hangman

This story is a work in progress about our first visit to the Cancer Center.

            Doctor French talked a lot, in kind tones and with a gentle air. She didn’t have much to offer us in the way of a plan forward, which I suppose explains her apologetic demeanor. We were supposed to be meeting with many doctors – The Cancer Team – as I’d been calling them, but the day before the meeting, the sky had come crumbling down around our feet. Again.

            The first time it fell was just nine days earlier, in a brief conversation with the PA from our brand new family doctor’s office.

            “Sara? This is Joy from Dr. Dallas’ office. We need to schedule an appointment to go over your pathology results. Can you come in tomorrow at 10:40?” She said it brusquely, in a way that should have made clear the gravity of what she was about to tell me. Maybe I knew already. Maybe I needed to hear it.

            “Yes. I—What are the results?”

            “Positive. We’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, she hung up. Before I could say anything. Before I could scream or start crying or muttering ill-formed questions about “what next?” Before no no no no no could start tumbling from my quivering lips.

            Jason was home in an instant. We cried and held each other so tight we might have fused together. We smoked cigarettes we promised would be our last.

            I had an mri. I had my blood drawn. I scheduled appointments and we waited. We got a terrifying phone call. The mri results were troubling and the radiologist wanted to do more biopsies. We sat in the same waiting room as we did on our first visit, talked to the same nurses, but this time I cried – big, hot, endless tears. We agreed that the only news worse than cancer was More Cancer. The nurse left us alone in the small, ugly room. A poorly frosted tulip was fading in the corner of a mirror framed cheaply in brass. A mess of twigs, ribbon, and silk flowers adorned one of the walls. A dated end table held an abused silicone breast embedded with plastic and rubber models of different cancers, a copy of Readers’ Digest, and a box of tissues. A calendar comprised of photos of the ugliest kittens we’d ever seen hung next to the door. Jason lifted each page as I sat weepy and pouting, making fun of their malformed faces and alien eyes. He scrawled “Jason’s birthday” in the box for August 13^th at my juvenile pleading and I laughed like we were twelve and making prank phone calls. I snapped at the doctor when she finally came in to talk to us about the biopsies and when she left I fretted pitifully to Jason about whether or not I had been mean.

            I selfishly forgot to ask how he was doing.

            The day after these new biopsies was the day we were to meet with The Cancer Team, but the Team abandoned this plan because there could be no Plan while we were waiting to find out if there was More Cancer. More Cancer changes everything. Still we talked, asked questions, waited, until finally we came to a series of equally possible if/then scenarios. It was more of a brainstorm than pathway, but it was something – a buoy many miles away, but there nonetheless.

            “Before you go I’d like to get some blood work and a chest x-ray.” Dr. French explained. Afterwards I had questions about why, but I have come to assume that every doctor wants blood and images of my insides. A nurse whose name I cannot remember came in, gave us a form explaining that Dr. French hadn’t really been able to tell us anything and said she’d walk us to our next destination. Her skin was tan and slack, with vertical wrinkles as though it had been pulled in opposite directions from her scalp and her toes. Her jaw seemed somehow narrower than her neck where the two were supposed to meet. She was kind in a way that indicated that she was waiting for me to fall apart, that she was used to it. I cannot remember if we talked while she took us to elevator and down one floor to a large lobby strewn with ugly, straight-backed upholstered chairs. The chairs lined the perimeter of the room, jutted out in two places where they were set back-to-back, interrupted only by windows, a sofa situated in front of a television broadcasting Dr. Phil or some such nonsense, and a large aquarium where fat cichlids lolled in the water. Nearly all of the seats were full. Two small children had accompanied their grandparents; otherwise we were the youngest people in the room by decades.

            I studied the other patients. They were wrinkled and moved slowly, wore ace bandages and gauze around iv ports in their forearms. The men’s baseball caps were too big for their bald heads and their legs protruded like thin, weathered dowels from the wide bottoms of their pleated shorts. They dressed in pastels, khaki, and loud floral prints. They smelled like cheap aftershave and perfume, like aging, like the hospital, like illness. Treatment for these people, I thought, is about staving off death which had already begun to infiltrate their lives. It had already birthed aches in their brittle bones, painted liver spots on the backs of their hands, pushed and pulled until their spines started to sink and tip forward at the shoulders, stolen memories, dulled the sensation of their ear drums, toyed with the rods and cones in their eyes.

            I do not belong among them. I am young and relatively wrinkle-free. My infected breasts are still pert and dense. My skin is elastic and taught. Nothing in my life has ever proclaimed the nearness of death, and suddenly I am sharing a predicament with these people. The smell makes me think of visiting my grandmother in the hospital and of her funeral where I threw up from sadness and stress. Makes me think of aging, of death, and a void opens in my abdomen that swallows my stomach, my heart, the air in my lungs and I want to scream because I very suddenly realize that I am Too Young. Because I have only been married for a year. Because I haven’t had children or gotten the job for which I worked so hard to be qualified. Because Jason and I haven’t gone to Greece and I have said no too often when he wanted to have sex. Because I have been unromantic. Because my mother will be lost without me. Because I do not want to die.

            All these thoughts are circling my brain at high speed but I can’t say a thing and I utterly lose my composure. Tears are flowing hot and fast and I cannot wipe them away quickly enough to stop them from dripping off of my jaw and onto my collar bone. Jason is looking at me – his enormous brown eyes wide and wet with concern, his arm around me. I wish I could explain, but the only thing that comes out when I open my mouth are big hiccup-y sobs, so I try to keep my mouth closed because how dare I? How dare I lose it here - in the face of worse predicaments? Also, this is embarrassing. This is weak. They all look so composed (or maybe that’s resignation?).  My efforts to stop myself are fruitless, as are my efforts to find an exit. There is no bathroom in sight, there is no separate lobby, no exit door (we are on the second floor), only the elevator, but I cannot leave because I am waiting to have an x-ray and blood work.

            Jason doesn’t say anything, just uses his free arm to pull out his notebook – the one he brought to take notes while the doctor was talking – and open it to a fresh page. He makes a “7” with a line at the base, perpendicular to the straight back of the number. He makes a smaller line dropping down from its far left tip, begins making a line of horizontal dashes next to it. Hangman. I am sobbing at the Cancer Center and everyone is looking at me and my husband is setting up a game of hangman. It is a habit of ours to play when we are waiting at restaurants or for car repairs. Ok, I think. I can do this. I can guess letters. But I can’t. I cannot say a word, or more precisely, a letter. Every time I open my mouth to speak the only sound to make its exit is a low wail, but I try until I am laughing at my failure to utter coherent sounds, and until he guesses for me.

            He writes a ‘W’ off to the side, looks at me quizzically; this is a bad first guess. He crosses it off and draws a head on the noose. He is making me lose. I laugh a little more, try and fail again to guess a letter. He writes a ‘Z’ next to the ‘W,’ looks at me like I’m crazy because this is such a terrible second letter to guess, shakes his head and crosses it off. He draws a body for the poor hanged man. He is smiling mischievously and his eyes are all teasing expectation – eyebrows raised, chin tipped down, head gesturing “guess!” I am still bereft of voice as he records an ‘X,’ crosses it through like the other letters, and gives the stick figure a leg. My sense of competition and his tactless humor are winning me over from my tears. No, no! X? Fuck you. Who guesses X third? E! E! I want to guess E! and so I finally sent it sputtering through tears and snot, muffled sobs and wild laughter, “E!"