by David Carr
The ticktock of medical jargon in the record vibrates with subtext.
“The patient has no complaints.”
Oh, but he does. They are legion and festering, and cannot be resolved by mumbled words of reassurance.
“The patient tolerated the procedure well and [was] taken to the recovery room in satisfactory condition.”
As I remember, the patient felt as if he had been cleaved in half, and when he woke up in the recovery room, he took stock of his physical state and began vomiting, pulling hard at his newly installed stitches.
“The patient has had his spleen removed in the interval since the last examination.”
Just like that? My spleen, what with all of the venting and expressing I have done throughout my life, would seem to have been a critically adaptive organ. You’d think the loss would be acknowledged with a little more than a lifetime of prophylactic antibiotics. How about a little sweet with the bitter, for mercy’s sake?
“The patient continues to do well and is in complete remission of his Hodgkin’s disease.”
That’s more like it. After having my life medicalized for months on end, I left on a dead run. Once the medical Borg has a fix on your coordinates, it can lock and load in a heartbeat. I have been back to many hospitals, many doctors, many waiting rooms, not because the cancer came back but because I once was cured of it.
Certainly the physical expression is still with me. I have no jowls—they were seared off during radiation—and I have a swanlike neck, although pocked by scars from all of the biopsies, both to see if the cancer was there in the first place and then to see if it came back. And when I go swimming, the people around me must wonder if I lost a really bad knife fight. I have what looks like the footprint of a machete in my abdomen: a thick, ropy scar that drops from my chest cavity down to, well, just below the belt buckle. There’s a little jog around my belly button, lending it a bit of drama. Many hands have been inside there messing around, and I have no illusion that they won’t be back.
Cancer’s ubiquity means that I, like everyone else, have lost many familiars, including my mother, to the alien. I could default to recovery speak—better them than me—but these many years later, I still feel very much at risk. Not clinically, but psychically. Even though I never talk about it much, having cancer scared the shit out of me. It kept seeming to come back, even when it didn’t. I had forgotten about that part until I got the records and reviewed them from this distance. My neck kept getting big again, and at least one time, my doctor thought he felt an enlarged node under my arm. After stiff-upper-lipping it for six months of treatment—I didn’t weep, except in the dead of night, when I wondered about bringing any more bad news to Meagan and Erin—the suggestion that the cancer was back caused a shutdown, a “vasovagal episode,” as it was called. That means I fainted, not that I went all girly-man. It was, as they say, a false positive. I’m fine now.
But different. When life is good, which it often is, I always tell my children that “things will not always be thus.” Peddling through files, buried beneath all of the clinicalspeak, it’s clear that having cancer wounded me in a way that addiction never did. With addiction, I could look in the mirror and say, yes, the affliction nearly killed me and will finish the job if I am not vigilant. Cancer keeps its own appointment schedule. Your body belongs to you one day, and the next it becomes the host. That mystical power, its very ineffability, gives cancer traction on the soul that never goes away.
Sometimes when I sleep, I hear beeping, like the noise a medical apparatus might make, or the sound of a very tiny spaceship coming in for a landing.
I came home from the hospital with a one-foot gash down my abdomen. Doolie and I were seeing each other only occasionally at the time, but out of pity she came over and ever so gently made sure that all of the rest of me was operational. It was a significant kindness, especially because my wounds were, gosh, weeping a bit. (Not to get ahead of the story, but this “conservative” approach, meant to avoid the complications of chemo, began a surgical odyssey for me, with ventral hernia repair, surgery to repair surgical scars (which is sort of counterintuitive, when you think about it), acute necrotizing pancreatitis, gallbladder removal, and so on. If they were planning on using me as an ATM, I wish they had installed a hinge to start with rather than slicing their way in every time.)
I never came close to dying, but for the first month of my treatment, I looked like I might. In those thirty days I had a neck biopsy, a bone marrow biopsy, major abdominal surgery, and thousands of rads of radiation. I woke up in fistfuls of hair, and my ears, neck, and the inside of my throat got burned, but it seemed like a fair trade. I would lie there getting irradiated, and a mechanical voice would keep repeating instructions from a small speaker. “Hold your breath.” “Relax.” I spent a lot of time staring up at a tropical poster on the ceiling, taking in the Zen rhythm of the machine. (That poster may explain why I had an odd urge to go to Nicaragua when I finished my treatment, but I can’t be sure. It was a good trip.)
I went from a fat, vaguely thuggish guy with a fresh, heinous scar to an almost beatific, skinny soul. Every time I caught my reflection, either in a mirror or in the face of a friend, I averted my eyes.
One night my friend Mary, a pal from the church we attended, was over at our house on Pillsbury making dinner for the twins. I was resting on the couch in the living room and listening to the music of Mary chattering to Erin and Meagan as she cooked. Without warning, a glass light fixture on the ceiling came loose, bonked Mary on the head, shattered, and sliced her forearm open. It turned out that the tenants upstairs had left the water running and the flood it had created weakened the ceiling. The fixture came down along with a rain that seemed almost biblical. As I helped her stanch the blood from the gaping wound, I thought, “This place is the fucking temple of doom. Nobody else in or out. Just us.”
The girls and I developed a routine. Meagan, who was an almost pathological caretaker by disposition, began to take over all sorts of responsibilities as the girls edged toward four. From my couch in the living room, I would see her setting juice glasses on the counter above her head or mopping up a spill with the paper towels she knew were under the sink. (Meagan remembers precisely none of this, by the way.)
If I frightened my children, they didn’t let on. In what became something of a pattern for us, I told them as much as I knew, even though they weren’t yet four. Yes, I was sick, with something called cancer, but the doctors were pretty sure it would be OK. In the meantime, I might not look or feel that good. All of which was true. For their part, the girls hung tough, suggesting that something called “cancer” was no match for the likes of us.
When I was feeling good, I would spend time setting up the refrigerator so that all of the stuff that could be eaten raw was on the lower shelves—that way the girls could just grab some carrots or an apple if they were hungry. I sent Meagan to the door more than once to give the pizza man $10. “Keep the change,” I’d hear her say per my instructions to some stunned guy who probably took the story back to the shop. On nights when I was too tired to tuck them in, I would lie there and hear her tell Erin it was time to say prayers before bed.
“Lovely lady, dressed in blue, teach me how to pray…”
I excused myself when friends called wanting to drop by, telling them that we were fine but couldn’t accommodate company right now. Blood relations were a different matter. My mom came and went, bringing easy food to make and taking the laundry with her. My sister Coo, my longtime ally and familial jester, still had run of the place. She would burst through the door, arms full of junk food and her head full of capers, bringing the circus with her every time she came. I couldn’t even stand the sound of a television set at the time, but her voice, her yelling, her goofiness, well, that somehow sounded celestial. When she asked me how I felt, I answered truthfully, telling her I felt like shit and “It” was scaring the hell out of me.
“Hey, what a coincidence! Me too! Well,�
�� she’d shout, turning to the girls, “what say that we go into your room and make a huge fort where no one is in a bad mood and everyone feels good!”
Whenever I go in for a CAT scan—which is scheduled when some new ailment occurs—the technician is always confused. “Where is your spleen?” “Hey, what happened to your kidney?” And, “You seem to be missing your gallbladder.” He makes low, whistling sounds as he surveys the wreckage of my past on his screen.
For the record, I have had four concussions, I have no meniscus in my right knee, I was born with one kidney, I have half a pancreas, no spleen, no gallbladder, and what’s left of my insides is all covered by a steel mesh to keep it in. I have scars on my neck and my abdomen where the surgeons hacked their way in. I have had two broken legs, a broken wrist, a broken arm, a broken foot, a broken nose (twice), a broken hand, and a broken finger. That oral surgeon was right in a way, it has been a battle to keep my teeth, but I still order steak, medium rare. My neck is chronically bent—dropped head syndrome—because the nerves and muscles that hold it aloft are compromised, shot out by all the radiation I absorbed so many years ago.
It all serves as a reminder of two points:
I may have gotten away with a few things, but I did not escape clean. I trailed parts behind me as I went.
You don’t need much to get by. My donor card may be shot, but I am healthy enough to ride a bicycle hundreds of miles, I ski steep runs whenever I can, and I feel good enough every day to do honest labor. Best to keep moving, lest the alien get a fix on your coordinates.
47
THE VILLAGE PEOPLE
Tender, you’re the princess who is looking for your mom, and I am the mother, and we meet in the woods by the palace.
—MEAGAN TALKING TO ERIN IN THE BATHTUB WHEN THEY WERE FIVE YEARS OLD, AS QUOTED IN A PARENTING COLUMN IN FAMILY TIMES
The prerogatives of normal life—a middle-class version of it, even—began to float back toward me and mine as I healed in 1991. On summer weekends we would go up to Blueberry Lake in Wisconsin and a collection of dilapidated fishing shacks my family had bought. It was sort of like the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, but without the football, ocean, or yachts—a white trash nirvana. I would take the girls out for boat rides and fishing when the boat motors worked, or hold the wrenches while my dad quietly swore when they didn’t. Many times I would grab the chance to sleep a bit while the rest of the family kept an eye on the twins.
Blueberry was always more fun when my sister Coo was up there, because it meant some kind of monkeyshines were under way. She’d build some harebrained, patently unsafe contraption for land or water and then plop the twins on it.
Coo taught my daughters that women make stuff—she adored power tools—and that there was no need to wait for a man to get things going. She had been married to a great guy, a farmer, who cracked the occasional fag joke. Having spent much of my college years hanging out with a coven of brilliant pot-smoking lesbians—and noticing how Coo’s eyes got wide when she was around them—I knew that one day she would wake up and tell her husband she was one of those people.
It was a lesbian cartoon after that: She immediately met someone in a woman’s group, one of them brought a U-Haul to the second date, and before you knew it, Coo was living with her partner in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis and wearing those hideous silk pantsuits with the animal prints from the Lesbians “R” Us store. She was an incredibly powerful person, someone who could tilt a room with her presence, and she liked to come into my house and give the place a good tug. Sleepovers at her house with the twins began at an early age. There would be candles, movies, Skittles for everyone, and no set bedtime. I used to call those sleepovers Lesbian Indoctrination Camp.
The other early constant in my daughters’ lives was Kathy, their day-care provider, also a lesbian, but less extravagantly so. A former nun, she lived on the south side. Through a network of referrals, she ended up as the go-to day-care provider to a group of mostly single parents who were struggling in one way or another.
I went back to see Kathy, now living far outside the city with her longtime partner Cynthia, and she began giving me all manner of pictures almost immediately. Diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, she was heading out the door and wanted to leave me some things. We talked for several hours and hugged big at the end, with talk of a visit to see the girls. We both knew better.
There was something pitch-perfect about her, a person of remarkable constancy. And she looked after the parents as well as the kids. I remembered those years, from the time the girls were three until they were six, as simple, wonderful times, but Kathy reminded me that they were hard days as well.
“When I look at how hard you were all working—all of you; one-and two-parent households, it doesn’t matter—you were working your asses off, as was I,” she said. “I worked hard and you parents worked hard and the kids, they just flourished, the kids blossomed. I did a good job with them. I found my niche.”
She said I found mine in the time she came to know me. “It changed you, having those two girls. I bet if you had two boys, it would have been different. It’s for a reason. I think they changed you.”
She shifted an arm that was giving her obvious pain. Cancer was everywhere, and now it was here, with me, in my friend. She just kept talking. “It changed you from self-absorbed to absorbed in them. By doing that, that means you had to take care of yourself. I saw that, I just happened to be there at that turnaround. You cared deeply for them.”
She reminded me that I was backed up by a tactical unit of pals and relatives who punched in as required. It happened a lot, either because of work or, in that time, my own cancer. “You were surrounded by people who were rooting for you all the way. I don’t remember all your friends, but once in a while they came by to pick up the girls, and the girls would smile. The girls were used to having people in their lives.”
It came in handy when I got sick.
“I remember you treating it as no big deal, like ‘I have to do this,’ meaning you have to keep going. I don’t remember pitying you, I sort of remember going, ‘Wow.’ You had a lot of determination,” she said. “I don’t remember you looking like you should be pitied. I remember us being worried about you, all of us, when you were in the hospital. I remember your parents—your dad more than your mom—and I remember the girls going home with them or with Coo, and just all of us clucking.”
I eventually got better, but Kathy did not. She died a few months after we got together. When I look at the pictures from day care, Kathy is mostly just out of the frame, but you can see her reflected in every single kid, including mine.
As a parent, I was the king of the ad hoc, scrambling not so much to keep up with the Joneses as to keep our heads above water and moving downstream. When the twins gazed lovingly at some expensive cowgirl outfits before Halloween, I bought only the hats and told them I would make them real ponies to ride. Some hobby horses, a bit of glitter, and two packing boxes later, those fillies were riding high. The Halloween cowgirls of 1993 was a moment of vivid personal triumph.
The twins were morphing into their own damn thing so quickly that sometimes when I would come to Kathy’s at the end of the day to pick them up, they seemed discernibly different than when I dropped them off. They were a concept when I started taking care of them, little wiggling markers of responsibility, but then they started to talk, and talk back to me. Peddling back through the columns I wrote for Family Times, I realized that I had turned on a dime, morphing from a big, nasty thug into one of those horrible, gooey parents who thinks that everything his kids do is extraordinary. Small stuff was huge. Cooking an egg. Eating candy. Going for a ride.
FAMILY TIMES, OCTOBER 1992
Even old family recipes like “Egg in a Hole”—which has been handed down successfully for generations through the family tree—are being subjected to scrutiny. The other day, each girl was offered an opportunity to imprison their own egg in the hole of a piece of frying bread.<
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“More butter, Daddy. That’s what makes them lots yummier,” Meagan said, gesturing toward the margarine with a wave of the spatula.
“Hey, I have been turning out perfect Eggs in a Hole since dinosaurs roamed the earth,” I said as I goosed a little more margarine into the pan. “My daddy taught me how.”
“Well, he’s your daddy, but he’s our grandpa, and we know how to make ’em too,” she said, deftly lifting off a corner of the bread to see how the egg was doing.
Erin followed and was so pleased with how her breakfast effort turned out that she offered me a rare kiss on the lips.
“Oh really,” I said with mock amazement. “You don’t usually go for that kissing stuff.”
“Well, I switched my mind.” Not so long ago, I made an impulse buy at the SuperAmerica of some Gummi Bears that boasted tropical fruit flavors. A sickly sweet odor poured through the car after I opened them for the girls, and then boxes of candy came flying back into the front seat with guffaws about how terrible they were.
“Those aren’t Gummi Bears. Those are ishy bears,” Meagan said, setting off a long, slippery peal of laughter from both of the big smart guys in the backseat. Thus emboldened, Erin found the words to describe just how awful my purchase on their behalf had turned out.
“They’re so yucky they taste like broccoli trees.”
My life, which I was worried would shrink when I took on responsibilities beyond my own needs, was exploding out in glorious, unforeseen ways.
48
A SAVAGE LOVE