Health Update #28: Mojo Nixon and the Alternative Soundtrack of the 80s

It's been over a year since my first diagnosis (1/24/2023) and just shy of a year since my first staging at Stage IV (3/3/2023). I'm still here.

February 7th: Mojo Nixon died today. Or was that yesterday, I'm not sure. It was probably after midnight and this side of the International dateline, so I'll assume it's today. For those who don't know, Mojo Nixon was an iconoclastic rockabilly/psychobilly satirist who got his start in the mid-80s, taking aim at Reagan era corporate America with songs like "Burn Down the Malls," "I Hate Banks," "Destroy all Lawyers," "Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with my Two Headed Love Child," "Elvis is Everywhere," "Don Henley Must Die," and "Jesus at McDonalds." He was an imperfect encapsulation of the counter-cultural rage in that industrial wasteland, the musical equivalent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

Looking back through recordings of Mojo -- interviews and MTV appearances and music videos -- I'm reminded of that counterculture that I was able to immerse myself in, even in a small town like Monroe, Louisiana. The sleeveless denim jackets and torn t-shirts and loud cow-punk bands. I'm reminded of the anger and passion of the anti-Reagan movement, the rage against a glossy, neon-glow pop culture among slacker philosophers, mildly apathetic revolutionaries, and burned-out hippies. And I'm glad for those memories of that passion and anger and kindness of good friends, acquaintances, like-minded folks passing by, and even those occasional frenemies who shared those feelings. It was an awesome and infuriating decade.

Long-haired redneck meets long-haired cajun.
Enoch's a Cafe, DeSiard Avenue, 1987 or so.

In 1990, at the beginning of a new decade, Mojo Nixon debated Pat Buchanan on CNN on the role of censorship in a democracy (shortly after the release of 2 Live Crew's Nasty as They Wanna Be). He was over the top as always, but maintained an edge of respectability. Mojo kept that energy and anger and joy up until the end, hosting an Outlaw Country Cruise, playing one last raucous set, closing down the packed bar by winning a drinking contest, and then having a massive coronary in his sleep while docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A good ending if ever there was one. Wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom. Mojo was 66 when he died, less than a decade older than I am now. Rest easy, Mojo.

February 21: It's been more than a month since my last update. A lot has happened on a personal level, so I apologize for glossing over much of that and getting straight to the medical update. I had another chemo session on January 30th with Docetaxel and Ramucirumab, and the three weeks that followed were pretty brutal. I've spent about 10 days each time in bed recuperating, and then 10 days progressively feeling better until I'm able to hobble across the street to the Lake Street Theater or even take a slow walk around the block to a nice restaurant. Half the meal ends up in a to-go container to be eaten the next day, but it's good to get out. Corrine is kind enough to insist on picking me up and dropping me off at the front door if we go further than a block or so. 

We spent Superbowl Sunday at what should have been a quiet little Italian restaurant a few doors down from the apartment. Unfortunately, a jazz trio was packing up their gear for the night, and one nicely dressed older woman was demonstrating to the balding, ponytailed, sexagenarian drummer how she knew a few drum licks by pounding on the table and he would respond in turn with his own demonstration. They were still going at it in call and response when we left. Ah, mature love. I hope they ended up going home together that night and finding some comfort from the cold darkness.

We drove to Ann Arbor last week so that we could spend Valentine's Day at UM for a CT scan, and then Rochester that afternoon for a small gathering at Lori and Jim's house. By then we had received the CT scan results, which were a little hard to interpret, but looked good to us: "Likely evolving radiotherapy changes to the right lung; Unchanged appearance of the lytic lesion right posterior sixth rib; Stable size thoracic lymph nodes; etc etc etc." Some hard to decipher; others pretty clearly positive.

We were able to take a quick trip with Pris to Louisiana to be with a tight group of family and friends, and then back to Detroit and Ann Arbor for the next chemo session on February 20th. After a flight delay and rebooking, we landed back in Detroit at 1 a.m.  

We slipped in late at night and were at the hospital by 8 am for lab work. The phlebotomist used my port to access the vein and left the access line in for the chemo session. After the lab work, we were called in to see the doctor to go over the CT scan results. We first saw a colleague of our typical oncologist, and she asked what we thought of the results. That's never a good sign. Don't ever fall for that. We should have said, "you tell us." Instead, we rambled a bit about what we saw as the positives, but included the caveat that there were some results that we didn't know what sense to make of. She referred to one specific line in the abdominal portion of the CT Scan: "Since 12/1/2023, interval increase in size of right renal metastasis now measuring 3 cm, previously 2.5 cm (series 605, image 147). Interval increase in size of right inferior renal pole metastasis now measuring 1.7 cm, previously 1 cm. Unchanged posterior tiny hypodense lesion in the right kidney too small to characterize and may represent an additional metastasis measuring 0.8 cm (series 5, image 44)." Each previous scan had shown these renal lesions, but they had never made any fuss about it before. The proxy oncologist told us that because of the growth of the lesions on the kidneys, they considered this to be disease progression beyond the limits of the clinical study. In other words, my clinical oncologist was breaking up with me. 

When Dr. Q came in, she said that there was no point in continuing with the docetaxel and ramucirumab trial, pulled me out of the study, and cancelled the chemo infusion session scheduled that day. Apparently, the lesions on my right kidney had doubled in size since the last scan, which signals that the chemo regimen isn't working on a systemic level, especially considering the side effects are severely debilitating for at least half of the 21 day cycles. They were willing to keep treating me, of course, with either a different chemo drug (Gemcitibine, perhaps) or get me into a Phase 1 trial with an untested drug (on humans), but they recommended that it would be better to do that somewhere local to me in Chicago. They wished us well and walked out of the room. It was a bit stunning. I've had less emotional breakups in my teens. A nurse was summoned to remove my access line. We decided to cancel the rest of our plans for that day and the next and drive straight back to Chicago. 

We're still digesting the news, but will probably get in touch with the oncologist at Northwestern in the next couple of days. We've already had a consultation with Dr. G. at Northwestern back in December and will probably go back there now that Corrine has me on her BCBS-Illinois insurance. I'll transition to permanent disability soon at OU, which means that I'll loose my insurance in Michigan, as well as 40% of my salary. I feel like I need a break from chemo for a while, but we'll see what Dr. G. says.  

I've been reading "Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted," which is a brutal but ultimately positive memoir by Suleika Jaouad about being diagnosed with Leukemia in 2011 when she was 22.  She takes her title from an observation in Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor," written as Sontag was being treated for breast cancer: "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." I can say that the memoir is hard to put down. I read most of it on my phone between Atlanta and Detroit, and just a few chapters in, learned to use the highlighting feature and went back to the beginning to underline passages. In 2021, Jaouad was diagnosed with a recurrence of the cancer and underwent her 2nd bone marrow transplant. Her story has been chronicled in the documentary American Symphony.

I also have a collection of essays edited by Lee Gutkind (big creative nonfiction guy) titled At the End of Life: True Stories about How We Die, as well as When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who died in 2015 after being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. For a little lighter reading, I was given a book by Pris, Every Man for Himself and God Against AlI, Werner Herzog's incredulous memoir that's tonally consistent with the rest of his work, and a biography from Greg, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. 

We're still wrapping our heads around this and the prognosis hasn't really changed -- they've known it's terminal since October. We're trying to make the best of the time we have left, however long that is. It could be months or years, but we've all gotta go sooner or later. 

Cheers from Tre Sorelle Ristorante, 2024, on one of the good days.