“IN HIS OWN WORDS” - A REVIEW EXCLUSIVE
‘TAHITIAN NONI, MIRACLE JUICE OR MIRACLE CONTROVERSY’- PART 2 HOW PAUL BAHOU CRUSADED THROUGH CHEMO AND GOT HIS GROOVE BACK ON
“I had just graduated college at Cal State Long Beach when I found a lump in my armpit. It was small, about the size of a marble and just as hard. I was really busy trying to find out what I was going to do with my life now that I was done with school, so I put that tiny question mark on the mental backburner. My grad money was going to last two months tops, and after that I’d have to find some other means of paying rent. My band Inverse was also keeping me really busy as we were touring, playing local shows, writing, and recording on a fairly consistent basis. When you’re so tied up in the little aspects of life, sometimes you don’t notice the one big thing that can snatch it all away if left unchecked. Several months later I went to my doctor, who then referred me to a specialist to find out what this little lump was. The specialist said that it was 99% likely to be a cyst, but that if I wanted to get it checked out, he’d authorize the surgery to get the lump removed. I was so busy with everything I was doing that I couldn’t really find the time to squeeze the surgery in. I was too busy making sure that every little thing in my life was in its right place (although naive belief in my invincibility also played its role). I told him if the chances are 99% to 1 in my favor, then I’d just watch it and see what happens. So this is what happened.
I got a job, I got in good shape, girls liked me, my band was touring and gigging locally, plus A&R scouts were coming to our shows to check us out. I had everything under control. Around 8 months later I realized that the lump had grown a bit. It was slow growing, so it wasn’t like I woke up one morning with an ‘OH MY GOD’ type revelation, just the understanding that it had in fact gotten larger over the course of the year. I went back to the doctor’s office, which sent me to another specialist, who checked me out and noticed several other smaller bumps on my collar bone in addition to the larger one in my armpit. He ordered a biopsy. I regretted not getting it earlier. Since the biopsy was invasive I was to be put under for the hour long procedure. I felt an overwhelming sense of dread being wheeled into the surgery room. It had been nearly a year, and all this little lump had done was gotten bigger. What would my world be like once I woke up? Once the results were in? I lay on the table as one of the nurses prepped me for the anesthesia. A small iPod player filled the room with music. ‘Mercedes Benz’ by Janis Joplin played as I sang a duet with the anesthesiologist while slowly drifting off to sleep. The next few days were rough. Word was getting out that I was getting checked out for cancer and as normal, people were giving reassurances that even they didn’t fully believe. The surgeon had hit a nerve during his tour of my upper left axial something-or-another, so I was left with a large bandage wrapped across my armpit and an arm looking like a chicken wing. Everyone I knew was treading lightly on the whole “C” word (no, the other C word), trying to keep things positive as possible, but even collective denial didn’t change anything. My follow up with the surgeon clinched it. I sat in the room alone. The doctor who performed the surgery was out of the country, so one of the other surgeons, one I had never met before came into the room. He read my chart: Salim Paul Bahou.
“Salim” he said, “Are you Muslim”?
The surgeon was black and had an African accent. I assumed he thought my Arabic first name implied we shared the same religion.
“No, Greek Orthodox Christian” I replied.
He looked back at me and took a breath, wondering, I can only guess, if small talk was even still necessary. “You have Lymphoma.”
And that was it. I don’t remember a thing he said after that, just something about further tests. I left the office in a daze, trying to let my rational self overcome my overwhelming desire to fall on the ground and burst into tears. I made it to my car before I completely lost it. Electric Ladyland was in the CD changer. The CD played all the way through before I was able to leave the parking lot. After a few really rough phone calls to my mom and dad I went to their house and contacted my general practitioner. After going back and forth between the myself and the surgeon, my doctor called me back with the full results:
Hodgkin’s disease, a form of lymphoma that can spread very rapidly due to the lymphatic system’s access to the rest of your body. They didn’t know how spread out it was, so they would need to take blood tests, a PET/CT scan and a biopsy of my bone marrow. The blood test and the CT scan were fine (although trying to lift my poor chicken wing arm over my head wasn’t easy), but the really fun part was the bone marrow biopsy. Imagine a needle as thick as the inkwell in a Bic pen getting pushed into your hipbone with nothing but topical Novocain to deaden the pain. He spent 20 minutes sucking marrow out of my hip before pulling the needle out.
“Phew! That was rough.”
“Please continue to lay still”
What? What was this? I thought I was done. Nope, Act 2 of the biopsy found my oncologist chipping a piece of my hipbone off with a small hammer and chisel through the hole created via the needle. It felt like I was in my own personal horror movie. A close friend of mine had given me a small metal fortune cookie filled with positive messages that her and her family wrote. I gripped it for dear life in one of my hands as he pulled a splinter of bone from my body and put it in a small container. Grey as a ghost I leaned over, my voice soft from the shock.
“Hey doc, hold that small container up please?”
“What for?
I then pulled out my camera phone and snapped a few pictures. He was surprised that the first thing I wanted after such a rough procedure was to get pictures of my bone fragment and marrow. I was surprised I was the first person to ever do so. They loaded me up with Vicodin to deal with the hole in my hip, but I hated it. I spent 2 days in a brain-dead trance (I couldn’t even keep up with the plot line of Into The Blue which should give you an inkling of how gone I was.) before I decided that I’d rather deal with the pain then not be able to construct coherent thoughts. I had another week to wait. How spread out was it? Was I going to die? My arm was still killing me and my back had an eraser sized hole in it covered up with nothing more than a bandage. I was at my friends’ house when the talk of cancer came up, more notably medical marijuana. I had never smoked weed before, but had always believed it should be legalized and regulated like alcohol or tobacco. Someone lit a joint and held it in my direction.
“Medical, eh?”
I gave it try, but nothing really happened. My arm hurt less, but I was still sore. I shrugged it off and went on about my business. The results came in soon after. I was in the oncologist’s office with my parents and my friend Ivan who had been hanging out with me when it was time to go. We talked on the way up about how I should be fine. I looked Hodgkin’s up online and saw that it had something close to a 90% survival rate. Besides, I was young, healthy (minus the cancer of course) and my energy meant that I was probably still in the early stages.
Nope. Stage 4. 90% goes to 70%. I had tumors in my armpits, along my collar bone, in the lymph nodes around my stomach and groin, on my spine and on my spleen. The cancer hadn’t gotten all the way to my marrow yet, so that was one piece of good news. Still, he told us that I would need to undergo 12 rounds of ABVD chemo. No surgery or Radiation because it was too spread
out. I would also have to leave my apartment in Long Beach and move back in with my parents in Temecula who could take care of me. The treatments were scheduled to run for 6 months. 6 months. Fuck, that’s a long time. I stopped working and moved back in with my Parents. My band agreed to take a partial hiatus, skipping shows, but still making the trip on weekends to Temecula so we could stay sharp and write new material. It was one of the few things that kept me sane. I started off pretty well with the chemo. It burned like hell when they pumped it in my arm, but on every other Monday for the first month or so, I held my own. 
I couldn’t do anything for the first 3 or 4 days after every chemo, but I still went out (though no alcohol) and dated around a bit. I even kept most of my hair. The nausea was horrible, but I had pills that made me good enough to not be curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor throwing my guts up. It wasn’t fun, and I still felt pretty terrible most of the times, but between the pills and the steroids, I was able to eat a little and keep it down. My body acclimated to the pills quickly however, and by the 3rd treatment, they weren’t working very well at all.
Enter medical marijuana. I had smoked every now and then between my first experience after my marrow biopsy and this point, but never really used it constantly as medicine. I had always mainly relied on the pills for my stomach. Pills with names I couldn’t even begin to remember, but they all had two things in common. They took 45 minutes to work and they only worked enough to keep me from throwing up. They never made me feel “better.”
Weed did! Pure and simple. As I started replacing my pills with marijuana, and even got a medical marijuana license that I picked up from some holistic doctor (as my Oncologist didn’t know the first thing about medicinal marijuana). Replacing the pills with Pot was a godsend. 
I was hungry on a more consistent basis. When I got spikes in my nausea, inhaled pot smoke worked within minutes, often times taking me from the brink of vomiting to checking through the pantry 20 minutes later. Weed was cheaper than my pills (some of which ran for 30 bucks per pill with insurance) and its fun loving side effects made the outright trauma of having toxic chemicals pumped into my body on a bi monthly basis manageable. By smoking once every half hour, I would even manage to go large spans of time without feeling horrible. This was huge. To go from pain, sickness and the doubt that you’ll even see your next birthday to actually being happy is something I will never forget. It made an abysmal situation do-able. The problem with being sick in such a manner is that your health depends on your energy, on your outlook on life. If you are in good spirits, healing is all the easier. But when pain and sickness is all you know, it’s hard to stay cheery. The sickness only perpetuates the bad energy, which brings more sickness, which brings more bad energy and on and on and on. Marijuana stopped it. Suddenly I wasn’t in pain all the time. I wasn’t sick all the time. I could enjoy a meal, a short walk outside, or a good female friend who stopped by (Hey, I was dying, not dead).
My health (immune system) continued to slide over the course of the chemo. I was forced to put a port a cath in my chest (a hub inserted beneath the skin south of the collar bone which 
is attached to a larger vein which leads to the heart) as the vein which used to take the chemo in my arm collapsed (these were rough chemicals). My white blood cell count dipped so low at one point that I wasn’t allowed to leave my house for a month (I had to give away my ticket to go see Radiohead, which hurt almost as much as the chemo), and I got the “chemo-brain” which is an unfortunate side-effect of certain chemo treatments that leaves you without the ability to read, remember names, events or the ability to follow complex story lines. I was still myself, but I couldn’t recall the names of many people outside of my immediate circle, and had actually introduced myself to the same guy 6 times over a 4 month period, each time assuming it was the first time I met him, (he knew the circumstances though, so he wasn’t too hurt).
I still tried to keep sane through all this by practicing with my band on weekends, writing a daily blog about the misadventures of chemo and other random brain clutter, and playing at Java Jo’z open mikes. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to make it, but when I did, it was wonderful. I made some good friends there, and got some much needed support. Despite everything that was going on, I was soldiering through it. I took to wearing a Pirate Hat in 
public to mix things up a bit. Between my sizable lump in my chest, the 30 lbs I had gained and the beard I had grown (I had low level hemophilia from the low blood counts, so I couldn’t shave), I didn’t really worry about what others thought of my outward appearance anymore.
Side note: All of my chemo nurses were stunned that I was the ONLY patient
they had ever had that got HAIRIER during treatment. I think it’s a testament to my sheer manliness, although the Arab genetics probably didn’t hurt. 8 treatments in, still holding strong… and then I met Hannah. 
We met and hit it off better than I have with any other person I have ever met in my entire life. The first time we met was at my parents’ house. She came to visit my brother (who she had met at school) after a day at her aunt’s ranch. When I opened the door I was wearing nothing but soccer shorts and my pirate hat. In my hand was the mandolin my parents gave me for my birthday. She smelled like Horses and looked like a farmhand. It was love at first sight. The very next day I got a call saying that my last scan was clear. The cancer was gone. 8 treatments in and my cancer was nowhere to be found. It was also my mom’s birthday.
The doctor said that while the scans showed nothing, it was very possible that I still had cancer, and that it was just too faint to be picked up by the CT scan. Just 4 more treatments to go. That was when I collapsed. It’s hard to explain, but my body just caved in. 
My white cell counts were so low that they had to inject me with special shots called Leukine 5 days a week that forced my bone marrow to grow new cells. It felt like acid, melting away at everything it touched. The pain was so great that they actually had to rotate the injection sites. Monday left arm. Tuesday right arm. Wednesday right leg… and so on. Some days I couldn’t walk. Beyond will power, or necessity, I was unable to. I had to crawl. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel though. Only a few more chemos and a dozen shots. I’ll live. Fuck cancer, I won. This is just insurance.
By the time I took my last chemo I had gone from 145lbs to 175lbs (lack of
exercise + marijuana induced ability to eat), yet my body was still frail. I was able to walk, but usually only with assistance, I couldn’t read for more than a few minutes (I would just forget everything I read), and was in constant pain. But I had won. The fight was over, and I was the last one standing (figuratively). In my impatience to return to normalcy I had booked a show with Inverse as a sort of personal achievement. I had booked the show months in advance, but because I had several chemos delayed on account of my cell counts being too low, we ended up playing 4 days after my final chemo. 4 days after my 12th round of chemotherapy and I was on stage (albeit in a chair), melting faces with the power of rock. Or maybe it was just the massive beard I had grown. The doctors called me an anomaly, as most people lose their hair during chemo. I kept a soft bit of baby-down like hair, and a beard that made me look like a homeless vagrant. I was even invited by the US competitive beard team to compete with them in the World Beard Championship in the UK. Too bad I got the e 
mail a week after shaving. C’est la vie. The Battle was won and now it was time to take that long road back to normalcy. The oncologist said I would be back to normal in 1 month’s time. 1 year later, and I was still nauseous and easily fatigued. I would still have to smoke up to 10 times a day depending on how much I exerted myself. Going to work and to band practice in the same day would usually mean that I would be sick at least a half dozen times over the course of the day. The more I did, the sicker I would feel. If I took a day off from everything and rested, then I would have to smoke once, maybe twice tops. Marijuana is great for treating symptoms, but it doesn’t actually make you better. My stagnation at this point was very frustrating, I was told I was going to be normal, but here I was, still getting sick, with my poor girlfriend Hannah dating me for over a year, yet never seeing me healthy. The limitations on medical marijuana also made things tougher for living normally. I was allowed to take my medication, but only at home, and it only exempted me from prosecution by state officials, not federal. So I could be arrested inside my home by federal authorities or outside of my home by anybody for the egregious crime of caring for my health. Smoking in the car because my house was too far away didn’t matter either. I would be prosecuted all the same. I always wondered what would happen if people could get high off insulin, and if the Feds would be dragging diabetics off to jail for the horrible crime of trying to stay alive. This is one big reason why what is considered medicine should not be determined by politicians and lobbyists.
Acquiring marijuana was also an issue in of itself. The closest dispensary was over an hour away in Orange County, and over the course of my treatment and recovery I was often unable to make it out there to get more. Occasionally I would run out and spend the night curled up in the bathroom throwing up and or dry heaving. I wrote to my (state and U.S.) Senators, Congressman, and (the Temecula) City Council trying to find some way to make marijuana more accessible to people like me, but with no luck. I got the same reply from everyone:
“We feel bad for you, but it’s a bad move politically, sorry, you’re fucked.” I couldn’t just count on friends with pot to help me out 10 times a day, so I ended up turning toward actual drug dealers (whose stuff is often far less effective than what I got from dispensaries). It’s always good to know that my elected representatives are hard at work helping to make my life better. But moving along…
It was one year since my last chemo, and I was still sick. Then, about 3 weeks ago that I spoke with a woman named Leilani. She runs the rescue from whom Hannah and I adopted out dog Zissou. She had beaten brain and cervical cancer and knew what I was going through. She told me about Tahitian Noni and its many benefits, not only to cancer and post cancer patients, but to anyone. Normally I’m skeptical of remedies lacking scientific research, but then again, the thoroughly tested anti nausea pills I was prescribed did 10% of the job that the unjustly controversial medical marijuana did. I ordered a case and gave it a shot. In the 2 weeks I’ve been taking Noni I have had only 1 bad spike of nausea (as opposed to several times a day). My lingering nausea is far less severe, and can often now be ignored, or if weed is necessary, taken care of without actually getting high. 1 or 2 hits for the sickness, 3 or 4 and I’m just having fun. A lot better for an active lifestyle than having to get outright stoned every time I need to go somewhere. I’m hoping that by the end of September I won’t have to smoke anymore at all. Its not to say I’m done with marijuana for good, I’ve grown to see that like a beer or fast food, it can be enjoyed, but in moderation. But being reliant on marijuana to get through my day is something I won’t miss anytime soon. I’ve read about the curing of cancer in lab mice, but its rumored side effects as well. All I can say for certain is that I am noticeably better from 2 weeks ago. It is just like the debate over medical marijuana. Politicized studies mean nothing when put next to personal experience. Medical Marijuana worked for me, as did Tahitian Noni. They may not work for everyone, as we’re all different, but they are both worth a shot for anyone going through chemo, or recovering from it.
So here I am now, wrapping up what I started in January 2006. I wouldn’t take it back if I could, as I’ve learned more about myself in the last year and a half than I have in the 23 before it. Some things, even as horrible as they may be, give us a perspective on life that we wouldn’t have acquired any other way. You learn who your friends are, who are only there as a matter of convenience. You learn the limits that your body and mind can be pushed, and what it truly means to suffer. Nothing is taken for granted. All things are cherished. I lost a good friend of mine to Non-Hodgkin’s Disease almost a year to the day after my cancer was declared gone. He was my age, and had the same outlook on life. Even while being eaten up from the inside by tumors, he had more life in him than most. More-so than anything else, his passing taught me how valuable our time is while we’re here, and that the biggest crime any of us can commit, is for us to waste the opportunities we have in front of us. Life is too short to waste constantly worrying about the little things. In the vain quest to micromanage everything, you might miss out on what life is all about in the first place; Living.”
-Paul Bahou (DEDICATED TO MARY ROSEBUD DANIEL 1923-1982)