On Not Having Cancer

Does everybody learn from fiction how to act in dire circumstances, or is it just me? For example, when told you may have a cancer that will kill you within three months, you’re supposed to go all wide-eyed, gasp, sob and collapse, right? Those are the fictional rules and I knew what to do two months ago when an e.r. doctor read my CT and very carefully explained that further tests were required but yeah, it looked like maybe typical pancreatic cancer.

I knew what to do and had the perfect setting to boot – an empty, silent emergency room parking lot at dusk, shadows falling, where I was alone waiting for a Lyft. Perfect! I waited to gasp and sob, maybe double over dramatically, illuminated by a single street light. Except I couldn’t pull it off. Not even close.

I just stood there thinking, “Well shit, if this is it, why not? I’m 82, a perfectly good age to die.” I mean, it was basically okay and a total waste of the noir setting. But I felt remiss in having failed to act appropriately.

The timing couldn’t have been worse, so at least that conformed to fiction. I was less than a month from moving to Boston, the storage unit for my stuff chosen and paid for, the movers arranged, plane ticket ready. The very stressed Oregon health care system told me the first date available for the urgently ordered “further test” would be in March of 2025! WTF? If I really had pancreatic cancer I’d have been dead for four months by then. (Do not move to Oregon for health care.)

So while multiple doctors in Oregon sent more urgent demands that required assessment by two different hospital committees, I just got online and created a patient profile at Mass General in Boston. This shouldn’t have worked without a referring physician, but it did and I love Mass General for allowing individual autonomy! After two weeks in which Oregon couldn’t freaking find and send the CTs, they turned up somewhere and were sent to MGH, which immediately looked at them and scheduled the procedure that would define my fate.

I knew I didn’t have pancreatic cancer after looking it up. I didn’t “lose weight for no reason” and the whites of my eyes didn’t turn yellow. Still, I was uneasy, casually mentioned what was going on to a few close people and got a ton of support. Close person Johanna immediately flew up from San Francisco and spent days helping me pack, meaning she packed while I sat around talking. On Sept.1 I got on a plane at PDX to BOS and an appointment at MGH for the crucial test I’ve just had.

Which brings us back to the dramaturgy of dire events.

Across from my little curtained area where you strip and pull on a hospital gown big enough to fit a rhino and let them stick needles in you, was another woman. She was “older” although probably younger than I am, and beautiful in the Vanessa Redgrave mold. Exquisite facial bones, no makeup, hair discreetly pulled back and so tall her bare feet and ankles hung over the end of her gurney, motionless. She was awake but SO still, seeming deep in herself, tense and calm simultaneously. A marble statue but alive, exuding a terrible inaccessibility. Her arms at her sides, those bare, motionless feet in the cold hospital corridor.

I had five inches left at the end of my gurney, feet in those nubby socks they give you, swaddled in blankets as I bantered with the anesthesiologist about the Propofol with which he would soon obliterate my conscious awareness for over an hour. We exchanged quips about Michael Jackson’s death from the same drug. The anesthesiologist was smart and funny and I liked him, but the woman on the gurney across from me didn’t smile at his levity. Not the tiniest twitch in her embouchure, yet I could tell she was aware of us, our empty, pointless, meant-to-make-me-comfortable chatter.

And that’s when I realized where I was, in a medical context designed specifically to acknowledge the likelihood of death. When? How long do I have? What does it all mean?

I already pretty much knew I wasn’t dying, confirmed by the surgeon an hour and a half later, but what if the beautiful, terribly still woman across from me, in the same way, also knew that she was? And knew the real, the un-fictional way to act.

My friend Linda came to pick me up and I told her about the woman. She said, “What you saw was a Bostonian. That is the way to act under those circumstances.”

Reality makes terrible fiction but there is no better teacher. One day I’ll remember a silent, barefoot woman on a gurney, and I’ll know precisely how to act.