[sic]: A Memoir by Joshua Cody

see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl”); not the rage against the machine of Madison Avenue and daytime television; not the ecstasy of the symmetry of the musical reprise (a joy unknown, until this moment, to the pop/rock album)—none of this matters, Lennon tells us, because he’s just read the newspaper and—oh, boy. And now we’re in minor. And we may never get out. But of course we will, unforgettably, with the help of ten hands on three pianos—one lent, uniquely, by Daniel Barenboim, just when you think the guy’s exhausted pretty much any further possibility of cultural generosity, you learn something like this about him—and with the help of one of the, well, no, I’ll just go ahead and say it, the greatest E major chord in the history of Western music, * a conclusion that very nearly had been a bunch of white guys humming Tibetan chant, which incidentally is as good an illustration of the fragility of great art as the image of a forty-nine-year-old Ryan O’Neal (Paramount’s original choice, to Mr. Coppola’s horror—hey, the suits told him, Italians can have blond hair too) saying, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Which would have been even worse. But we know now, in hindsight, it ends with that chord and, as the groove proves, we will never see it any other way; but before, when it was actually happening, we simply weren’t sure how it would turn out.
    It’s also exactly like yet another fresh spring after yet another waterfall in the center of a Greek island: yet another giving away.
    What I wrote now, in foreverafter altered penmanship:
     
Lymph node shrunk and is stable—not unusual
Still some PET activity, much less than before
This is troubling b/c it correlates
False positive rate 20/40%
Money is in the chest.
Media stanoscopy.
If there is persistent disease, we still have an excellent chance of getting rid of it.
Autologous st
Supportive
Stem cells. After chemo,
Cell separator, takes blood out, centrifuges it, get the stem cells.
Then high dose chemo with radiation
with autologous stem cells, back in for a transfusion, after
2/3 weeks, they start growing back.
Risk not huge, been doing it for 20 years.
Mortality under 5%.
ICE. Two cycles to start with. In hospital.
2/3 weeks, 6/9 weeks I is continuous infusion
1 to 2 days
then more
a little more intensive but still conventional
2) replace the port—this is the catheter
3) stem cell separator. Few days.
4) High dose chemo with radiation. 48 to 72 hrs after chemo
stem cells go back in.
Then in hospital for weeks.
Could be worse.
Pretty well tolerated.
    Some risk, not too much.
     
    Notice something? The writing’s way better. Like having Pound around, but for free, without having to put up with his fascism. (Joyce was “genuinely frightened of him” and wouldn’t meet him for dinner in Paris in 1934 if Hemingway wouldn’t come along.) 5
    Then I said, how long will all this take?
    “A year.”
    Okay and we shook hands and I walked outside and kept walking and when I reached Park Avenue I called a friend of mine with whom I’d been speaking during the six months of chemo; she’d had the same thing, she’d done the same chemo and was fine. I told her that for me there was some “uptake” on the scan results and that I was going to have a bone marrow transplant, and she started sobbing uncontrollably, crying, “But that can’t be true, that’s not true. That’s salvage treatment, you’re not going to die. You have to go to another hospital, because that can’t be true.” Now this reaction made me feel a little uneasy, like Eurydice must have felt when she saw the look on her boyfriend’s face ahead of her, and felt herself slipping into Hades. I called my friend Carmilla. She told me where to meet her, a pan-Asian restaurant in Chelsea. I jumped in a cab and watched the old Pan Am Building, now the MetLife Building, swell.
    She was at the bar