By Becca Baisch
My husband’s testicle upended our lives.
On an early April morning, five years into our marriage and four months into our baby’s life, I stumbled into the bathroom blurry-eyed, in search of my contacts. My husband followed me, closed the door, and sucked his teeth, “Something’s wrong with my balls—ball—it’s hard. It hurts.”
I giggled—balls, nards, jewels, nuts—then straightened my face.
“What do you think is wrong?” he asked.
“Did you get nailed there?” I said, a reference to his work officiating soccer, and plopped a lens into my eye. I blinked at his blond scruff coming into focus.
“No.”
I shrugged, fishing out the other slippery lens. “Probably nothing.”
A senior medical student, I mentally retrieved study files on embryology, reproductive medicine, sexual development, sexual—anything.
His expectant green eyes searched mine for a definitive answer.
“Infection?” I said. When in doubt, pick infection. “Or probably nothing.” Probably nothing was never a multiple-choice option on exams, but I repeated it quietly, disallowing my mind to roam elsewhere. “It’s probably nothing.”
Weeks later, when his discomfort persisted, even after a round of antibiotics from the internal medicine doctor who, like me, had chosen infection, he was sent to radiology. I never imagined when we scheduled the appointment, when the ultrasound tech’s face screwed with concern at the film’s shadow, when we drove home in silence with the word cancer stifling the air, that it could’ve been anything but an infection.
I never imagined life without my husband.
Plucked from the Gemini constellation, our births were separated by four hours and the roughly 1,900 miles between California and Minnesota. We met eighteen years later at a tiny Southern California college. I fell fast. He wanted to take it slow, make sure he was “stoked” about me. Stoked? Only a boy from SoCal would use that word.
Raised on a steady diet of soap operas and romance novels, my faith in true love prevailed. We’d finish one another’s sentences and carry entire conversations using our favorite movie quotes. Our longest separation—a whole week—was spring break of senior year when I had traveled with the track and field team. I stowed into my suitcase his tan sweatshirt with the dorky youth camp logo and ratty cuffs. Snorting the scent of his cologne from the fibers, a pitiable fix for my lovesick withdrawals, I’d exhale to my best friend, “I want to have his children.”
Six years later, on a December afternoon, I pushed our baby from my hardy German-issued hips, the ones my hardy German-issued grandmother had noted during my pregnancy: “Your butt has gotten big, that means you’re having a girl.”
When I held our little girl in the birthing tub, collapsed against him, oblivious to the pool of bloody human secretions and my torn body with its hemorrhoids, buzzing ears, and blackened vision, I’d never felt higher on love. But I’d also never felt less sexy, and newborn-induced sleep deprivation fractured our hearts’ telepathy, rendering us capable of saying things like “fuck you” in the middle of the night.
For the inguinal orchiectomy procedure, I was allowed to scrub in, a sympathetic gesture on behalf of the urologist who had been my professor. Once the traitorous testicle was caged in a metal specimen container, the urologist sutured the tissue layers of my husband’s lower abdomen. When he reached the last one, he handed me the thread. “Would you like the honors?” He’d apparently missed the memo stating I was in medical school to be a psychiatrist. Still, my perfectionist tendencies made for some impressive suturing during surgical rotations. I hoped one day I’d run my finger across his skin and think, There’s barely a scar.
The oncology team, suspicious of stage II cancer, scheduled another surgery—retroperitoneal lymph node dissection. I Googled it and read the list of complications. My heart stalled on—Death.
How could death be a complication?
I called the surgeon’s nurse, palmed my head as I paced, and controlled my shrill, shaky voice. “Is surgery really necessary?” I wasn’t denying the medical recommendation as much as I was still denying reality.
I wasn’t allowed to scrub in this time. During the surgery, and surrounded by family taking turns holding our baby girl, I waited one hour, then two, and three. When I was allowed into the post-op area afterward, I kissed his mouth. His lips were cracked and caked with dried saliva, and his post-anesthesia breath smelled like dirty socks.
The surgeon sat me down with family members hovering nearby. I fixated on the coarse dark hair on the back of his hands. Hands that had made a foot-long incision from my husband’s rib cage to his pubic bone. With no emotion whatsoever he said, “Some lymph nodes were likely cancerous. He’ll need chemotherapy.” A rock floated from my gut and lodged itself in my throat. I left the room as though dragging the legs of a stranger. I stared at our yellow-haired daughter in her stroller, at her cleft chin and ginormous eyelashes that all belonged to her dad. Would she only ever know him in photographs?
We were told recovery in the hospital could last two weeks.
“Stay with me?” my husband asked that first night.
My mother exchanged a breast pump for her granddaughter, and I stayed.
Alongside his hospital bed, I jammed two chairs together, and hunkered beneath a blanket. We didn’t talk much. I was preoccupied with his fragility and my engorged breasts.
From inside his hospital bathroom, hooked to the breast milk pump, I heard a sharp rap on the door.
“That bathroom’s for patients only,” said a nurse.
I bit my lip to stave off tears and heard his gentle explanation on the other side of the door, above the rhythmic whumping of the machine, “We have a baby at home.”
Once the milk was nestled between freezer packs, I assumed my physical relief would bring a modicum of rest. I closed my eyes, sleep eluding me, and listened to him toss and quietly huff. “Could you…?” he asked.
I opened my eyes.
He cringed. “They gave me something to go…” He rolled aside, slipping the hospital gown to expose his naked behind for the suppository. “I don’t really want that nurse to do it.”
When I finished, I washed my hands, and curled into the chair-bed. My body droned with a current of restlessness that went beyond the uncomfortable sleeping arrangement. Shoving a laxative into my husband’s rectum was something I might have expected after fifty years of marriage, not five.
As I lay awake, I studied his decimated body, his puffy legs, legs that a handful of years prior had executed a corner kick under the college’s stadium lights as a thousand fans held their collective breath. The soccer ball sailed in a perfect arc to his teammate who sent it home with seconds remaining, clinching the win that earned them a shot at the championship. He’d stripped his sweaty jersey, face exploding into a triumphant roar as he pumped his fists, only to be buried by the victorious dog pile.
I got up, trudged to the hospital window’s ledge and riffled through his folder of post-op instructions and patient education materials. On a scrap of paper, in his minuscule handwriting, I counted hash marks of laps he’d completed around the small unit using the IV pole as a crutch. The post-op instructions recommended one lap per day to promote circulation. He’d done ten. Those ten laps had taken two hours.
I thought of our daughter’s birth in that moment, how days later he’d confessed his legs were sore and bruised from when I squatted on them during labor. “Why didn’t you tell me to move?” I’d asked. With a humble laugh, he’d replied as if the answer were obvious: “You were in a lot more pain than I was.”
I returned to him. His pale stare at the ceiling dropped to me. Though at the height of our twenty-something invincibility, we were no different than any other fallible human whose only certainty in life was death. My gaze drifted back to the window, to the night sky that held our Gemini constellation. According to the myth, one twin was mortal, the other immortal. When the mortal twin died, the immortal one pleaded to the gods to bring him back to life, unable to bear the separation.
And so they were etched together into the universe.
My husband and I linked hands.
Stars eventually die too. But at least not for a few billion years.