Oooops! You mean you cured that? Even temporarily??? #15

A singular fringe benefit of chemotherapy

OR:  Two for One is Twice as Fun

My oncologist is also a dermatologist!

One does learn something new every day…if not, one has wasted the day.  When a person has Stage Four cancer, even at a ridiculously early stage of stage fourness, that person gets up to date in things never before considered.

Take this, for example, and I can make this a ridiculously brief blog entry:

I have been suffering from what we once blithely called “the heartbreak of psoriasis” since I was in high school—long before most of you were born.  I have visited several dermatologists, a peaceful group of medical people who rarely deal with heartaches greater than psoriasis.  Now this is fairly unfair since many of them do work in burn centers, in children’s surgeries and elsewhere.  Still, our pervasive impression is that dermatology is a less intensive kind of specialty than, say, oncology or cardiology. I saw an episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” once when the youngish interns stumbled onto the dermatology ward:  soft music, skin ointments, make-up clinics and so on.  It reinforced the stereotype I already had of dermatology.

When I first consulted a dermatologist about my psoriasis (and I will get to the point soon), said dermatologist recommended a kind of tar compound.  I rubbed it on my scalp every day for months and nothing happened except my hair kind of stuck together.  It reminded me very much of the gummy residue I used to pick from the bark of pine trees in the Big Thicket and chew like gum, but in a liquid format.

The tarry compound helped a little, but never did as much as I had hoped.  I combined it, on the advice of the dermatologist with Neutrogena^tm  T-Gel, a shampoo that is supposed to help with psoriasis.  I continued to use T-Gel for years and, a few years ago, combined it with something called Clobetasol Propionate^tm (5mg), an ointment used on the bits of psoriasis on my body and combined with a scalp oil to rub on the psoriasis on my scalp.

NOTE:  I teach a course fairly regularly called "The Antihero in American Literature."  I love it!!!  I start, usually, with The Red Badge of Courage and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” by Stephen Crane (a true antihero hisownself); then move to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, show the Henry Fonda film of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and then ZAP! Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Kerouac’s On the Road or The Dharma Bums.  We watch The Last Picture Show and Rebel Without a Cause (great material for the course) and I finish off with a fine novel by Bobbie Ann Mason called In Country or use her book Shiloh.  I did use Fear of Flying once, but my students weren’t fond of it.  Okay, I teach all that cool stuff and DAMN!  I can’t wear black!!!!  Why?  The heartbreak of psoriasis snowing over my shoulders.  Unsolved by medical science.

Did I say unsolved?  My psoriasis is totally gone!  How?  May I add, WTF!!!!!  I looked it up.  I Googled it.  Chemotherapy is the most effective treatment for psoriasis!!!!!!  I don’t have it anymore and I’m scheduled to teach my antihero course in spring, 2012.  I will wear nothing but black and I will be mostly bald.  Perhaps I’ll even appear threatening!!!  Doc Onc1 is the best dermatologist I’ve ever had.  And I don’t even have to pay him for that part of what he’s doing.  It’s a side effect, a mere bagatelle.  Please note that I do NOT recommend getting chemo for that disease!

More after Monday when I have a CTscan of the chest and an MRI of the brain.  And, as always, thanks for reading this far.