Sunday 19 June 2005.
        Back on May 27th, I blogged about the book "Time on Fire" by Evan Handler, an American who suffered from leukemia and who had a book about it published in 1996. At the time of blogging I didn't know if the author was still alive. Very shortly, I got an e-mail from E.H. himself saying that, as it happens, he is alive.
        I was most surprised to get this feedback. Usually the result of blogging is silence. For example, I've blogged about George W. Bush on a number of occasions, but he's never deigned to notice my existence.
        Anyway, Evan Handler's e-mail drew my attention to the fact that he's active in the TV world, something which had escaped my attention as I rarely watch any TV apart from the news. I'm as close as you can get to a television zero.
        E.H. writes that he was "until recently" one of the stars of the show “Sex and the City”, playing the role of Harry Goldenblatt. He (Evan, not Harry) is working on a follow-up book to "Time on Fire", the follow-up book being a memoir to be published in the US in 2006. The title of the follow-up book is “It’s Only Temporary...The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive”.
        My interest piqued by this e-mail, I looked on the Internet and found a picture of Evan Handler as Harry Goldenblatt, conspicuously minus hair. Although Evan survived, it seems his hair does not. As he writes on page 247 of his book, the hair follicles in his head ended up permanently damaged.
        The e-mail also gave me the push I needed to read on and finish the book. Some of it I couldn't relate to -- adventures in the realms of death therapy and holistic healing. But a lot of it was useful, particularly the statement on pages 126-127 which says "I might not be able to choose what happened to me, but I could decide how I would respond to it."
        (Quote from "Time on Fire", Owl Book edition, published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1997.)
        Reading Evan's book, occasionally I got a glimpse of something I recognized. At one hospital he was in, there was a "three strikes and you're out" policy regarding inserting needles into a vein: you take a maximum of two shots at getting the needle in, then hand over the job to someone else. In the hematology department at Auckland Hospital, there was a similar policy, but you only got two shots at getting the needle in.
        Other elements of Evan's experience were rather different from mine. For example, he writes (page 120) "I spent hours visualizing images of domestic bliss, symbolizing the depth of our love". I, for my part, with my appetite stoked up by the steroid dexamethasone, spent hours visualizing imaginary meals.
        My fantasies were gratified, in part, when my sister turned up at hospital with a plastic ice cream carton containing ten chicken drumsticks. It would have been unspeakably greedy to eat them all at once, so I didn't, and a few survivors managed to make it as far as the fridge -- they disappeared the next morning.
        Another thing that was rather different was Evan's preoccupation with the possibility of fatherhood. He writes (page 120) that he and his inamorata "would both fantasize, hour after hour, about parenthood".
        I didn't fantasize about the possibility of parenthood because, for a fair chunk of the time, I had the actuality on hand in the form of baby Cornucopia. In one of the notebooks documenting my chemotherapy days there is an entry which says "Cornucopia is screaming. For fun." Such are the joys of fatherhood.
        Anyway, having finished the book, the main point of "Time on Fire" is, for me, that the author survived -- after a struggle which was a lot longer and a lot tougher than anything I've had to go through. Right at the moment, a survival script like this is imaginatively useful for me.
        Of course, I'm writing this before my own treatment is over. I still have the radiotherapy ahead, and there are a number of unknowns associated with it. But my expectation is that I'm going to get through the radiation therapy okay. Fingers crossed.