Gotham Diary:
Is this it?
21 March 2014
On Wednesday, I had a call from the dermatologist’s office. Great news! Tests indicated that both growths, biopsied about two weeks earlier, were benign. I made an appointment to see the dermatologist anyway, at the beginning of next month; my scalp grows worrisome mutant cells like Iowa grows corn. The two most recent nasties had erupted since January.
Yesterday, the dermatologist herself called. “I don’t want to throw you into a panic,” she said, but I could tell that she was uncomfortable. It turned out that not all the tests came back on Wednesday. The one that came in yesterday suggested an unusual but not unheard-of possibility, a kind of lymphoma. Whereupon the doctor threw me into a panic by insisting that I get a second opinion, and from a doctor down at NYU.
Making the appointment with the second doctor presented no difficulties (I’ll see her at the end of next week). I hung up the phone and sat at my desk. A kind of dullness muffled the room.
I wanted to talk to Kathleen, but Kathleen was at a meeting in Washington, and her phone, set to vibrate, lay somewhere in her bag. I knew that she was planning to take a three-o’clock train back to New York, and I could expect that she would call me when she got to Union Station. That would be about ninety minutes from where I sat. I sent her a text, asking her to call me on the cell phone, something I’m trying to get her to do by default.
Kathleen called right on time. Our conversation was brief. I told her my news; I did not tell her how awful the ninety minutes had been. The news was still disturbing, but I was no longer alone in an elevator that had just dropped fifteen floors.
***
Is this it? I ask, waiting to see the doctor. Am I now going to be told that there’s nothing to be done? It’s a stupid question, but it distracts me from a more wearisome one: what new course of treatments am I in for now? So far, I’ve been very lucky: I’ve been spared treatments like chemotherapy that make you feel awful. When is this luck going to run out? Will it run out gradually or all at once? These questions are always humming quietly in the background — every day. But as long as they’re in the background, they don’t slow me down. It’s when they’re brought up close by something a doctor says that I wilt. I don’t fall apart, or make scenes; I simply go quiet, holding hands with my mortality. It is not at all pleasant.
I cannot believe that I have managed to stay alive for sixty-six years. To put it better: I’m surprised to have survived my youth, which was moderately reckless and which came to an end when I gave up smoking and put on weight that I’ve never managed to lose. But a failure to take better care of myself is not what’s behind my visits to doctors. Take the dermatologist: I see her because my mother failed to protect me from the sun. How could my mother have been so thoughtless? Because nobody knew much about skin cancer back then, for the simple reason that it wasn’t a medicable problem in those days. Either people died before the disease set in, or the disease went undetected until it was hopeless. My autoimmune problems are rooted in what seemed at the time to be a healthy environment — in retrospect, too healthy. A grubbier existence might have given my immune system something real to worry about. As it is, doctors have been doing an excellent job of warding off serious illness and unbearable pain. I don’t count on them to keep this up indefinitely. In grim moments, I feel that I’m being kept alive so that something truly horrible can attack me. Something richly deserved. But I really have no idea what to expect, because the medicine is too new and ever-changing.
Or, my heart could just fail. Doesn’t that happen all the time?
***
We say that you can get used to anything, but that’s not how it works. You simply do get used to things. To the extent possible, you also make things get used to you. That has been the program for me, anyway — so far. Is this it? Is this the moment beyond which getting used to things is no longer possible? Probably not. Probably, the question will fade once again into the humming background. But the background will have inched a bit closer.