Rocco Versaci's Blog, page 3

False Peaks

When I biked across the country, my single worst day came pretty late in the trip. I was crossing from Tennessee into North Carolina on Highway 165, which is known around those parts as the Cherohala Skyway. My new friend Lawson—whom I’d met about a week earlier in Clarksville, Tennessee—told me that it was beautiful country.
And it was. Or I guess it was. It was kind of hard to pay attention because soon after I started out on it, I was climbing.
Obviously, at that point of my journey, I had d...

Nuts and Bolts

Last week I received a package in the mail—a medium-sized box with the return address of the Illinois Farm Bureau. I knew right away that it was from my buddy Kevin, who’s worked in their educational programs department for a number of years.
Kevin and I were—and are—fraternity brothers; he was a year ahead of me at the University of Illinois, but he joined our house the year after I did. Our house was small, and it followed the general rule of any group: 10% of the people did 90% of the work....

A Big John World

My fourth and last round of chemotherapy ended on Friday (the 17th), and the numbers are excellent: my tumor markers are at zero and have been for several weeks. As far as cancer goes, I’m lucky to have been stricken with one that has a pretty effective treatment. As a good friend messaged me, “Better living through chemistry.”Well, almost. Nothing comes without a price.Ten years ago, when I went through this before, I had a total of three rounds. This time I had four rounds, and let me tell...

Nice Shootin', Tex! or, Crossing Off #18 on the Bucket List

When I was a kid growing up in the 70s, a bunch of us in the neighborhood used to play a game we called "Guns." Not very imaginative, but neither was the game, really. We sorted ourselves into teams, and everybody picked someone to "be" from TV. Tony Cruz, who lived two doors down from me, was Baretta; Scott Reed, my next door neighbor, was Hutch; his sister Debbie, the only girl who played, was Pepper Anderson (from Police Woman); and Steve Kafka, who lived on the other side of the townhouse...

Voices from the Road

I'm working on a longer, more text-heavy post (teaser: it might have the words "bucket list" in the title), but in the meantime, I wanted to share some of the comics from my recently-completed book, That Hidden Road. The images below represent a sampling, and they are sprinkled throughout the manuscript. I decided to draw and write these comics because, when I bicycled across the country, I had a lot of encounters with people that stuck with me, but they didn't seem substantive enough to...

Numbers Don't Lie

Good news to report: I got the results of my blood tests back after the first week of chemo, and my two tumor markers--alpha Fetoprotein (AFP) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)--are dropping. So, the evidence is strong that the chemo is doing more than just turning me into a naked mole rat.


Also dropping, unfortunately, are my white blood cells, which apparently are important in fighting off germs and bacteria. That means some changes for me: I'm carrying a little bottle of Purell and squ...

Hair Today...

Well, the time has come. For the last few days, I’ve stepped out of the shower to find my neck matted with hair. Yesterday, all that hair loss became--at least to me--noticeable; I looked like I’d had a haircut. This morning, I could gently pinch the hair on my head and come away with this:

So, here’s where I started:

I don’t know how many people have shaved their heads before, but it has to be done in stages. Stage one is with the electric clippers, starting at the third-lowest setting and wor...

Mailbag!

I’m a little more than a week removed from my first chemo treatments, and I’m happy to report that my appetite is strong and my energy is up. I was afraid that I’d be too cashed to teach, but last week went really well—so great to see all my colleagues and students again—and I’m looking forward to one more week of rest before I head back for my infusions on the 2nd.
So what does all of this mean? Another post, of course.
Readers of my last blog (the fun one, the one I kept when Ibiked across A...

Scenes from Week One

Well, I made it through my first week of chemo and now have two weeks off to recover before I go back. As the days have passed, I’ve been feeling more and more disjointed, so I thought that instead of imposing a false sense of order on everything, I’d try to mirror how scattered I’ve been feeling.
Some basis facts:
I receive my treatments in a large room that sits at the back of my oncologist’s office. From above, the room would look like a wide smile. The teeth, in this case, are cushiony recl...

The iTunes Syndrome

So I decided to take a self-shot every day for the duration of my chemotherapy and recovery (by which I mean the time it takes for the most visible side effects—puffiness from the steroids, baldness from the drugs, etc.—to fade away). My plan is to then turn them into one of those high-speed animations that love to go viral.
Anyway, I took my first selfie on Monday, and I couldn’t figure out how to move it from my phone’s camera roll into the album I created. It’s probably easy to do, but I wa...