By Mark MooneyI’m sure you’ve heard the old saw that you’ll never hear a dying man say that he wished he had spent more time at the office.
Well, I’m here to tell you… ah, check that. If you are reading this, that means that I am no longer here. The prostate cancer finished toying with me on October 6, 2017. I was 66 and glad to be done with the damn disease. But if I were still here I would tell you that I wish I had done more work as a news reporter. Written better stories. Made more and better contacts. Skipped some of the easier pieces and done more in-depth stories. Spent more time on foreign stories. Been a better editor. I loved being a reporter. (Journalist is kind of a lace curtain word for the job.) It’s where I met most of my best friends. It’s where I met my wife Barbara, also a reporter. It’s where I had my biggest audiences. And take a look at the top of this page, that byline. It looks good, right? Journalism allowed me to circle the globe writing stories and meet amazing people. I love, well loved, to be able to say I worked for the Bronxville Review Press Reporter, New Rochelle Standard Star, Bangkok Business, UPI, New York Post, New York Daily News, ABC News and CNNMoney. I have the coffee mugs to prove it. My last residence was Maplewood, N.J., but I always considered myself a New Yorker. As a former Good Humor man in Brooklyn, Blimpie counterman in Manhattan and bartender in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen, I was a New Yorker. And it was by far my favorite newspaper beat. As a kid, my family bounced around Washington, Maryland, Delaware and upstate New York several times. I arrived in New York City at the age of 17 to attend Fordham University. (Attend is used loosely here, but I did graduate.) And I stayed in the city until I was about 50 and moved to New Jersey. There was a break from the city which lasted a little more than two years when I circled the globe. I wrote about it in my self-published travel memoir “Three Cents a Mile.” It’s still available, agents. My wife Barbara Goldberg survives me and l leave greatly in her debt. I got so many more laughs than I gave. And I regret I won’t be there to comfort her as she did me in those final foggy hours. My daughter Maura and son Paul are better looking and smarter than me, a fact which they often reminded me. I was still working on a retort at the time of this writing. The three of them were my holy trinity. In lieu of flowers, donate to a favorite cause. Mine was Doctors Without Borders. Or just buy a round.
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Mark has always been a wizard at finding the shred of humor that can lift you out of the darkest depth. That talent was key to my recovery from a bike/SUV encounter last year, to ensuring that our two children survived into their 20s with no homicide charges against their parents and to our 27 years of marriage. He really knows how to crack me up. There hasn't been much funny stuff happening lately, but I am trying to follow his lead. He is now back in the hospital bed, but it has been brought upstairs to the master bedroom. For the first time since my accident, we are roommates again. Because he needs constant care, we installed a baby monitor with "parent" listening devices that can be used when the caretaker takes a quick bathroom break. Despite tremendous changes, Mark on some level is still Mark. Which means he's feisty, judicious and always in search of the truth. When I approach with a needle-less syringe filled with melted oxycodone (he can no longer swallow the pill), I get a suspicious eyeball. After hearing testimony that I'm acting under the nurse's instructions, he allows the syringe in his mouth. Hospice Home Health Aide Carla, a sweet, pretty Ecuadorian woman, has had her challenges. Thanks to Mark's years of Catholic school and the only thing that rivals Jewish guilt, however, he knows when he is being impossible with someone who is just trying to do her job keeping him clean. The third day she showed up, no doubt expecting another endless series of No's from him, I heard this unsolicted pledge on the baby monitor: "I will be a good patient." We no longer hear what we once did from Mark Mooney the voracious reader and fierce newshound. Still, his vivid imagination is in hyperdrive. These days he frequently wakes from wild dreams with even wilder proclamations. Mark: "That is an amazing story!" Me: "What happened?" Mark: "I can't tell you." Me: "I swear I won't tell anyone. What is it about?" Mark: "Murder." Rest assured, if you are the killer, your secret is safe with Mark Mooney. The man is a vault.  Thank you to all the wonderful people who have followed this blog. There are many people who have been awed and inspired by my dad’s voice through his journalistic career, his book, and now this blog. But today you’ll hear from me: an editor, tech support and daughter to the amazing Mark Mooney. We’ve come to the point where it's not feasible for my dad to write these posts anymore. The advancing prostate cancer and its various metastases have complicated things. It's too hard to concentrate and impossible to type. I will do my best to fill in for him, but he's done a masterful job of walking a thin line between honesty and optimism, and that's something that’s hard to replicate. In what may be a permanent change, he’s moved into the bed in our guest room as he’s no longer able to move up and down the stairs or even stand on his own. This change came following a 4:00 a.m. phone call from my dad. I was asleep in the next room but hurriedly awoke to find him sitting on the floor beside his bed. He explained to me that he had sat up in bed to take a sip of water but, suddenly finding himself breathless and dizzy, he had fallen from the three-foot-high bed and smacked his head against the floor. There was a raised purple bruise across his temple to prove it. I left the house at 7:00 a.m. that day, Friday morning, after a few restless hours in bed, and returned Sunday afternoon following a few days at my apartment in Brooklyn that I rarely see. Even after two days time, there is a noticeable difference. He sleeps a little more each day and eats a little less. Chronology has become distorted for him and he's often confused in his memories. Texting has become too complicated and his phone is altogether too difficult for him to manage - even that is a marked difference from 4:00 a.m. last Friday. Every day is a little different, a new normal that is becoming increasingly difficult to accept and adapt to. If this were my dad’s post, this would be the point where he’d offer a hint of optimism, a taste of humor. But, unfortunately, I don’t have an upside or a heartfelt slice of life moment to share. Some weeks are boring, others are ugly. We are getting through this one day at a time. It's hard to put this story into words, especially because it is not my story and it's becoming increasingly difficult for my dad to tell it himself. But we are still here, breathing and struggling and trying. That is as much as we can do for now.   I recently had my first puffs of legal medical marijuana in New Jersey. The fact that it cost over $800 and took nearly two months shows how well a state bureaucracy can mangle a program it really doesn’t want to work.
The pot is not actually prescribed like a pharmaceutical, although it comes in a bag with an RX logo on it. The top cancer docs at major medical facilities including those who have treated my advanced prostate cancer are prohibited by their institutions from writing prescriptions for medical pot, presumably because it does not have a federal blessing and federal funds are too lucrative to risk. Medical pot gets about a 50-50 rating, I’ve found, among other cancer patients who have tried it to ease chronic pain or to goose a non-existent appetite like my own, which has allowed my body to dwindle to the flyweight division. My entre to med pot came thanks to my wife who asked a Memorial Sloan Kettering doctor about medical marijuana and got him to say, in a line right out a TV crime script, “Well, I know a guy...” His “guy” is a perfectly legal medical professional who specializes in alleviating pain, but couldn’t roll a joint to save his patient’s life. He looked at my bent posture, my cancer record and my age and pronounced me eligible for New Jersey’s medical pot program. That will be $250. Cash. There is no co-payment arrangement. Insurance is not touching this. Now to register with the state. That will be another week or more and another $200. That made me eligible to go to one of five med pot dispensaries in the state to discuss with an experienced stoner the many varieties of pot from Girl Scout Cookies to Platinum OG. It’s not what you’d expect from the dispensary of a hip medicine. I was rolled in my wheelchair past the receptionist to a few rows of empty couches, with a game show blasting on an overhead TV. After the requisite wait time, my name was called. I was rolled up to a counter where my 20-something consultant in a black T-shirt and sparkly silver nail polish awaited. There were no displays except for what was on her computer screen, which only she could see. Customers can’t see, touch or smell the product. Our saleswoman appeared to know her varieties, much like a mechanic at Meineke’s would know mufflers, only with less enthusiasm. She suggested two items for my appetite, a somewhat aggressive sativa called White Widow for the morning, and a more couchified strain for the evening called Finola Kush. The pot cost $135 -- including 15% off for a first-time buyer discount -- for an eighth of an ounce of each. She threw in a plastic pot grinder for three bucks. Being that ingesting anything -- food, water, juice, smoke -- is a problem for me, we were urged by others to get a $200 vaporizer, which heats up the pot until it is a mist. Conveniently enough, there was a vape dealer across the street from the dispensary. I was hesitant to try the pot out of fear of further aggravating my uncooperative stomach. My 22-year-old son helped me figure out how the vape worked with a pinch of White Widow. A short time later he was handing me a dish of vanilla ice cream, although I complained of some nausea. So far, that taint of nausea has kept me from trying the Finola Kush. Or another run at the White Widow. Back in the day - that would be a year ago - I didn’t need urging to toke up. Now I’m leery of any meds, pot included. I can barely believe what I see on my scale these mornings. In between the array of toes is a number that would belong to a high school sophomore wearing a soggy shower towel -- 134 pounds.
But that’s me down there. I feel the effects. I’ve stopped wearing my wedding ring because it spins around my finger too much and slides forward too easily. I lay down to rest after brushing my teeth and again after washing up. After making it to the bottom of the stairs, gasping for breath, I practically dive for the hospital bed that is now parked in my livingroom. The gasping for breath is getting unnerving. It used to be that a short walk would mean a bit of heavy breathing that would pass. That has evolved into a period in which I can’t get any air into my lungs. Even though it only lasts two two or three seconds, that inability to breath, to be suffocating, is panicky. I may want this daily ordeal to be over, but those few seconds where I might be face to face with the end are little bit terrifying. And since they are becoming more frequent, the prospect of having to stand up several times a day gives the day a little extra unwanted drama. The hospice nurse describes having to put up with the this breathing spectre for thirty, forty-five minutes, even while on oxygen. Don’t compound it by panicking, she advises. Practice a mantra: “I am breathing. I am same safe.” We’re never through practicing something, are we?  Instead of a welcoming wreath of seasonal flowers or a mat promising a warm hearth inside, my front door now has this stark “Hello.”
The oxygen showed up after increasingly difficult bouts with breathing. The episodes all pass, but not before bringing my steps to a halt, forcing me to take deep sucking breaths of air and leaving my heart hammering in my chest. These incidents, which last for a couple scary minutes at the most, usually occur after I’ve been sitting or lying down for a while.So getting up now comes with its own little dread of anticipation. My son sees no issue with storing his left-over summer fireworks in the same room. --- My Master I have a Reike master. Reike (pronounced ray-key) is a form of Japanese massage. I agreed to submit one day because much of the skeleton of my torso ached. I had nothing to lose. As far as I can tell, there is no kneading of knots, just slight pressure on shoulders, arms, wrists, chests. I peeked at the master while she worked. A small woman, she seemed to be doing battle. Her mouth was set in a determined frown and her head moved slowly back and forth as if she were denying admittance. Or maybe it was an assessment of what she was feeling through my bones. There was a bit of a warrior about her, constantly battling infection and pain. When I woke up 45 minutes later she was gone, and so was my skeletal pain. ---- Twitter out - almost Twitter is nearly over for me. I no longer start my day by looking at Twitter to see what’s breaking, or end my day with a tweet fix. At times even 140 characters can be too much for me to read, but mostly it’s the wading through crap that I can’t deal with. This from a guy, @mxmooney, who once promised an open bar (for a while) if my friends could get me to 500 followers by a Friday evening. They did.
 The left side of my mouth no longer curls up into a smile. And my left eyelid doesn’t blink in unison with the right one.
I had recently switched my cancer treatment from palliative care to home hospice care. The difference in those terms was brought home by my facial defects. My wife and I called the home hospice nurse because we suspected I might be having a stroke. After a couple quick visits and tests, the hospice staff determined it was Bell’s palsy, not a stroke. Bell’s palsy affects a facial nerve and is often a temporary situation. One of the hospice nurses, however, asked me, “What if it WAS a stroke? Hospice care doesn’t treat illnesses. We try to make patients comfortable while dealing with an illness.” In essence, she was asking whether I would have left hospice care to get treated for a stroke or let it run its course. I asked what the effect of the stroke could have been, and she replied I would likely have lost some bodily function, possibly become incontinent, likely unable to care for myself. “But that would have just made things harder for my family,” I responded. “It’s not like a massive heart attack that would take me out.” A stroke could result in death, she replied. The implication was am I ready for hospice care? Am I ready to let go? Hospice does allows patients to slip in and out of its care for treatment, with some limitations. I thought about what she asked, and concluded I am ready to let go. But there are no assurances that when you do let go, the disease takes you all the way. That could be distressing. She said the Bell’s palsy could have been brought on by my nodes enlarged by cancer squeezing against a nerve, and suggested some steroids that might reduce the swelling. It had a 50% chance of working, I was told. I said no to more pills that might or might not work, but would surely have a side effect. And, I thought, maybe the Bell’s palsy has come at a perfect time. I need a wry smile to face the world. Sleeping has become my major past time. Laying on my back against a hillock of pillows is the surest way to avoid the pain that comes from the least bit of pressure on my spine, where the prostate cancer is inching its way along. And since I always seems to have just taken a pain, nausea or dizziness pill with a side effect of fatigue, it can be hard to stay awake. Emerging from sleep is like trying to climb a slippery slope in loafers. I keep sliding back into that lovely little coma. After four or five failed attempts to stay awake, I often turn on the TV, just to prevent me from sleeping more. Of course, turning off the TV has its own impossibilities. So my two biggest time consumers by far are sleep and reruns likes of “Friends,” “Big Bang Theory,” “Bob’s Burgers,” “Mike and Molly” and watching Aaron Judge strike out. This is all done while lying down. When I struggle upright, it seems my head is too heavy for my neck. I want to topple over again or at least put my head in my arms on the table. Yeah, I’m pretty boring these days. The fatigue doesn’t just come from the meds. Food and drink remains an issue and it’s disappointing that I have pills to control nausea and dizziness (from dehydration), but no doctor is any longer trying to figure out why eating and drinking is such an effort for me. In March, when eating first became a problem, I was a hefty 187. When I left the hospital recently after being treated for acute dehydration, the scale read 153. This morning I was glad to see it had gone back up to 145. This week and next, my extended family has reserved a Jersey Shore house for a big reunion. I was going to take my daughter to nearby Monmouth Park horse track and show her how to read the Racing Form. I thought that would be a classy thing for a pretty woman to know. Instead, hauling my slumbering carcass to the shore seemed too much like “A Weekend at Bernie’s,” so I have stayed home and my family is shuttling back and forth between some beach time and making sure someone is babysitting me. I can tell the Lupron shots have stopped. Lupron is the hormone treatment, or more specifically the treatment denying the body hormones -- like testosterone, which the prostate cancer cells feed on. Suddenly I have to shave a lot more frequently again. There is an upside to all of this. While nearly all of the days are groggy, most days the pain level is on the lower end of the scale. And I congratulate myself daily on having ended my chemo treatments. It must be some kind of biologic mystery when a body refuses nourishment, is in need of food and water but forcefully expels it. If an experiment is needed, I can be subject No. 1. I had been having trouble keeping food and water down for several weeks. The water I did drink consisted of small sips during the day in the hopes that it would stay in me. At one point, however, my body decided nothing was welcome. Anything swallowed was quickly evicted. Not simply ushered back out, but evicted with a violence that lifted my knees off the bathroom tile floor. A doctor said to take an anti-nausea pill, but that pill was soon gone along with the gulp of water it rode in on. After two days of this, I knew I was in trouble. There hadn’t been a reservoir of fluids in my body to begin with, and now the room began to rotate around me like a carousel. I messaged my wife at work and didn’t even have to ask her to come home early. Within hours she had me in an emergency room. If the ER docs sought convincing that I needed something beyond fluids, I threw up several times on their guerney, right after they assured me that the latest bag of fluids would solve the issue. (I ended up getting fluids in that hospital non-stop for five days.) By day two, it was becoming a pill jamboree as they tried different anti-nausea potions, valium and other drugs, while I was still taking oxycodone and was wearing a Fentanyl patch for pain. The dizziness accelerated. Instead of a carousel in which the room spins left to right, the room was now spinning at times from top to bottom. I would close my eyes and peek out cautiously. The doctors never did figure out the cause of my body’s convulsive reaction. I did. Thinking of all the pharmaceuticals being pumped into me, I realized that the worst of the vomiting began when they doubled the strength of the Fentanyl patch. When I explained this to a doctor, she immediately yanked the patch. It took about a day for my body’s most violent reactions to subside. The vomiting largely stopped, aided by meds, but I remained too dizzy to stand. Daring to eat was still an issue. And the constant rounds of anti-nausea, anti-dizziness and anti-pain pills left me asleep for the bulk of those five days in the hospital. I didn’t really mind sleeping through those days, but it has been hard to recover. I’m still constantly exhausted. Forming thoughts takes effort and typing them out -- making the correct keystrokes -- is a struggle. Going back to fix a typo is often left for tomorrow. Food is still not my friend. (God, I hate Burger King commercials.) I have a cane now because my balance remains an issue, and I’ve been prescribed a wheelchair because I don’t think I could walk the length of a store any more. All this does come with perks, however. I now have a handicapped parking sticker to hang from my car’s rearview mirror. All those spots just outside the mall door -- they’re mine!  It’s been exactly one year since my wife was broadsided on her bicycle by an SUV, and in that year she has made a recovery so remarkable it would make Marvel Comics’ Wolverine jealous.
She not only cheated survival odds, she has taken on more than she had before the crash. While still struggling to get control of her brain, her eyesight, her broken jaw and her ability to walk, I believe she recognized that she had a short timetable to heal. She knew that she would soon be the primary caregiver in my cancer crisis. Today, she is sitting in a chair next my hospital bed where I’ve spent the last two days. Her breaks mean rushing home to take care of the dog and the laundry, which had been one of my jobs. Instead of me checking on her, Barbara is solicitous of me at all times. She has ferreted out support groups, second opinions, recipes I can stomach. There is an unending supply of soothing head rubs. (There is nothing as calming as a loving wife’s touch.) She even arranged a reading of my book at the local library with a reception after -- a reading she had to take over along with my son and daughter because cancer has now robbed me of my voice. On the morning of Aug. 6, 2016, I got a frantic phone call from my wife’s friend to say she had been hit by a car during their early morning bike-a-thon. “How bad is it?” I asked. “It’s bad. It’s real bad,” the friend answered. To gauge the enormity of Barbara’s recovery consider this: In those first few hours, a doctor could not assure me she would live. When it was determined hours later she would survive, doctors couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t be brain damaged. Anyone who saw Barbara’s battered face and body in those first few days had trouble recognizing her, and that recognition nearly always brought tears. When my daughter joined me in the ER, she was so shaken by her mother’s condition that she sank into a chair, shaking and sobbing. In those early days, family around Barb’s bed would report excitedly that she had squeezed their hands upon request. That was a really big deal. There were moments that verged on despair, like the evening weeks after the accident when she stood for five long minutes at the sink, unable to remember how to wash her hands. And there were moments of ridiculousness, like the kissing frenzy in which a hospital orderly was taken aback because Barb insisted on kissing her too. And her big waves of hello to perfect strangers in the rehab center hallways as we rolled her -- looking like a loopy pirate wearing a skewed eye patch -- in her wheelchair. God bless drugs. She tackled rehab like a linebacker, doing more than she was asked. Not only did she need to learn to walk again and manage stairs with a broken pelvis, she needed to rehabilitate her shattered jaw and her scrambled eyesight. But her determined rehab, I believe, was fueled by my deteriorating health. While she was still in a residential facility, I confided to her that my doctor had informed me that my prostate cancer had spread to my spine, hip and left thigh bone. He estimated I had about two years to live. Barbara would later tell me that she felt bad at the time because her rattled brain was having trouble remembering what I had told her, and she would have to ask me about it. But what she did understand was that our roles would soon be reversed, that she would be taking care of me. Eight months after being scraped off the road, Barbara returned to work as a journalist at Reuters. Four weeks later, she was back full time. Being back on the clock, she knew, would make it easier for me to stop working as I found the commute grueling and the day’s work exhausting. Her eyesight remains an issue. She is still seeing double from certain angles, but she can’t find the time to do the eye exercises needed to strengthen her sight. That’s because she does many of the chores around the house that I used to do. Her near death has become almost an afterthought as my prognosis sucks up all the attention. She should have had more time to recover, to get her eyesight repaired, to just soak in the affection and sympathy following such a traumatic event. She didn’t get nearly enough attention. So on this awful anniversary, Barbara, I am so grateful for your love, patience and care. I love you and I’m sorry that I’m not taking care of you. |
