Reid Levin is a New York City writer, actor and comedian who is currently undergoing treatment for leukemia in his hometown of Denver, CO.
Reid writes and acts in sketch comedy videos and performs with Better Than The Machine around the country. He is a regular contributor to the humor website Smosh.com. Reid is also the co-creator of the NBC comedy webseries The Guys in 3A.
Reid acts in commercials and films, and has lent his voice to several cartoons.
The radiation burn on my back is closer than ever to becoming one whole weird scar, which is what I’ve been referring to as “healed” for two-and-a-half years now. It seems to have had lots starting and stopping while healing. Sometimes it has healed so fast that it can be seen day to day, and sometimes so slow that it seemed to have stopped altogether. The chemo I’m given slows down all healing processes in my body. I fell on my knee and scraped it up at the beginning of the year, and it’s still trying to heal. Being on and off of chemo for two months-ish this year really energized the healing process on my back. When the wound first started it was the size of my hand with my fingers outstretched. In the past few months, we’ve been measuring it in fingernail sizes: it recently hit the size of my pinky fingernail.
Then it stopped. Or at least slowed back down to a crawl. At least it wasn’t hurting; earlier in its healing cycle, when the nerves were regenerating, I had tremendous pain. When it touched muscle, I had body jolting spasms. No hurting? That’s awesome, no complaint. It was so comfortable, in fact, that I was able to have it covered only when sleeping, and then only every few nights when sleeping. There had been a time when having it uncovered, even for a moment, would cause me searing pain. Someone had to wait outside the shower and delicately slap (hah) the covering onto the wound. I’m quite happy to say that’s in the past, too. But I just want to be done with the thing. I’ve just wanted to be done with it for what feels like a long time now.
Last week, I had a dermatologist appointment that we made months and months ago when I was worried about some moles. Though I will admit to having forgotten about my concerns about the moles until I was asked by a nurse what brought me in and I ventured, “acne?” and my mom just shook her head. What?! I’m a very anxious person! I have more pressing issues to be neurotic about! I can’t be expected to remember every little thing that panics me to the point of thinking I may have another cancer! Jeez! Anyway, the doctor said all my moles were fine, but then he spent several minutes studying the “radiological ulceration” on my back, as he called it. He looked at it from different angles, he measured different parts of it, and finally he looked up and offered one word:
“Honey.”
He looked at my mom, he looked at me, and as if answering an everyday question about an everyday scenario, he said, “We have a nurse here who swears by honey; we’ve seen it heal a number of these.” He called for the nurse and as he left the room, I had two thoughts: 1) If the nurse swears by the honey, what does the doctor swear by? and 2) Some crazy nurse is about to come into the room with a squeezy bear of honey and squeeze it in my wound.
There was not much time to build up the normal level of anxiety I encounter when trying something new, and trust me, I’m well rehearsed in building up anxiety. The nurse slides into the room with a flat packet that he cuts open, puts in my face, and says, “Smell it. Come on, smell it.” It smelled like honey. “That’s real honey,” he informed me, “you could put it on toast! Delicious!” As he showed me the previously sterile honey in the package, which was literally a thin but malleable honeycomb filled with honey, he started saying some things about mummies being unearthed and archaeologists finding honey in their sarcophagi. “And it lasts! Thousands of years, you could still put it on toast!” Yum.
We eventually moved beyond the fact that you could, if so desired, eat the delicious honey on toast (if that’s what you’re into) or in any of a number of other different ways that people ingest honey. We briefly touched on the fact that Silvadene, the ointment we’ve been dressing my burn with (and that the radiation oncologist prescribed) for the past year and a half, is full of silver. I never made this connection because… well, I don’t know why, but I had not previously known that silver was a healing agent. The tangent on silver only lasted a moment, during which I’m sure the nurse considered that silver does not taste good on toast, and then got back to talking about the natural wonders of honey. In England, he explained, they’ve officially been treating deep radiation burns with honey for quite awhile and the FDA just approved it for use here. There’s no downside, other than putting faith in it and it not working, so what the heck, I let him patch my back up with some honey and we took some samples of the sterile honeycomb with which to dress my burn at home.
When I woke up the next morning, I took off the dressings, and what do you know? I felt like having some honey on toast. But also, it was one of those day-to-day changes in the size of the wound. It was a little smaller. And for a wound the size of my pinky nail, “a little smaller” is a big deal! I don’t know how long it will take for this thing to close up, and I’ve long since given up on trying to guess. I do feel good that I’m trying something new though, and that it’s working right now. Stick around (…ahem) for further updates on the success of honey healing my burn! Delicious!
I feel superbly crappy, and as a result, I’ve taken a lot of pain pills today. There’s two groups of pain pills I must/can take on a daily basis. If I’m on a pill to fix something in my body, you can bet it also causes pain somewhere else in my body. For every curative pill or two that I take every day, I also take a pain pill in an attempt to balance out the pain causing to pain relieving ratio. Second, I have pain pills that I can take if the normal everyday pain pills aren’t cutting it. Even though I took all of them today, my being remains in a state of crap.
The first day we were in Miami after disembarking, I was diagnosed with Swimmer’s ear and a sinus infection at a CVS Pharmacy “Minute Clinic” ($25 well spent!), who then prescribed me antibiotics that I could get right there and then. The nurse practitioner even called me the next morning to see how I was feeling! How ’bout that?! Remind me again why health care was so hard to fix. CVS seems to have it all figured out–there wasn’t even a wait. I bet this is the future of surgery: “Come in on your lunch break to your friendly and convenient neighborhood CVS to get that gangrenous limb removed for only $25!”
When I got back home to Denver this week, I restarted chemo yet again. Normally for me, there’s a three day pattern of feeling bad, then worse, then better with this stuff. But I’m on day four and am still getting worse. I’m writing on what looks like a blurry laptop monitor while checkerboard-painted walls whiz by as the room spins (which is weird, ’cause I don’t have checkerboard-painted walls). My arm just spasmed! The right side of my brain is in the 396th round of a boxing match with the left side of my brain! My throat is raw!, my eyeballs are hot!, my toes have pins & needles in ‘em!, my knee is out of whack!, my skin itches all over!, I’ve got the creepy crawlies!, I’ve got bone pain!, it feels like the room is spinning the other way now!, I’ve got a cramp in my stomach!, and, WORST OF ALL, none of my complaining seem to be making any difference!!
I couldn’t nap during the day due to the unusual amount of pain. I watched a surprisingly large amount of TV, though, and came up with an important, possiblyprobablydefinitely world changing anthropological question:
Who do you think would be more impressed by a modern, 80″ flat screen, high definition color television with over 300 cable channels, 100 premium channels, the Playboy Channel, and a terabyte DVR?
A. An American family from 1950
B. A Neanderthal family from 33,000 years ago
Remember, this subjective poll does have one right answer. From the research I’ve looked into on the subject, the answer may just surprise you! Stay tuned!
I am writing to inform you that I have returned home.
The cruise was delightful. We sailed around the Western Caribbean, to locations both familiar and new. We awoke late in the morning, adventured through the afternoon, and filled our bellies each night with fine cuisine and drink from all over the world. I took much personal pleasure in exploring the second largest barrier reef in the entirety of the world: I swam below the water through many schools of exotic fish and around many ancient volcanic formations. Remarkably, much to my own surprise and glee, I did not fatigue from this extended physical exertion. We stayed in the final port of call for a relaxing wind down in which we were met by several familiar and friendly faces. Thus ended, the journey proved to be quite the successful celebration for our small band, just as intended.
Forgive my ostentatiousness; I do not mean to brag, merely to relate.
How have you been? On my voyage, I met someone that greatly reminded me of you. I dwelt upon this, and deemed it to be an existential sign that I must contact you with utmost haste upon my return. I find, much to my dismay, communication between us has become quite the exception, rather than the expectation it once was. You would have thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience, My Friend, and more than once, I found myself wishing you were by my side. I suppose there is always a next time. I hope you and yours are doing well.
Since my last entry, I’ve missed several topics I wish I’d blogged about. Knowing full well from prior experience that if I gave each of these many topics their own posts, I would quickly feel overwhelmed and, just as quickly, give up. So I decided to write about each of these many topics in one entry I’ve dubbed a “twitlog.” Aware of my propensity for verbose verbiage, I decided to treat each story as a Twitter post by limiting each of them to 140 characters. Onward!
-Last Vid: Bobby Fitzsimmons (of screen & stage) vlogs. Los: great! But whycome so few hits for funny video? I want to play Bobby’s cousin.
-New Vid: Crazy lady thinks cat is her son; boyfriend aghast. YT Comedy Spotlight! Moms Day dedication: to all moms, not just the crazy ones.
-New “Give A Shit” lyrics: Earthquakes, volcanoes and the oil spill/My candidate still says, “Drill, Baby, Drill!”
Whew, okay I think that does it. This turned out to be a fun challenge. Maybe I’ll wind up making more of these. We’ll see how I feel about it a few days out. At any rate, I enjoyed doing this enough to create a new category for these things (’cause you know, this entry wasn’t already in enough categories).
For the record, “twitlog” is a double portmanteau, and I love me some portmanteaus. First, of course, there’s the Twitter-weblog combination, which is an apt description of all these Twitter-style stories in my blog. Second is the more self-derisive combination of “twit” and “log”; with the “twit” being myself, and this effort being the only “log” of what happened in the unintended space between more frequent and detailed blog posts.