Cancer

In December 2005 I was diagnosed with 4th stage squamous cell carcinoma, tongue base, after a young resident at U of Wisconsin medical center noticed two lumps on my neck when I was in for something minor. The cancer had metastasized to two lymph nodes. They put me into six weeks' radiation, linear accelerator death ray, down in the Frankenstein basement of the Madison hospital. Had a G-tube implanted in my stomach, could not swallow anything. Went down to less than 120 lb. and looked like Keith Richards on a really bad day. In fact, one of the nurses down there asked if I'd played in rock bands, said I had the look. They gave me the maxi­mum possible dosage of radiation, possibly because I refused the chemo, which would have only increased my survival chances 5%. During this period I participated in a research project, the booby prize for this was a Mac laptop. The following is an interview, presumably that wound up in an archive somewhere the bowels of UW Madison.

Interview with Dr. Lucille Marchand

Carbone Cancer Center

UW Hospital, Madison WI

June 16, 2006

J.C. - I was thinking of taking off this morning instead of doing the interview, but I don't see where that would get me anywhere. I got declared clean of cancer, but I just don't feel wonderful about it. With all the con­sequences of the treatment and everything, I have been pretty depressed. So because of the radiation, the dental thing is coming in now. I'm just getting all kinds of tooth infections. I just went to the dentist and got some antibi­otics, more extractions coming. Less ability to eat. I knew it was coming, you know, a total tooth removal, but of course, one wants to put that off.

LM: I just wanted to also let you know that you don't need to tell me anything that you don't want to. Okay, so, even if I ask the question, if there's anything that you feel uncomfortable disclosing, please don't. But this will be confidential and you'll be getting a copy of the transcript just as a place to start.

I'm not concerned with that. What I am concerned with is what you actually get. At first it seemed like a good idea, and I was in a pretty upbeat mood. And when I filled out the original survey, I was thinking, “Oh this'll be interesting...” but now I'm in a little darker place. We'll see if that makes it more or less interesting.

Question 1 LM: Yup. And so the first question that I had was just a very general one, and that is, tell me about your life story.

Okay. I grew up on the East Coast. I was born in New York. My parents were from Westchester County . My father was an electronics genius and an inventor. Unfortunately, also a pretty severe alcoholic. My mother was a very witty woman; she had quite a way with words. Kind of like Dorothy Parker.

So we moved around a bit on the East coast, moved to Connecticut when I was eight years old, and it was the suburbs. And suburbs were new then. Levittown had been built when... in the forties, forty-seven, and this was a brand-new suburban subdivision called the Highlands. My parents bought a house, and everything seemed okay except that there was a part of me that immediately felt something was definitely wrong there. There was some­thing wrong with that little setup, all the little nuclear families in little blocks, like the song says, all made of ticky-tacky. It was called a neighborhood, but it couldn't have been further from the true idea of a community. Everyone had their lines and their borders, and every­body was very separated and uptight. There was a rigid demarcation of everything; the neighbors didn't seem to like each other all that much, or have anything in com­mon, all the fathers were commuters, and the mothers were the sort of housewives in a little idyllic kind of 50s thing, but it was all an illusion. And something in me sensed this, even though I couldn't articulate it. So I became -- I sort of had it in my make-up anyway -- a rebel, an anarchist, a kid with a bad attitude. I felt like an outcast in the suburbs, and the illusion was that all the other people felt perfectly comfortable and straight there. Now, I don't think they did. I think everybody had this deep down sense that something was wrong.

If you picked out someone who was going to point at the elephant in the room, I'm going to be that guy. So, this went on and I made it my job to point out every ele­phant in every room that I went in. It didn't make me very popular. I'll give you an example: In the early 60s there was a Thalidomide scare. It was big news...all these babies were being born deformed because the mothers had taken this drug called Thalidomide. Big, big, public­ity on that. I don't know why, but one day my tenth grade English teacher saw fit to mention that he was taking a sabbatical trip and he was able to afford it because of an inheritance he got from some relatives in the pharma­ceutical business, because of a drug. And I said, “Oh what drug is it, Thalidomide?” And it was a joke, and I just blurted it right out, and the whole class just went crazy laughing. You know, and he had to laugh too. That was one of my good spontaneous moments in school. I had many others that got me in a lot of trouble.

As the Sixties progressed, I was the ideal Sixties kid - the anarchist, the rebel. Whatever the ordinary thing was, I was gonna do the opposite. I also brought to that attitude, a dark outlook. Whether I am depressed, or just a gloomy guy by nature... Is there a difference? Do we know? Maybe we don't. I don't think we do.

I'm still taking narcotics now. Jesus. I tell ya, they got me on dilaudid, oxycodone syrup, oxycontin pills, and a fentanyl patch..... I'm going off the track here.

LM: OK. And Jeff, not during this interview, but after we finish the interview, I can talk to you about that.

Ok. All right. I guess you want to hear more about the...

LM: Yeah. What I wanted to do was bring you back to your life. Even though this is a part of your life...

Right. At the end of the Sixties… I already had the bad attitude - a normal, keen, intuitive sense of hypocrisy and such and I'm in trouble in high school. I was always regarded as one of the smart kids, constantly being lec­tured by my teachers, about how a guy like me needs to toe the line and buckle down, or else I'm gonna be in a lot of trouble. And they were right but I didn't care. I think some of them actually meant well. Some of them didn't. Some of them just couldn't stand me. But, the six­ties had come along and I had begun to learn to play music. So there I was the sixties guy in a rock n' roll band.

I told you my father was an alcoholic. And my mother got sick, it was cancer, and she went to the hos­pital and died. That's when I was twelve years old; my father's drinking just got worse and this little suburban ticky-tacky house got repossessed. By the time I'm sev­enteen, eighteen, I'm homeless, and looking for ways out. Out of town. So I put my little band together and after living in places like a fleabag hotel with a bunch of old drunks, eight dollars a week for the room, I had man­aged to put a band together and go on the road. So homelessness was no longer a problem because, since we were on the road we could live in motels. And this lasted for a few years, and then I hired a manager for the band, and he took care of a lot of business for us. We ended up moving to Boston. We worked around upstate New York for a while and when we went up to Boston we all got apartments on Beacon Hill. We had the business man­ager to take care of this. All of the sudden I had an apartment. And of course by now I had very stupidly picked up a girlfriend and brought her with me and got her pregnant. Which was exactly the stupidest wrongest thing for a 19, 20 year-old traveling musician to do. So that was beginning to weigh things down pretty quickly. But that relationship ended after two children were very quickly born. And she went off with an acid dealer.

My musical career kept changing yet advancing. I found myself in New York playing on recordings and stuff, and I lived in...like cooperatives; a lot of colleges in Boston so you can get a room with a bunch of stu­dents. And a lot of the students were hippies and dope smokers and rock n' roll fans. So it was pretty easy living in those days, for a young guy like that. And being able to play the guitar got you a lot of places too, got me in a lot of doors. But at the same time, it was still the East Coast, and it got to be about early 1970 and I just got the itch. I had read too much about California and the West and I just chucked it all and went. Hopped a plane to L.A. And this girl went with me, she was a Boston girl, and she freaked out in two days and flew right back to Boston. So, there I was, staying with my old friend from Connecticut, and, living in L.A. This guy was a musician and we tried to put something together. I convinced my drummer friend to come out from New York and put a band together with this bass player guy. Well, that didn't work, these guys didn't get along, and we were now renting a house in the San Fernando Valley, which was once more the awful suburbs. And I knew this wasn't right. Especially when I took LSD there. You want to find out if you're in the wrong place? Take acid. The place will make itself known to you very quickly. And so we decided that San Francisco would be the place for us. Summer of Love. This was the center, San Francisco, the epicenter of the Sixties, hippie, drug universe. We went there. And my drummer friend and I got kind of separated. There was kind of a big drug haze, that obscures some of the memories, but I wound up living in Haight-Ashbury in a house full of hippies. But they weren't good hippies, they were cult hippies.

LM: What do you mean by that?

They all followed a guru. The same one. They were followers of Stephen Gaskin, who had a thing called Monday Night Class. What these hippie cult guys would do is go out in the streets, and see all these lost kids, you know, who had come to San Francisco, who did not have any sense of self-identity, a bunch of lost little sheep. He started Monday Night Class and people started going, and he started telling them how to live and giving them clues on how to be an awake human being. And one day they got a bunch of school buses and went to Tennessee and bought a farm, and they're still going. It's called The Farm.

LM: Yup, I've heard of it.

That's how it started. But in the meantime, I wasn't into that. And the main question, now I had made the acquaintance of this rock n' roll band in in Sausalito....and thus began another large and major phase in my life. I wound up on the waterfront in Sausalito across the bridge from San Francisco, living on a little boat, and if I was a rebel and an outcast, well I had clearly found my home. I was now in a place where everyone was an outcast, like the Island of Lost Boys, except there were girls too and it was on boats. We were pirates and anarchists and we had a great rock n' roll band. And of course there were lots of drugs, and it really wonderful and wild and indescribably romantic and colorful, like a fantasy that most people could never dream of living. It was actually like that, for a while, and I spent some formative years there, to the point where, just going into normal society seemed so dull, so boring, I couldn't stand it.

But then, everything has a dark side, and the dark side of this place was drugs. I got very badly strung out on drugs, and a lot of people down there destroyed themselves that way, and of course the beautiful colorful dream went away. And now I'd met another woman and had two more children. And that is the woman with whom I am staying right now. But because of the drugs, and because of the dubiousness of our compatibility in general, we split up -- she left me, actually, and I was very badly strung out on methamphetamine, and I had to... I went to see a psychologist and they really didn't have any therapy for that. It's something that you just have to stop. And so I did, but picked up alcohol as a substitute. I needed to get out of there, so I decided I would go to Hawaii and wound up staying there for ten years. Drinking and taking drugs still, but doing music, and getting a reputation as both a musician and a drunk.

And in 1987 I finally walked into my first AA meeting and quit drinking. But not before I had done a awful lot of terrible damage to my liver and gotten hepatitis C, and let my teeth go all to hell, and … but, anyway, I'm still alive. And so shortly after I quit drinking, not surprisingly, my world fell apart because it was largely based on drinking. And so I retreated back to California, where I knew I would at least have a place to sleep. And I wound up very shortly thereafter, in Port Townsend, Washington for ten years.

LM: Ten years?

Eh, eleven. And while there, Port Townsend was the first place I ever arrived as a sober person, as a person who did not drink. So no one there knew me as a drunk, so I'm able to have a fresh start. My reputation as a drunk was not all that good. So I lived with a series of two women there, and I kind of restarted my musical career. And by that I mean, I reinstated a learning curve that I'd sort of let go in the bad drug and drinking days. At some point, I decided that I really belonged in Hawaii, even the West Coast was too cold, and I wanted to go back to the islands. So I did, and brought my girlfriend with me, but she had her own issues to deal with, and we didn't make it there together. She left. I stayed there and shortly, not too long after, I got involved in a pretty good, successful, musical group, I think I've told you about this before, but once again the woman thing came along and I got overly attached to one of the women in the group and let myself get all bent out of shape. And decided I was going to run away and go to Wisconsin.

And then I came here and got off the bus, metaphorically speaking, realized I'd made a terrible mistake. “I don't belong in Wisconsin, oh my god, this is awful, what am I going to do? Now I've got to see if I can retrace my steps,” I was freaking out. “What am I going to do?” And then, was unable to leave, I mean the cost of that trip was a very big undertaking, and I wasn't able to just reverse it.

And then I got cancer. And everything was different. I just happened to be very close by a great big university hospital with a cancer center. And it was way beyond my control now. That's about it...

Now I've been declared clean of cancer. And I'm still just having a terrible time dealing with the debilitated self that I am now compared to before. Even before with my Hep C and stuff, you know, I was not the healthiest specimen in the world, but now ... holy Jesus. If I was going around at 60% before [interruption], anyway, I am having a hard time dealing with …

LM: You said you were at 60% before and then the bleep came, and where do you feel like you're at?

Oh yeah, I was operating at 60% before cancer, well now I'm at twenty or thirty. And I don't like it. But I can't stop it from being this way.

Anyway, okay, what else... During this whole time, in small pockets of the world, I did manage to get a very good reputation as a guitar player. And you know, I never got big and famous or anything, but I attained a form of legitimacy with enough people in the industry and in the business and everything, and all that... To say “Yeah, well, my life's been worthwhile.” People say that my music has made them happy so that makes my life mean something. And while I have done other things too, I've done journalism and writing, and I've gotten a few laughs that way too.

And generally speaking, you know, I've been a criminal - a thief, never a killer. I've never deliberately hurt human beings, even though I've stolen their things a few times.... And I haven't been much of a good parent. But I haven't been a terrifically bad person. Maybe I haven't been the most sterling example of a human being, but you know, it's like you're in the hospital, and no matter how bad you are, very quickly you'll see several people who are in worse condition than you are. And so, I try to keep my perspective on life that way. Where I had failed in some areas, you know I've done really well in some others. And like I say, I haven't done any really terrible, horrible things. That's kind of a bad outlook isn't it? Well, obviously...judging myself by the bad things I didn't do rather the things I did. But hey, you know, it made be a weird point of view but it is one.

LM: And, you know, you've been through quite a bit of very challenging times. What do you feel kind of got you through that?

My wits. Generally speaking, my… in fact, my ability to observe human nature, directly; I don't want to use the word 'judge'… my ability to smell a rat when it's really a rat. And then I said my ability to use my wit, and my abilities - you know, playing music will get you through a lot of doors. Having a way with words. And cooking is a very good skill to have, in a way.

LM: Cooking, yes.

Yes. In fact, I cannot tell you, how many times I have fed myself by showing up at someone's house and offering to make dinner. They love that. And I show up, I make a fabulous meal, everybody has a nice dinner, and I get to eat.

LM: Yeah, that's excellent. Yeah. No, that's quite a bit, yeah that would've gotten you through this, especially the cancer. Do you feel like it challenged you in a different way where something else emerged or are these the sort of cornerstones of what, you know, has gotten you through those times as well.

Could you repeat that?

LM: This is a lot to get you through very tough times. Has cancer challenged you in a different way that brought out something else in you, that hadn't been brought out earlier in your life?

Well, this is something that I don't think my wits can beat. And as far as that something, part of the reason that I am worried, or depressed, or debilitated is, I'm having doubts as to whether that something else you're talking about is there.

LM: And do you have any idea of what that is?

What, that inner strength that would bring me through this cancer? Do I have any idea what that is? No. You know, sometimes I see evidence of it. Okay, for instance, this morning I did not want to get out of bed. I've been bugging some people at the hospital to please, take this G-tube out. Okay? I've done my two weeks without losing weight, without using the tube. And they're not getting back to me. Like they don't trust me. But this morning, I just did not feel like getting out of bed. I didn't want to deal with this issue… I ate a fairly normal dinner about 6:30. I cooked a nice dinner. But that's not enough. I can't go for twelve hours without consuming something. So at one o'clock in the morning - I wake up at midnight and I go, “Oh jeeze, I need to take something.” And because I can't enjoy the experience of eating, I have to think of it as taking something in. Some kind of vitamins.

And I don't feel like it, the hell with it. I let the depression take over. I've always been called self-destructive. And as a matter of fact, my whole band, my rock n' roll band in California, was in a movie, and the movie centered around the band. Some movie reviewer said, “this movie is based around (Joe Tate) and his insanely self-destructive band the Redlegs” It wasn't good enough that I was a self-destructive person, I found four others to be in a group with. We were the kind of people who would, when opportunity would knock on the door, not merely shut the door in its face, we would spit in the face of opportunity and then close the door. We did that with Columbia records. In fact the story of the Redlegs and Columbia records is semi-famous in the industry now. Columbia records tried to sign this group to a record deal. And we just told them to go fuck themselves. “Nah we don't want to do that. Nah we don't…” And anyway, what were we talking about?

LM: Well, you were talking about that sort of self-destructive quality that's in you and how it was…

Right. I realize it's time for food. And I know that if I don't take something in I'm going to lose weight. Every single thing I take in counts, but I said, the hell with it and went back to sleep. I woke up an hour later and, involuntarily, something made me get up and go make a blender drink....I didn't want to, I did not want to go through this, but I went and put in a banana and some protein powder, and some spirolina. And some cream. You know, high calories, two tablespoons of cream is a hundred calories, and I also read that dairy products are sort of alkaline forming. Is that true? I thought they were very acidic.

LM: You know, I'm not that crazy about that whole acidic/alkaline thing, but we could talk about that some other time.

I've been measuring my pH and it's really acid, but I know it's from what I'm eating, and I made this high caloric stuff. So anyway, so I made about 400 calories worth of blender drink and I drank it all down, and went back to bed, then this morning I woke up at 7:30, ... I didn't have to get up yet. But then I started crawling the walls because the drug was wearing off, so I just laid in bed going crazy for an hour when it occurred to me, well she's going to call at 10 and I'm supposed to do this interview, and if I feel like this I'm not even going to do it. Uh, so I laid around going nuts for about an hour, and then I said to hell with it and took the pill 2 hours early, and then started gauging the time by what's on the radio. At 8:00 they stop talking and start playing music, and then at 8:30 Garrison Keillor comes on, and then at 9:00 the news. Well I actually stretched it out til 9:00, but by that time the drug had taken hold and I still didn't feel like eating, my self-destructive part says, “life like this ain't worth it,” I really do ask that, even with the news of the cancer gone I mean, this ain't livin'.

But yet something, like what you're talking about, some force is making me live despite myself. And once again I got up, still didn't want to get up, didn't care if I gained weight or not, yet I got up, it was like someone else was controlling my body. So I got up, and I went in, and I boiled 2 eggs, and peeled a banana, and this time I put some cooked oatmeal and more protein powder and banana and cream, and some sweet potato all in the blender, that's more than 500 calories right there, and just drank this stuff down. And I'm doing it involuntarily. Part of me is willing to say to hell with this. Because, to a great extent I don't call this living, but apparently I'm not entirely in control.

Question #3a LM: Okay, Um, is there anything you feel that's been left undone in your life? That you feel like you still would like to do?

Yes, and it may or may not be possible. And that is to reconcile somehow with my older daughter, and my younger son... I've got 4 kids, 2 of them I have a good relationship with. We have understanding, you know, they get me, and they have either forgiven me, or never, never became terribly resentful or angry at me for being a bad or absent parent. I was never a bad parent, but I was absent which is the same thing, the only thing I can say in my defense is that I did not beat or molest my children, but I certainly deprived them of a lot of the benefits that could have resulted from my presence. But they've done pretty well without me.

With cancer, I've had an awful lot of support, support systems working my favor, all over the country I've had Christians in New Jersey praying for me. A whole gospel choir prayed for me in California. I've got people in Hawaii sending vibes, I've got people in Washington, places like that, sending me reiki. And I have people supporting me in other ways in places like Florida and Texas, it's amazing. And I have to give that stuff some credence for killing the cancer. I think if you put enough energy on that... the radiation, that’s just a form of energy. Despite the fact of all this support and well-wishes from all these people in all these places, I'm still worried about whether I'm going to have the strength to go and be with these people again.

Okay, I was asked to go to Maui to play on a record, and that would be in August, and the way it is right now, that only gives me about 6 weeks of recuperation to get the strength to do this sort of travel, which I don't have now. I couldn't do it. And then also I've been asked to go and play in California on Labor Day weekend, and as far as that one goes, I wanted to go to that if they have to prop me up on sticks, if they have to wheel me out there in a wheel chair, I don't care, but yeah, I'm concerned about this stuff, you know. You can say I'm lucky to have this sort of support system. I must have done something right, I have a lot of friends. Um, I have some enemies too....I've been, I can be very offensive, but I (generally) piss off the right people.

Question # 4 LM: And along those lines, is there any wisdom from all that you've learned in your life that you'd want to impart to others.

Don't believe advertising. And I mean that on many levels. Believe your intuitions. That's a tough one. Sometimes in certain moods I'll toss out little tidbits of wisdom, but when I'm asked for one it's hard.

LM: Well that's why I thought I'd just give you some space to kind of, just think about it for a few seconds. What if you were advising one of your children or someone else who's sitting next to you in the waiting room with cancer? Are there any, anything that would come to mind in those kind of situations?

I was doing that the other day. A woman, a patient I think that you've been seeing, Nina?

LM: Yeah, I can't say.

Professional ethics?

LM: Right.

Right, well I had dinner with her the other night. I cooked. Okay, let's put it this way. I was with a woman, a cancer patient who's been having problems. And I found that over the course of the discussion we had, that there was no point in coming up with any phony, false, positive, cheery crap. You know? Maybe because she knows, until you've had cancer, until you've had radia­tion, you know, I'm very lucky that I didn't get chemo... But until you've had this experience, there's no way you can know. It's really awful, it's really bad and yet there are people who say “Oh, this is the best thing that ever happened to me because I got a new value on life.”

Well maybe, okay, but part of that is bullshit, because overall, the experience really sucks. You know, it's just one of the worst things going. What I've found is that I've gotten the best response from other cancer peo­ple when I can come up with words to describe the experience. Because some of the ways that you feel, and the things that happen to you, people haven't had words for them yet. Here's one: What is the fatigue like? It's like this: you're exhausted but laying down doesn't help. Okay? And then with radiation sickness, there's this sort of gray, death-like envelope that just sort of closes around you, and it's...I don't have an adjective for it. The closest thing I can say is, have you ever been so sick that all the spring went out of your step and your joints. Have you felt that?

LM: Oh yeah.

Okay, well if you take the concept of having all the spring out of your step, multiply that times everything and 10 thousand. That's what this gray, deathlike radia­tion sickness is like. Maybe some people go around with this sort of false cheeriness, well maybe it's not even false, but I've never been a cheery person anyway. And there's nothing about cancer that's going to make me cheery.

So far, the wisdom is “this sucks, admit it.” Don't try to sugarcoat this, because this is a horrible thing.

The only thing I can say is, the force that is involun­tarily making me eat even when I don't care, well, I guess people have that to different degrees, and mine is just right on the edge. I've been like this before I got can­cer, where I would get depressed... I would lose my appetite and I wouldn’t eat, and I would lose weight. And this is pre-cancer, years ago. I would go for a couple of days without eating anything; of course that involun­tary thing always kicked in. But it would take longer, for one thing because I weighed more and I could afford to lose more weight, but now it's like I bottomed out at 120 point something and I've gotten some back, the last time I weighed myself, a few days ago in the hospital, I was 130.8, which is, you know, plus six pounds. But I haven't been able to get past that 130. I've gotten up to 130, and back down to 129 point something. I've never gone below that again, but I've been hovering around this 130 point, and it seems like I'm eating a lot, something between 200 and 400 calories every like 2 or 3 hours, but I don't succeed at it all the time.

And I've been doing some exercises and stuff, and I can tell that something's coming back. I don't look quite as Auschwitz as before, but at the same time, my teeth started getting infected and I just went to the dentist and I got antibiotics, and my face is a little puffed up from the infection. And this is just ...I can't deal with all this, because it just goes on and on... I'm not off scot-free. Okay, now we're back off the question now.

LM: No, this is part of it.

All right, well do you have any more questions?

LM: No, is there anything else that you'd like to say?

Well besides that I could wake up and have it all be back like it never happened?. Not really, I don't know how far, how deeply involved I'm going to get with this, as far as using the laptop, or….

LM: Yes, what we want to know is how people like you, you know, sort of use it. What are kind of the barri­ers to using it. So you can use it as much or as little as possible. What we want to find out is whether or not this is even feasible for people.

Well what specifically are you trying to find out is fea­sible?

LM: Just you know, you're a part of this interview, and so you're going to get a transcript of this interview, and then you can decide what you want to do with it. So you could use the computer because you have that. You can use it to, because you'll be able to kind of upload or download it to your website in your computer, and then after we, you know, are going to take the computer, we can put that on a disc as well for you to have all that information on there.

Well you know what, I might be in a slightly unique position here, because there are an awful lot of people are writing these days, but over the years, I have written and published a lot of stuff. I had a regular column in a newspaper for over 10 years. And I've done a lot of writing. And a great deal of it is autobiographical, and there's really not a lot that I've said here, that I haven't gotten already written down somewhere, not counting the cancer stuff.

LM: So there are no rules here.

I could take the transcript and I might be able to edit it into something else. So…

LM: This could be for publication, but this could be just for you, it could be to pass on to people that are important to you, it could be further exploration of this whole cancer journey that you've been on. Vis-a-vis what's happened already in your life. So, it could be a lot of different things.

My view and my take on this very well might change, because I'm still in the middle of it. So many of my friends, when the doctor said I was clean, they all expected me to say “Whoopee, I'm all better now. Let's get back to livin.'” They don't understand, and I have to make them understand that well, just because the PET scan shows no active cancer in my body at the moment, it doesn't mean I'm not going to get it again. But more to the point, I'm so debilitated from the treatment and the whole experience that I'm still hardly here. I'm barely there, so... And there's one particular friend that, when I told her, called me on the phone and went “oh whoopee that's wonderful, blah blah blah”, and I said “Wait a minute.” She was so happy for me that I brought her down and she hasn't called me back lately because she wanted to be all happy about it and I wouldn't let her.