I Hope It's So

We all know how Facebook is the "go to" place to look up old friends, high school mates or just snoop on people you don't talk to anymore. Yea, I admit it but I don't think I'm alone in doing this. In any case, for some reason, for the past few months, I had been curious what had happened to an old college friend I had and with whom I stayed in touch with up until about 1992. Then we stopped speaking for a reason that I can't even recall now. I'd run into her now and then at awards and televised events as she was a teleprompter person, tapping out scripts and words for famous people to say. But not long after that, I didn't see her at these kind of events any more. She just disappeared. And we stopped talking.

Over the last couple of years since Google and Facebook appeared on the scene, whenever I had a free moment, I'd try and look up her name but really didn't find anything current. Did she move away? Did she get married and change her name? I'd search for a minute and then just move on. 

And then today, I had a moment and searched and this time, finally found a lead to a writer who credited my ex-friend as her first editor. She was saddened to hear that my ex friend had died. She died just last month. I know you'll think it's weird but somewhere in the back of my messed up Jewish brain I had recalled when I couldn't find her that maybe she had died. That's me, always imagining the worst. Yea, maybe she died. And stupid me, she really did die.

I have to say I'm ashamed to say "friend" because I wasn't a good friend, particularly since she died and I never made amends with her. I guess as a means to lessen my guilt, I was curious to find out what were the circumstances of her death, as if somehow that would make me feel as if I was with her when she was suffering.

BTW, my ex-friend was Lauri Klobas. We met at Cal State Hayward and kept in touch over the years in my moves first to New York and then to LA. Lauri was a big Jan and Dean fan and Beach Boys fan and eventually worked for Brian Wilson. She also had a flair for writing and authored several books on Disability and images and portrayals in the media. She was good but also very dramatic. I wasn't surprised then that after some searching, I found that she kept a blog called 'Letters from Home." There, I came across one of her last blogs dated two years before she died which sort of gave me a chance to do all the catching up we would've done had we reconciled as friends. 

I must say that reading it was weird, in a movie sort of way, where letters after the fact take you to the beginning of story you want to tell. But if you knew my friend Lauri, you'd know that would've been a perfect exit for her. She loved all things movie and music and as I said, had a flair for the dramatic. 

Lauri's last words to me in a letter she wrote (she wrote letters even when people moved over to emails and they were very descriptive and sometimes dramatic): "I hope it's so" Those four little words became sort of an inside joke between me and Marlee, as she knew her as well, and we always said we'd look to each other and mouth them if we ever ran into her. Oddly, they are most fitting here, as I paste her last blog entry. Feel free to read it below. She was whip smart, kind, sometimes annoyingly precise but always had a smile. Appreciate the words and the person she was. 

As Lauri said "I hope it's so." 

Jack

Posted 10/18/08 9:57 PM From Lauri Posts 8864 Last Apr-2
To All [Msg # 61449.1 ] 

I got off the LFH list when Barbara started it up again... so, this is not really a letter
from home, just a letter to friends.

I had a good spring and summer, busy and running about... working and just enjoying life. I did a big editing job on a MS for a Forumite and that started getting my writing engines going a bit. And then a miracle occured-- I started reading again.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, I thought my reading and writing would be good companions during the treatment but they weren't. I pretty much abandoned the wirting because I could not lose myself in a make-believe world when my own had become so serious. As for reading, well, I just couldn't concentrate anymore. Reading something like Alex McCall's Precious Ramotswe books was an ordeal. I could have once been through a book like that in a day!

In 2004 when the cancer came back, I still hadn't gotten back the reading and writing. Now, some four years later, in the blink of an eye, the reading came back. I read more in a week than I'd read in the previous six years! I knew it wa sonly a matter o ftime for the writing to come back. I've felt it in my bones.

Or maybe it was something else. The second week of June, I bent over to put my laptop under my desk at work as we broke for lunch. Somethng went sproinnnngggg! under my right arm. After that, I couldn't life my arm to do anything. When I'd pull open a door, I could feel the whole girdle of muscles on my side aching.

Since that's been my troublesome side (where the cancer was found), I went for a mammogram. "It's as perfect as perfect can be," the docter said, much to my relief. When I asked about the sproinnng, she traced a line on me, exactly where it hurt. "That's your latissimus."

I was relieved it was just a weird muscle pull.

I went for my six month oncology check-up on June 30th. I told the doctor about the sproinnng and she palpated the area and felt nothing. "If you're not worried about it, I'm not worried about it," she said, and I was told to come back in six months.

Also in that time frame (I'm just not sure when), I was making my bed and I bent over and something that felt like electricity exploded at the base of my spine. I fell on my elbows on the bed saying, "WHAT was that??" I thought that, at last, my if-fy back had gone out" on me. I've had pinched nerves, slipped disks, the whole gamut. This was new.

As I babied my right sproinggged side, something else went out of whack in my back. And then, I fell right on my tailbone. Needless to say, my back has been a mess for months. The acupuncturist is getting rich.

The oncologist called back. She didn't like my blood test from the 30th. Wanted me to take another. It got delayed because I got bit by some nasty insect that left a 4-inch red welt on my arm. I waited for that to improve before I had blood drawn again, not wanting it to skew the results with the bite business going on. Got it done a week later. She liked the second blood test less than the first which turned August into an odyssey of scans and appointments, The day after the Labor Day weekend, she called me and told me that I had metastasized breast cancer. She'd known before the weekend but let me have the holiday to enjoy.

And so, I am about to start Chemo 3.0, a regime that will be far more brutal than anything I have had. Before, I had one treatment every three weeks. This will begin as an oral regime, 14 days straight. I imagine I will be far sicker than I've ever been but I don't care as I now feel it in my pelvis and spine. I have already had one surgery, a thing called the Gamma Knife which radiated out four small, small tumors in my brain. This was so painless that I went home and had pizza for dinner that night. It's rather amazing. I am also a candidate for something called the Cyber Knife that does the same sort of thing in the body... computer pin-pointing of tumors and they are blasted away by some beams of whatever (I forget). I am hoping that removes the problems and that the chemo will be more of a "mop-up" operation. Before the Cyber Knife option came up, she said I might be on chemo for as long as a year this time... and that really gave me pause to think-- would I rather die with my soul intact... or go through this grueling marathon again which tears one apart mentally and physically?

Well, things hurt now and I want to fight it. Hurts so bad that I am having trouble walking and am about to go out on disability at work.

I'm going to fight to keep my reading and the almost-there writing stuff intact. I may not have another six years to gain them back.

I have a friend who's going to help me out with things, should I not be able to go shopping or what have you. One of my immediate needs is to get to the DMV. I need to renew my driver's license before the 28th (my birthday) and want to have the picture taken with my hair, which is REALLY good right now. I don't want to be pictured in a wig. But it hurts to walk to get into the car to get to the DMV! I need to try and do it this coming week.

The Pavilion of Pink Lights was a wonder to me in 2004. I hope, what with all the troubles and everything else around us, that some of you can blast me pinkly or prayerfully or however you send energy and love. The odds are much different this time but I know I can beat the Beast back again. I've done it twice before. After four years, I thought I was done with it but no, it wants me really bad. And I want it gone as much as it wants to eat me alive.

Up until 2002, my medical record read that I'd had a tonsilectomy at age 6. There was nothing else. But I have certainly made up for lost time since then, unhappily so.

I just have to hang in there. 
Lauri