A recent piece in Vanity Fair discusses a fraudulent television writer. I didn’t really care until I came to the word chondrosarcoma and then got reeled in, my rage accelerating with each successive paragraph. I was diagnosed with skull-base chondrosarcoma* in April 2005 (the final biopsy was delivered after two brain surgeries, transsphenoidal in February 2005 and craniotomy in March 2005 to remove a golf-ball size tumor.) In Sept 2005, M and I drove across the country in a rented van and moved to Boston for 2.5 months and lived in a hotel so I could get proton beam radiation at Mass General 5 days a week, one T stop up on the red line. The entire enterprise was a sustained period of profound darkness and fear, all-consuming, line-in-the-sand of my life against which everything else then or now or to come is measured, a seismic depth charge detonated 17 years ago which still reverberates and ripples through each moment I have the good fortune to continue to draw breath. I have met and interacted with people in the throes of the reckoning, newly diagnosed, those headed to the beyond and everyone in every station in between. I know many non-skullbases who did not make it but I know skullbases who didn’t also. I belong to or have participated in chondrosarcoma (CS) message boards, yahoo groups, FB groups. Some are particular to skullbase, some are for all with CS. I have lived through it long enough to experience all registers of emotion and emotional treatment particular to survivorship: PTSD, standard issue therapy, somatic therapy. I have lived past every-3-month MRIs, semi-annual MRIs, annual MRIs, biannual MRIs, semi-annual endocrinologist meetings and consults, semi-annual bloodwork, daily thyroid medicine, twice a month testosterone injections**, and a pulsing black worst-case scenario mind frame about every possible situation that unfolds before me from a kid’s cough to M being 5 minutes late coming home, every deviance from the norm or the plan is a possible portal into uncertainty, decay, death. Chondrosarcoma, in other words, is unwittingly part of my identity and to discover it fraudulently co-opted to aid someone’s success as a television writer is at once entirely unsurprising (having lived for part of my life in Los Angeles, where authenticity is a fluid concern, speaking generously) and body-quaking, table-pounding, screaming into the backyard rage-making. To the person in question, or to anyone pretending to have cancer or illness of any kind, I summon all my decorum and eloquence on behalf of all afflicted chondrosarcoma patients, victims and survivors to say: FUCK YOU WITH THE HEAT OF A MILLION SUNS.

* In the chondrosarcoma community there is a division between the skullbases and the non-skull bases, referring to how the disease presents initially. The skullbases have better odds b/c if it presents there first it will not metastasize (my radiation oncologist at MGH in Sept 2005: “don’t be the first”).

** my internal production was impacted by the position/removal of the tumor

VF BS VS CS

On Patience: Los Angeles & Screenwriting

new year, etc