It Takes a Worried Man (2 page)

We talk for a few more minutes, then she goes out to the car, while I head back into the room I share with five other teachers to grab my backpack and jacket. Everyone but me in this room is new to the school. Luckily Lisa, who I have known for a year, is there. She looks at me, and I am about to cry.  “Is everything okay?” she asks, and I sort of pull her back to the corner of the room.

“Kirsten has cancer,” I sob, and she hugs me. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m not strong enough to do this. I can’t lose her. I can’t lose her.”  Lisa says reassuring things about how I am not going to lose her and I have lots of help, so I don’t need to be strong all by myself. It’s true. She will see me cry many more times before the treatment even starts.

I gather my stuff and leave, and the other people I share the room with politely pretend that they haven’t heard and they aren’t curious. This is a great kindness.

The plan, Kirsten explains, is for her to have a semiradical or total, or anyway, some kind of mastectomy that involves hacking her entire breast and then some off. Then a little radiation, a little chemo, and boom, she’s better.

Of course, I am already worried about her dying. As much as I reassure her, it is just in my hypochondriac nature to imagine the worst. All I can think is, “How will I get Rowen to school?” and, “Oh my God, does this mean my mom will have to move in?”

She now needs to go for several tests to make sure the cancer hasn’t spread. First they tell her she needs a bone scan. Then they say she needs a bone scan and a CAT scan. But they hadn’t said that two days ago. Are they acting on some new information?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, they are. When Kirsten is reeling from the radioactive shake they made her drink, she runs into her surgeon outside the hospital. The surgeon tells her that her blood work came back a little abnormal. Two of the tumor markers are elevated. I don’t know what this means. I later find out that tumors not in the breast cause some kind of elevated hormone levels in your blood, so this is bad news. And they told her on the fucking street.

Kirsten’s parents are dropping by the night we find out. They are on their way back from cleaning out some elderly relative’s house in New Hampshire. They call from the road. Kirsten tells them.

They come over and we get hugs and stuff, but no tears are shed. This is okay. Kirsten’s parents are lovely people, but they just don’t really operate on the level of deep emotions. That is to say, I have seen them annoyed and happy, but after 10 years I don’t really know what makes them sad or what they are afraid of. That stuff is just not on public display. This makes them pretty easy to hang out with. You can pretty much be guaranteed that any long-simmering resentments are not ever going to boil over. They will just stay simmering close to forever.

This is a marked contrast to my mom, who never lets anything simmer for very long. Any kind of resentment needs to bubble up almost immediately.  This also makes her kind of easy to hang out with, because she’s not hiding anything. Except that real or imagined conflicts often lead to painful, meaningful talks about the state of our relationship.

Anyway, Kirsten’s folks take the news pretty hard, I think. You can’t really tell by how they conduct themselves, but they start remodeling our house with a vengeance. Her dad had been helping us re-do the staircase up to the attic, which was ugly and stupidly constructed. When he took it apart we found that the whole thing had been balanced on basically three nails. I thought about the surly Israeli guys who moved us in and how many times they stomped up those steps and it seemed like a miracle nobody fell to their death.

Moldings are finished. A power miter saw is purchased. Missing balusters are tracked down and replaced. Much dry-walling, plastering and painting goes on around the area of the new staircase. The new staircase is so solidly built that five Israeli movers with crowbars probably couldn’t get it down.

I appreciate the impulse. They want to do something to help, and this feels good and tangible. And it does help.

It has been, to put it mildly, a real bitch of a week. On top of everything else, Kirsten had to take an indefinite leave from her job teaching refugees how to get and keep jobs in hotels. The money, luckily, is not an issue because our Troll-free home is a multifamily and the rents cover our mortgage, but it is a real psychological blow to both of us for her to have to stop working. Welcome to the Land of the Critically Ill.

Doctor Sensitive, Ms. “Your tumor markers are elevated, oh, there’s my bus,” calls on Friday night. She says to Kirsten, “I think there was some mistake in your bloodwork. If your potassium level is this high, you should already be dead. I’m sure it’s a mistake, but you need to go to the emergency room right away and have it retested.”

I had really been looking forward to kicking back with a beer and a sporting event, but it was not to be. I had also been looking forward to a calm, uneventful year of working on the house and the yard. But what the hell are you going to do.

So off we go to the emergency room. I drop Kirsten off and Rowen and I head off to this amazing and really cheap Mexican place about 10 minutes’ walk from the hospital. On the way over to dinner, I end up talking to Rowen about what’s happening, about how mom is going to have surgery (I show her my appendectomy scar to sort of illustrate the concept of surgery) and then she’ll need to come back to the hospital for treatment, and how that will involve her getting some really strong medicine that is going to make her feel crappy for a while but eventually make her better.

I get through this okay, though I almost start to cry when I realize that some passer-by is listening to us. We get to the restaurant and eat outside and watch people heading over to the Red Sox game. It’s a practically perfect night. We go to the playground across the street after dinner. As strange as it sounds, it is a wonderful, wonderful night.

We walk back to the hospital and find Kirsten in an examining room behind the emergency room. Sh seems to be in pretty good spirits. “The doctor’s name is Nancy Drew,” she whispers to me after the emergency room doctor walks out. “I haven’t made any girl detective jokes. I was very tempted to ask her about Ned, but I decided I didn’t want to annoy her.” I would never be able to be so strong. But keeping quiet is the best course of action. What kind of Nancy Drew joke do you think you could possibly come up with that she hasn’t already heard?

Nancy Drew comes in and says the lab boys have their shorts all bunched up and don’t understand how this happened and want to study Kirsten’s blood as some kind of freak of science, but basically her potassium level is fine, her heart hasn’t stopped, she’s not dead.

Then she says, “Do you have any other health problems?”

We both laugh. Nancy Drew looks hurt, but I keep laughing. It is the funniest thing I have heard all week.

Somebody calls Kirsten and says, “you have a multi disappointment on Thursday.”  She eventually figures out that this is oncology lingo for “multidisciplinary appointment.”  The first reading seems a lot more in line with everything we’ve experienced so far. It is to be a two-hour appointment, and I scoot out of work right at the end of school so as to make the second hour.

I could have probably left earlier and made the first hour too, but that would have involved getting a sub for my afternoon class. Leaving work cuts into my little wall of denial, and I hate that. I like going to work and just forgetting that anything is happening.

The multi disappointment really really blows.  We sit in the fucking room for really long periods of time waiting for people to show up. The radiation guy is incredibly lugubrious. He makes all these vague statements, like, “well, of course, if the cancer has spread, as we think it may have because of these test results, then the objective of the treatment changes.”  Well what exactly the fuck does that mean? If the objective of the treatment is currently to save her life, then what’s the new objective?

The nurse, on the other hand,is extremely chipper. I want to smack her. We spend forty-five minutes waiting for Maryann, the oncologist, who is very nice and extremely attractive, and she tells us nothing new at all.

The thing that really pisses me off, that made me want to slap the whole bunch of them, is the fact that they just can’t hide it: fundamentally, they are scientists, and they want all their data to make sense. Right now they have one piece of data that doesn’t make sense, and it’s driving them nuts. They
want
it to have spread. That way their test makes sense. Bastards.

The day after the multi disappointment, Kirsten is told that they found something on her CAT scan. It is a spot on her spine. They don’t know exactly what it is.

This is not good news.

Kirsten is pretty much beside herself. She pages me, but I am already in the subway station. I am now wearing my pager on my belt and enduring the kids’ taunts about my hypocrisy with stoicism and the occasional, “lay off, because if I tell you why I have this, you’re going to feel bad.”

I call her up.

“Where are you?” she asks. I can tell by her tone of voice that something is wrong.

“I’m in the subway station.”

“Okay, then just come home and I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Just…just come home. I had a bad conversation with Maryann.”

It takes a very long twenty minutes to get home.

When I walk inside, she starts to cry. I hold her, and she tells me that she is tired, just so tired of getting bad news. I am too. She is a little confused about the news–she sort of stopped processing after the initial information, so I call the oncologist.

Here are some highlights of our conversation:

“Well, we see this spot on one of her vertebrae. It could be something we call a bone island, which is something we see on CAT scans from time to time and we don’t know exactly what they are and we only gave them a name because we kept seeing them on CAT scans.”

This sounds like good news to me. I am getting hopeful.

“But,” she continues, “this doesn’t really look characteristic of one of those.”

Shit.  “Does it,” I say, “look characteristic of cancer?”

“Well, no. We don’t really know what it is. The MRI and the PET scan should tell us for sure.”

The PET scan does not find out if you should have a dog, by the way. It involves being shot up with radioactive glucose, which tumor cells for some reason like a lot more than regular cells, so when the technicians take some kind of picture of you, the tumor cells glow brighter. Or something.

She goes on to say that we are still assuming that she will have surgery in a week and a half, but we will need to see from the results of the tests next week. If the tests show that the spot is cancerous, then the surgery is off, because, basically, what’s the point. See, it turns out that breast cancer in the actual breast never kills anybody. Makes sense, because if you needed breasts to live, they couldn’t very well cut them off. It’s only when it gets out that it kills you, usually by going after your liver. So if Kirsten’s is out of the barn, so to speak, there is no sense in trying to shut the gate and “the objective of the treatment changes.”

I decide to go for the big question.  “So if this is metastatic,” I say, “is that a death sentence? Because that’s what we’re hearing.”

Beat.

Beat.

Beat.

I have prepared meals in less time than she takes to answer this.  “Well,” she starts out, “there are some very special patients–I mean, we are talking about the Louis Armstrong of cancer patients–” This analogy annoys me somehow. I don’t know why. Couldn’t she say Michael Jordan of cancer patients? Maybe the Eddie Van Halen of cancer patients? The, um, Pedro Martinez? I don’t know. I am not very familiar with Satchmo’s oeuvre, so I find this annoying. “–who respond very well to treatment and can live relatively normal lives for years.”

“When you say that the objective of the treatment is different, what exactly do you mean? Are we talking about pain abatement, or are we talking about fighting the disease?”

“Oh, we are absolutely fighting this disease,” she says emphatically.  I think she is horrified that I suggested that they sounded like they were giving up after they basically said they were giving up for two days. She goes on to say that while this would be bad news, it would be the best bad news possible, since these spots are tiny, and she has nothing wrong with her liver. Somehow I manage to come away from the conversation with the idea that she could live ten years with this treatment. I figure if ten, why not twenty or thirty? You are always hearing about these people:  “The doctors told her she had a year to live, and twenty-five years later, she is fine…”  I write a quote from Maryann in big letters in the cancer notebook: BAD BUT FIGHTABLE. I feel optimistic. Sort of.

Well, that conversation takes place late Friday afternoon, and Kirsten’s mom has taken Rowen away for the weekend so that we can have some time to just be together. It is a nice gesture.

With Rowen out of the house, I was hoping for some hot sex this weekend, but this news makes it appear unlikely. Kirsten is really depressed, and I go into full cheerleader mode. We go out for dinner and a movie. It is a nice night, but it is totally tainted by this new news. It is fun, but not carefree.

After the movie, we walk back to the subway, and after a pause in our conversation, she says, “If I die, you can’t remarry.”

“Ever?”

“Ever. I’ll haunt you.”

I pause to digest this. “Can I have a string of meaningless affairs with twenty-four-year-olds?”

She pauses to digest that. “Okay. But Rowen can never find out.”

I think I can live within these parameters.

I have to confess I have already been thinking about this stuff. I know I would be a wreck. I am already kind of a wreck. I have left out a lot of my conversations with my friends at work and on the phone after Kirsten goes to bed. Well, calling them conversations is really a whitewash. They involve me sobbing, “I can’t lose her, I can’t lose her,” while they pat my shoulder and tell me it’s going to be okay. Or say on the phone that they wish they could give me a hug and that it’s going to be okay.

But I would be tragic, and therefore probably a babe magnet. I can brood with the best of them. Also, I’m good with kids. I figure if you just take those points, I could probably get laid.

But I also know that I wouldn’t want to. All I would want to do is cry and listen to country music. In fact, that’s much of what I want to do now.

Anyway, we go out to breakfast the next day. We rent some movies. We go out to lunch. We watch whatever Kirsten wants to watch on TV. She commandeers the remote, saying, “I have cancer! I get to watch what I want!” And we do end up having sex, and it is some of the hottest sex we have had in a long time.

Those of you who are married may know what I mean. There is, you know, the standard sex, which is wonderful and nothing to sneeze at and which I am not in any way putting down. But then, sometimes, at unpredictable times, you recover that passion from when you were dating, and then instead of, “I love you, sweetie, ” you have, “Oh my God I must have you now! And then, possibly, again!”

Anyway, there is nothing like staring into the void to spice up the old sex life, and we go after each other hungrily. It feels like a way of denying this whole horrible nightmare, and I guess maybe it sort of is. To engage in the procreative act is about the only way we have of defying death. You might get me, but by God I’m going to leave some DNA behind, you fucker.

Mind you, we are very careful that this act does not have the potential to result in actual procreation.

In any case, by the end of the weekend, we are in a pretty ok mental space, and not just because of the sex, although that certainly didn’t hurt.