"First, do no harm," the
Oath begins, but before she might enjoysuch balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalousin its behavior that at first they mis-diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of itwithin a year." But in ten days or soI sat beside her bed with hot-and-soursoup and heard an intern congratulateher on her new diagnosis: a children'scancer (doesn't that possessive breakyour heart?) had possessed her.
I couldn't stoppersonifying it.
Devious, dour,it had a clouded heart, like Iago's.
It loved disguise.
It was a garrisonin a captured city, a bad horror film(The Blob), a stowaway, an inside job.
If I could make it be like something else,
I wouldn't have to think of it as what,in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife.
Next, then, chemotherapy.
Her hair fellout in tufts, her color dulled, she sat lacedto bags of poison she endured somewhatbetter than her cancer cells could, though notby much.
And indeed, the cancer cells wanedmore slowly than the chemical "cocktails"(one the bright color of Campari), as the chemonurses called them, dripped into her.
There werethree hundred days of this: a week insidethe hospital and two weeks out, the fierceelixirs percolating all the while.
She did five weeks of radiation, too,
Monday to Friday like a stupid job.
She wouldn't eat the food the hospitalwheeled in. "Pureed fish" and "minced fish" were worth,
I thought, a sharp surge of food snobbery,but she'd grown averse to it all — the nurses'crepe soles' muffled squeaks along the hall,the filtered air, the smothered urge to read,the fear, the perky visitors, flowersshe'd not been sent when she was well, the room-mate (what do "semiprivate" and "extravirgin" have in common?) who died, the nightsshe wept and sweated faster than the tubescould moisten her with lurid poison.
One chemotherapy veteran, sixyears in remission, chanced on her formerchemo nurse at a bus stop and threw up.
My wife's tumor has not come back.
I like to think of it in Tumor Hellstrapped to a dray, flat as a deflatedfootball, bleak and nubbled like a poorlyironed truffle.
There's one tense in Tumor Hell:forever, or what we call the present.
For that long the flaccid tumor marinatesin lurid toxins.
Tumor Hell Clinicis, it turns out, a teaching hospital.
Every century or so, the waywe'd measure it, a chief doc brings a packof students round.
They run some simple tests:surge current through the tumor, batter itwith mallets, push a wood-plane across itspebbled hide and watch a scurf of tumor-pelt kink loose from it, impale it, strafe itwith lye and napalm.
There might be nothingleft in there but a still space surroundedby a carapace. "This one is nearlydead," the chief doc says. "What's the cure for that?"The students know: "Kill it slower, of course."They sprinkle it with rock salt and move on.
Here on the aging earth the tumor's gone:
My wife is hale, though wary, and why not?
Once you've had cancer, you don't get headachesanymore, you get brain tumors, at leastuntil the aspirin kicks in.
Her hair's back,her weight, her appetite. "And what about you?"friends ask me.
First the fear felt like suddenweightlessness:
I couldn't steer and couldn't stay.
I couldn't concentrate: surely my spit woulddry before I could slather a stamp.
I made a list of things to do next daybefore I went to bed, slept like a cork,woke to no more memory of last night'slist than smoke has of fire, made a new list,began to do the things on it, wept, paced,berated myself, drove to the hospital,and brought my wife food from the takeout jointsthat ring a hospital as surely asbrothels surround a gold strike.
I drove homerancid with anger at her luck and mine —anger that filled me the same way naturehates a vacuum. "This must be hell for you,"some said.
Hell's not other people:
Sartrewas wrong about that, too.
L'enfer, c'est moi?
I've not got the ego for it.
There'd beno hell if Dante hadn't built a modelof his rage so well, and he contrived toget exiled from it, for it was Florence.
Why would I live in hell?
I love New York.
Some even said the tumor and fierce curewere harder on the care giver — yes, theysaid "care giver" — than on the "sick person."They were wrong who said those things.
Of courseI hated it, but some of "it" was me —the self-pity I allowed myself,the brave poses I struck.
The rest was direthreat my wife met with moral stubbornness,terror, rude jokes, nausea, you name it.
No, let her think of its name and neversay it, as if it were the name of God.
Anonymous submission.
