By Paul Rousseau
Something’s wrong. I see a doctor. He hears my story and examines me, barely. Heart and lungs, a push on my belly, a touch of my pulse. He scribbles a cluster of letters: CBC, LFTs, BUN, CT, MRI.
Two weeks later, I meet with the doctor, in his office, in solemn air.
“It looks like cancer.”
He’s certain there’s already a malignant infrastructure. I need a biopsy, soon. I leave his office in an orbit of misery.
I lie on a sliver of steel. The metal chills the skin scrunched in the wide breach of my hospital gown. Goosebumps rise like tiny periscopes. I shiver from cold and fear.
“There will be a small stick.”
I wait, exposed. He pares a wedge of the knotted tumor. I grimace, terrified.
A week passes. The phone rings; I need an appointment with the doctor. The biopsy results have returned.
“Can I see him today?”
“I’m sorry, he’s booked until next week.” “But there’s an urgency.”
I sit in the same office, the air more solemn than before. The words are blunt. The biopsy, cancer.
“It’s fast-growing; chemotherapy and radiation should begin immediately, and after, surgery.”
Radiation? Surgery? It sounds ominous. “Seventy percent die within five years.”
He sketches a bell-shaped curve on a prescription pad. I want to be on the outer fringes, the thin slice of survival. Seventy percent. Such a stark narrative. I slump like crumpled linen. I tremble. I cannot write what he has told me.
He advises there are medications for the debilitating symptoms of treatment, and intravenous nutrition should I lose more weight. More weight? I glance at my belt. It needs another notch; it’s loose.
“But treatment will be physically demanding; you might even die.”
Die? From treatment? I thought one died from disease. Do I want treatment? I do; I revel in being alive. I want the chance of the thin slice of the bell curve. But what of the quality of the chance? Bedbound, never to recover, an invalid to the end? Perhaps. I’ll take it if so. And the days to death between no treatment and treatment? The statistics are confounding. I may live longer with treatment; I may live longer without treatment. He thinks the former. So does Google. And the Ouija board. I believe Google. But it really doesn’t matter; doing something is better than doing nothing, I think. He stands and saunters to the door.
“You’ll need a PET scan.”
The final letters. The PET scan will reveal the location of renegade cells. Cancer cells in hiding. But aren’t all cancer cells renegade?
“And a catheter, a Port-a-Cath. A small lump under your skin.”
The Port-a-Cath, a plastic tube surgically inserted through my chest wall into a large vein under the clavicle. A marker of the sick and the unwell. A conduit that will funnel bitterness to every part of my body to eradicate cancerous, and non-cancerous, cells.
“The non-cancerous are collateral damage.”
Soldierly patois. Battlefield casualties. It’s a war. Nothing will ever be the same again.