I have high hopes that the third part of this trilogy will return it to form. In the meantime, this is a rental.
Let’s start with the most important fact first: No cancer. No cancer, no cancer, no cancer.
Less important details follow.
My operation was shoved back several times. The good news is that I was having an open-heart surgeon perform my operation. The bad news is that nearly everything else he works on is critical, and when his attention is needed, a mere biopsy gets pushed back a few hours. This isn’t to say I wasn’t treated well – St. Mary’s Hospital in Apple Valley has, to a person, the most courteous and professional staffers I’ve met anywhere, whether it’s at the Pentagon, Senatorial offices or even the little old ladies at the mall who tell you where Spenser’s Gifts is, when you’re looking for a novelty tracheotomy box voice changer. So I didn’t really begrudge them the delays, although when someone cancelled – Does that mean someone got better, or that they were beyond help? No one said. – and we were asked to come ASAP, there was still a bit of a mad scramble to get there in time.
As I was laying in pre-op, having soda straws shoved into my hand and inner elbow as IV shunts, along with #712 in a series of blood tests, my blood pressure was apparently unusually low for someone about to have surgery. I was more nervous, according to the blood pressure tests I get regularly now, at the oncologist (whose name I will never have to learn now, so he will just remain “The Oncologist� for the rest of my life) and at the pre-admit testing yesterday. Of course, this also means that I didn’t get an injection of drugs to relax me prior to surgery. We call this a mixed blessing.
On television and in the movies, operating rooms have all the focus on the operating table itself. At St. Mary’s, the room was packed with other machines – even the operating table wasn’t a table per se, but something table-shaped but not actually a table as I’d recognize one. The nurse wheeling me in noted that every chest surgery other than heart transplants are done in this room, with the implication that all this equipment is needed for one chest surgery or another. Which was fine by me: If something goes wrong, I want Batman to have his utility belt close at hand.
Everyone in the room radiated quiet confidence, along with the exhaustion of having done three other chest surgeries earlier in the day. The fact that they all had on full-face splatter masks suggested that they were about to embark on a fairly serious operation once more.
The ceiling was hung with larger versions of the lamps dentists suspend over their chairs, including the large knobs in the center used to precisely position them. There were so many lights radiating so much heat that the air conditioner was kept at the meat locker level, and the nurse went and got me a blanket which apparently was in a dryer in a side room for me. My blue-eyed Sikh anesthesiologist – who had the most dense facial hair I’ve ever seen on any human in my life – told me the drug he was injecting into my IV line (the upper one) would make me feel light-headed. I noticed the dentist lamp over my face had suddenly split into three, and I felt very warm and cheerful suddenly. “This is just like being drunk, except without the awkward calling of ex-girlfriends at 3 in the morning,â€? I said …
and then I was waking up. With my eyes closed, I heard my mother in law talking, and realized that the operation was over. I shifted a little. My throat was sore, but there was no IV shunt in my neck and apparently no bandage on my side and no tube down my throat. They hadn’t had to go with Option #3 and deflate a lung. This is A Very Good Thing. Splatter masks on surgical staff is all well and good, but I’d prefer not to be the one splattering, all things considered.
I opened my eyes. I was still too groggy from the anesthesia to know whether this information was asked or volunteered by my wife or her mother, but three hours had passed since the warmed blanket was placed on me. I did not have cancer. I had something else growing inside me instead, but it was non-fatal and more or less treatable. It was now 10 hours since I’d stopped halfway through my glass of water, and I was starving. Dinner, unfortunately, consisted of some ice chips, since there was concern my throat was too swollen from having a camera sliding down it to put anything more substantial down my gullet. I spent a listless night in the hospital – made extra listless by the fact I had oxygen going in my nose an IV in my arm and no way to get to the bathroom as liquid was apparently pumped directly into my bladder through my elbow. Another medical adventure, using something called a “trucker’s friend� by much of the world, under my belt. Those wondering why the bloom is off the rose for this particular adventure for me may be starting to see why at this point.
Now I am home, with a bottle full of 500 mg Vicodin horse pills, a plastic tube that measures how much air I bring in and how hard (to remind me to keep taking deep breaths to fight off pneumonia), a very sore neck and a package of bandages to dress the wound with on future days. I have a 1 1/2� wide cut at the notch of bone at the base of my neck between my collar bones, which I’ll need to keep dry until it’s closed up better. I suspect interesting facial hair, possibly including the dreaded neck beard, may be in my immediate future. I do get to have a bitchin’ scar that will be visible at the neck of nearly every shirt I ever wear. Now I just need to find a novelty tracheotomy voice box at Spenser’s Gifts to use to freak people out, and I’m all set.
Bathing after a night in the hospital, I discovered my chest had been shaved and my entire front torso had been wet down with yellow Bactine antiseptic. While the operation apparently went quite well, the unspoken Option #4 – crack open my chest and restart my heart – had been prepared for, which again is a mixed blessing.
I have an appointment with my chest surgeon, the good Dr. Hakob Davtyan, on Wednesday, and then it’s back to my general practitioner for the sarcoidosis. More information about it is available online.
Again, it’s not fatal, and is mostly just troublesome – the futile cough will be here for a while, for instance. I told you all I’d live to piss on my enemies’ graves. Boy, are they going to not like getting that phone call.
I appreciate, and am somewhat surprised and taken aback by the outpouring of sympathy and concern from everyone. I deeply appreciate it, and it definitely helped. When I was laying in pre-op, it occurred to me that dying on the table would really be letting everyone down, and be a piss-poor way to die all around.
Thanks, guys.
Warning: Long message ahead. This is posted in a few places and being e-mailed to a bunch of people, so if it seems a little impersonal, that’s why, and sorry.
This is just a heads up about what’s going on with my health, so that I don’t have to have separate conversations with however many people are interested and inevitably forget who I’ve talked to or forget to mention certain details.
Last year, my friend Rob died, and to this day, I’m not sure what took him. I have no intention of dying any time soon; I intend to pee on the graves of my enemies, and they all have the bad manners to not have died yet, so I’m not going anywhere, but I don’t want anyone to be caught by surprise later on, just in case.
About two months ago now, I went to bed on a Sunday just fine. The next day I woke up with serious pain in my heels, to the point that I couldn’t walk comfortably. I thought I’d just slept wrong and pulled some tendons. It was worse the next day, and I looked it up online, and thought I had heel spurs (basically, really badly pulled tendons). Then it spread to my knees, ankles, elbows and wrists, with swelling so bad that it was difficult to put on my shoes. I also began having reddish bruises (which later turned out to be internal bleeding) appearing on my inner heels and later atop my feet and along my shins. I also began to have serious fatigue and a dramatic loss of appetite. Later, a persistent cough developed, along with a dramatic cycle where I would go from chills that would cause near-convulsions to a fever state where I was so hot that sweat literally poured off me in sheets.
I went to my local doctor, and they began to try and puzzle out what was going on. I was tested (and cleared) for lupus, HIV, Lyme Disease, gout and at least a dozen other things, including a whole host of STDs the nurse seemed to really want me to have in an advanced state. Eventually, they decided it was some infection that had “settled into” my joints and was causing this swelling. I was told frankly that we might never know what infection it was, but it would be treated with antibiotics.
The antibiotics worked, but just like when you take your car to the shop because your exhaust system needs work to pass the smog test and they find the transmission’s shot, other stuff was found. Specifically, when they sent me in for a chest x-ray to rule out mononucleosis, they spotted some shadows that worried them.
So, having already had an EKG (which felt very much like I was about to be tortured by a Cold War era South American death squad that was going to hook the electrodes up to a car battery), I had to have an even more unpleasant test, a CAT scan, complete with barium smoothies. Imagine the most vile drink you’ve ever had, and add a little strawberry flavoring to it. Now be told you have to get it down in 10 minutes, and then you get half of another one (with banana flavoring) and THEN you get an IV with yet more dye to go into your body. The CAT scan itself is somewhat uncomfortable in that you’re wearing a paper gown (with your pants pulled down, because apparently the scanning of the goodies is an important part of the process), and holding your breath when a mechanical voice tells you to.
The CAT scan scared them even more. At this point, I was at home, working half a day, but mostly sleeping the sleep of the very feverish and barely mobile (one day, my wife had to help me get in and out of the shower, since I couldn’t even move my swollen knee and hips on my own). The nurse told me that they thought I had lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes. (I’m 36, if anyone is wondering.)
Next week sometime – depending on when Blue Cross and the chest surgeon work it out – I will be going in for surgery. The doctor – who is an open heart surgeon who describes this procedure as extremely routine, and one he’s done “hundreds” of times – will both be eyeballing my swollen nodes and bringing back samples to biopsy. There are dozens of versions of lymphoma, and while many treatments are available, they need an idea of what they’re working with before beginning treatment.
The operation will go in three stages, stopping when the lab techs say they’ve got a good sample for biopsy. I will be knocked out the whole time. The first step will be sending a camera down my trachea into my lungs and taking a look at how my lymph nodes are pressing into them. The reason I have a persistent cough is that my lymph nodes have expanded to the size of thumbs inside my chest, pressing against the side of my lungs, irritating them. My lungs interpret this as mucus or something stuck inside, so I have a lot of futile coughing fits.
It’s unlikely that this will give enough information for the biopsy (since no samples will be collected), so the next step is to cut a small hole in my neck, at the notch where your collar bones meet. Apparently, there’s some sort of shaft in front of your trachea that leads down to your organs. A camera along with a cutting tool will go down, and they will be retrieving one of the super size lymph nodes and bringing it back up for the lab guys to slice up and stick under the microscope. I’m hoping #2 is as far as they need to go. Lord knows there’s a huge amount of material in this lymph node – it looks about as big as the aorta that lead in and out of the heart as the major highways for blood in the body – so hopefully it’ll give them useful information.
If not, they’ll go with option #3, which is to flip my unconscious body onto my left side, cut a hole between my ribs, deflate my right lung, and go in through the empty cavity to grab lymph nodes on this side of my body. They’ll then reinflate my lung, patch me back up, and get to biopsying.
About lymphoma: First off, it’s not impossible that my lymph nodes are swollen from something else, including the mystery infection. The standard medical protocol is to assume lymphoma, since it’s the most common, along with it being a progressive fatal disease if left untreated.
There are oodles of versions of lymphoma. At my age, the oncologist (I have all sorts of specialists in my life now, which is not nearly as cool as you might think) says it’s probably a flavor of Hodgkin’s Disease, which is a good thing. The survival rate of Hodgkin’s at my age is above 75 percent. And yes, that’s still a pretty high rate of not surviving, but not surviving does not mean I’ll be punching out any time soon – it could be months, it could be years. We need the biopsy to know. (I do get to check out of the debate about Social Security, though, so that’s an upside.)
Other than the fatigue, the coughing (which I can go days without having it spring up) and a lingering amount of stiffness that I treat with Advil (an anti-inflammatory, who knew?), my quality of life is still pretty high, so no one start measuring me for a coffin just yet.
I don’t tell you this to make you panic or get all weepy. I have the weepy stuff covered with certain family members, bless them. It’s also not time to panic: Lymphoma is one of the most curable cancers, and it’s also a cancer that sheds light on treating other cancers, so there’s a lot of research money being poured into it, meaning new possibilities are forever springing up. And, frankly, the scary stats you’ll find online about survival rates generally apply to much older people. If I were in my late teens, I would have a 95 percent survival rate. At my age, and my general good health – go figure, one side effect of all of this is that I know I’m doing pretty well, especially as the cancer is causing me to lose weight, which was my only real issue – I will almost certainly beat this.
I have two models for how I’m dealing with this. I’m freaking out my boss and, to a certain extent, my medical practitioners, by laughing my way through this. If there is a time to freak out, it will be later, and it will be very obvious.
My first model is a t-shirt that the father of a friend of mine used to wear. This was back when I lived on Army bases, and when I was in the fourth grade, my friend Toby’s dad was a Ranger, as I recall. He wore a t-shirt that was probably pretty scandalous for the mid-1970s. The shirt showed a beautifully rendered eagle sweeping down towards an outcropping of rock, talons out and ready to snatch up a mouse. The mouse, seen from the back, was drawn in a very cartoony style. A second, at best, from death, he stood defiant, arm outstretched, giving the eagle the finger. I’ve never been confused as to whether I was an eagle or a mouse in life, but that mouse has always stuck with me, and I’ve always been THAT mouse. If the eagle comes for me now, I will be eaten middle finger first.
My second model is my friend Kris. Kris, who is as pale as only a natural redhead can be, got a big old honking melanoma on her knee last year. Pale plus shorts plus outdoorsy will do that. There was every possibility that it had gotten into her kneecap and thus her marrow, which would take the melanoma from an ugly scar to fatal. Kris’ reaction was to laugh, and to use “The Cancer” as a way to guilt her husband into bringing her beer. This seems like a good plan. I figure I have a lifetime ahead of me of saying “oh, it’s too hard to take out the trash? You want hard? I HAD CANCER!” or “You think typing in obits is a burden, intern? CANCER IS A BURDEN!” Frankly, that seems like too good of a bit not to get to use, and it makes hanging in there worth it all by itself.
And, frankly, between the endless blood samples, the CAT scan, the barium smoothies, getting my goodies felt up by my oncologist under the pretext of checking for swollen nodes and glands and my upcoming surgeries, I’m too pissed off to let anything happen to me. I’ve got YEARS of griping to do about all of this, once I’m no longer falling asleep at 3 p.m. every day.
So, that’s the score. If I have a scary short haircut next time I see ya, you know why. Frankly, I think the problem was that I haven’t had any exciting adventures for a few years, and my body decided to come up with one of its own. I’m looking on it as an extreme character-building experience.
