YOUR SPACE: Finding humor in a serious disease

Welcome to Mike Hamel's happy hour.

That's what he calls his binges of toxic cocktails.

The 56-year-old Colorado Springs man began cancer treatment last month. He shares more humor than angst on his blog, Cells Behaving Badly (mikehamel.wordpress.com).

"I'm not trying to make light of it. It's the humor I've always had," he says. "Life is very serious, but it's also kind of funny. I want to demystify the whole cancer process for others."

He packs his laptop and camera when he heads to the Memorial Hospital cancer clinic - what he calls "going to the office."

He reported "live" from his first round of chemotherapy, which he documents with photos. "I studied hard for this test," is the caption under his body scan picture.

He went to the doctor in late June after feeling a mass in his stomach. "I told him it was abs of steel," he says, "and he didn't buy it."

Originally, it looked to be an omental tumor, which Hamel, a former pastor, terms a "dearly beloved we are gathered here" diagnosis.

"The doctor called and said, ‘I have good news. You have lymphoma,'" he says. His stage II non-Hodgkins form has a fairly good cure rate, he says.

After two of six rounds of chemo, he's a changed man. Gone is his thick head of hair. For the first time in 30 years, he has no bushy beard.

"I used to look like a gray Q-tip," he says. "Now I look like a turtle."

He writes: "I'll eventually lose all bodily hair and resemble an albino cucumber."

His blog tells the spiritual journey as well as sights and sounds, like chemo farts. "While not mentioned often in the literature and blogs I've read, fetid fumes are a byproduct of cancer treatment. Not surprising, since one of my chemo drugs is Cyclophosphamide, a derivative of mustard gas."

There is a dark side to his light side.

"It's like if you go into a banquet room and there is a well spread table and there is a trash can with junk in it, both in the same room. You can fixate on either one. Sometimes I get locked into looking at the trash can."

The married father and grandfather says it is harder on his family. "They are not used to seeing me having issues and weaknesses. I'm used to being the caregiver. That's scary; it's hard to adjust to. It's crummy. It's very humbling."

Then there are the mounting bills for Hamel, a freelance writer and author of a fantasy book series for kids.

"When the job I was working on came to an end in March, I didn't keep up my health care. So when this hit I had no health insurance," he says. "The thing I did right was in April I upped my life insurance."

After racking up more than $20,000 in medical bills, he found an HMO plan for $1,000 a month that would accept his pre-existing condition.

"Better in debt than dead I suppose," he blogs. "I had to take the car to the mechanic and it cost $400 to replace the alternator. (That's a tenth of the price of a CT biopsy though, so I'm not complaining)."

The athletic man who hadn't been in a hospital since he got his tonsils out at age 6 doesn't wonder why me?

Instead, he asks himself the airplane question: "When I used to travel I had this little ritual of, ‘Am I ready to go if this thing goes down?'"

He's planning ahead. "I hope to be able to kick my drug habit and figure out how to pay off the dealer."

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Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com