Richmond Reads
by
John Denniston
Sick Humor
In the spring of 2000, Robert Schimmel is at the top of his game.
After 20 years of doing stand-up, the 50-year-old comedian is seeing the
gold ring in his grasp: He has been named Stand-Up Comic of the Year. He
has done his first HBO special. He has just finished shooting a pilot
for a sitcom on the Fox network. And he’s living the good life in Los
Angeles with his new-found soul mate, a beautiful woman half his age.
By June, Schimmel is laid low, incapable of performing life’s simplest
tasks such as tying his shoes, driving a car or even going to the
bathroom. He’s completely hairless, unable to eat, walk or comprehend
how his world has been so suddenly overturned by the Big C, aggressive
non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Cancer on $5 a Day* *chemo
not included (Da Capo, 195 pages, $22) is Schimmel’s very personal
memoir of his long journey into the darkness of understanding he has a
51 percent chance of living longer than six months.
Told in his irreverent, sometimes raw, comedic style, this is a
day-to-day, chemo session-by-session primer into the devastating world
of a cancer patient, from denial to rage to acceptance to determination.
The trip moves from his pre-diagnosis advice on how to die—“Just go for
a really big stroke or massive heart attack. That way you’re out. No
pain, no suffering, bang, boom, we’re sitting at your funeral”—to his
ultimate embracing of the disease in order to fight it: “I honestly feel
that I’m a lucky guy. The cancer has obviously upended me, thrown me for
a loop, but it has also opened me up to so much that I could never have
seen before.”
Mostly “Cancer on $5 a Day” is about relationships, not only Schimmel’s
connections with his ex-wife, friends, acquaintances and children—in
particular his son who, at age 11, had died eight years earlier of brain
cancer—but also and importantly his relationship with himself, his life,
and what he discovers to be really important.
“Cancer on $5 a Day” is a quick read, and although it’s difficult to say
that the subject has any humor to recommend it, the story will have you
chuckling, if not downright laughing out loud.
It’s a book that’s probably targeted at people undergoing the fear and
anxiety of the Big C, and the caregivers surrounding them, but it has a
much larger, more general appeal. Beneath the veneer of his
self-deprecating humor, this is a story of struggle and hope, of being
pushed to the brink and walking away a survivor, and finding a core
truth within oneself during the ordeal.
John Denniston lives and writes in Richmond.
