Greetings from Manpad

(part the four)

My mother and I flew over to Rotterdam in May. People have a misconception about the Netherlands that everyone speaks English. Not true. They all take English classes but not everybody bothers to use it. Plus all the signs are only in Dutch, which is a goofy language. For example, brood rooster is not a chicken, it’s a toaster. Dinsdag is a day of the week, the regional paper is called Spits and a flop is a snack. You wash with zeep, smoke wiet in coffeehouses and if you’re caught with wiet on the street it is your own domme pech (bad luck). The first night we were there we went out for pizza and they put out the ketchup and mayo. Bicycles are everywhere and nobody bothers with locks. The taxis are all Mercedes Benzes. Dog crap is also everywhere and since the Mastiff is the pit bull of the Dutch, it’s some mighty hearty dog crap. No laws about sküuping püuph I guess. I saw a car called the Megane and walked down a street named Manpad. And none of this is funny to the Dutch when you point it out (no pirate jokes there either).

On Monday I gave blood and urine “examples” and had an MRI. Almost as boring as the MRI was the Euro-Pop they were piping into my headphones. On Wednesday I had the isolated limb profusion. This involved isolating the circulation of my leg and pumping two massive doses of chemo directly through the blood vessels going throughout my tumor. The two kinds of chemo used are too toxic for the whole body to handle and if it circulated through my body it would kill me. Instead, it made my leg turn purple and my veins burn. I also felt like I had the flu for about a month. After the anesthesia wore off I was a puking incoherent stoned crying puking mess. Did I mention the puking? Not my finest moment, and in a bed with pre-bloodstained sheets. Let’s hear it for socialized medicine and all the Percoset you can eat!