By Donna Myers
It’s my first time riding a Baltimore city bus. At the fifth stop on York Road an elderly man deposits his fare.
I notice his zipper is down. My eyes widen. I’m not comfortable with cities or buses or dirty old men.
As he shuffles closer, I realize there’s a catheter running out of his zipper and under his shirt, probably into a urostomy bag.
I’m a bad person.
I conciliate by pressing my thigh deeper into my neighbor’s. The old man accepts my offering, prying his bony hips into the space I’d created.
Maybe I should stand up.
No, I don’t want him to think I’m standing up because of his bag.
I stare straight ahead as the bus continues along York Road.
He smells funny.
That’s not nice. It’s not his fault. Most old people smell a little funny.
Suddenly, a woman sitting on the other side of the old man twists her face in disgust as she jumps to her feet and exclaims, “His thing is leaking!”
The seat next to the old man is now conspicuously empty, but he doesn’t move. Not one inch away from me. I look at the old man, but he doesn’t look at me.
No one standing in the aisle takes advantage of the empty seat.
Something’s wrong with this picture.
I haven’t regained feeling on the surface of my butt or hamstrings, so I can’t tell when things are wet or dry, or hot or cold, or sharp or dull. I want to put my hand down to feel, but can’t because people are too close to me.
What if I’m sitting in pee? I should move.
No, I shouldn’t. The old man has suffered enough embarrassment; he doesn’t need me to open up space on the other side of him, too, and ensure everybody notices his bag leaked.
I remain seated, all the while feeling, in my mind, that the seat is wet. As the minutes pass, I convince myself that yes, it’s definitely wet. I can’t feel it, but I know it.
The only way to stand up without risking the old man’s feelings is to get off of the bus. So, as soon as the driver stops at a part of the city I recognize, I rise from my seat, take a deep breath in preparation for walking around in urine-soaked shorts, and step onto the street. As soon as the old man rolls out of view, I check to see if my legs are wet.
They’re dry.
Decades have since passed and I now recognize that ride as a salient moment in my recovery. There are some things my tumor stole that are lost forever: two inches, carefree athleticism, empirical innocence. And there are other things I paid dearly to upgrade, like perspective, tolerance, and balance. But my pre-tumor self would’ve stayed seated, just like the post-tumor version did. So perhaps then, I was still myself, in the ways that mattered most.