Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 3

The other shoe

By Roger Owens

In 1861, before the start of hostilities in the American Civil War, both sides held their fantasies, those delicate, oh-so-vulnerable baskets into which we are forevermore enjoined by our mothers never to put all of our eggs. The Johnnies said the Union boys didn’t have the sand for one real fight, let alone a real war. They didn’t have the honor, the pride that would sustain the Southerners through the few months it might take to kick those invaders from the sacred soil of Dixie. The Union fellows told each other they had the vast advantage in manufacturing, which would provide the railroads, the cannon, the powder and shot and food and horses and rifles, and those Rebs wouldn’t have a chance. Many of the Union boys were from the cities, and they saw themselves as legion. How many Rebs could there be, after all? Just a bunch of farm boys. Neither side listened to their mothers, as so many generations have not, to their everlasting regret. So, as the shooting started, each side marched smartly off to disaster, figurative baskets of eggs clutched uselessly in their hearts and minds.

People have not changed since 1861, it seems. We have fallen into the same snare. Our oncological surgeon, a truly excellent Sikh gentleman, believed that a mastectomy would put an end to our concerns with Cindy’s cancer. I was conflicted but enthusiastic. As your war correspondent, I would describe it thus: you know you are going into this battle, and you know you are going to sustain casualties, but you are confident you are going to win. Not only that, but it will be the end of the war. You’ll be done. As Cindy likes to put it, you can close the book and put it up on a high shelf and forget about it. For me it is in fact a little more nerve-wracking and guilt-inducing than for the average participant in war; for I know the injuries will be inflicted, not on myself, nor on anybody nearby at the whim of any capricious God in the vagaries of war, but only and exclusively on the girl I love most in all the world, the one person I would push out of the way as the train ran over me.
    So you go to the hospital, and after they have made you wait an unconscionably long time – even though they told you to show up early – while your blood pressure and that of your dear wife have gone as high as a Georgia pine, you give her over to their sincere if somewhat disorganized care. The deal with the Devil is signed in blood. The pound of flesh is delivered, like butchering a hog or filleting a fish. In a perverse way you are glad to pay the price, just to have it done and over. And in due time you take her home, cradling your precious little basket of eggs.
    In a week and a half she is so recovered, so strong and happy and positive, and you go to get the drain removed. This is an ingenious little device I wish I had invented way back when I worked in hospitals, when we called it “suction” and, just like at the dentist, it required a powerful machine to vacuum the biological detritus from mouths and wounds of all kinds, before and after surgery. But today it’s simply a tube with a little squeeze bottle on the end going into her chest just below where her breast used to be. It is no more complicated or costly than the simplest candy dispenser or gag squirt device. You squeeze it, attach it to the tube, and this cheap little piece of dollar-store plastic suctions bodily fluids slowly and efficiently into itself, until it’s full, and you empty it and start over. Such simplicity. I could have made a mint.

What I think of as the well-point of this drain I had imagined as very similar to a real well-point: some kind of bulb filter to allow water to flow without clogging. Drains like this were common in the 1970s, the last time I worked in the medical business. When it was taken out, I realized how far behind the times I was. It was a five-inch strip of foam with holes on either side, the perfect anti-clog filter; it is the type used in advanced aquariums and live-bait systems. The odd burring sound it made as the doctor pulled it out, stretched beyond its natural length, was as creepy as anything I had ever heard.
    So, at this point we are asking the doctor for the pathology reports, and the nurse says on the phone that she has them. He goes out; we sit staring at each other in our hopeless optimism. He enters the tiny, glaringly bright cubicle. The fluorescent lights seem to hiss, bleaching all color from the room.
    “Unfortunately,” he says, and that other shoe drops, as if from a great height, hitting the floor with a boom you could hear in Nebraska. All those eggs you had? Gone. Hopes? Dashed. Faith? Crushed. Fears? Confirmed, in spades. What he says after that opening word is somehow muffled, as if he is speaking with a mouthful of cotton balls, down a sewer pipe, to where your personal hell awaits, where are gathered those legions ahead of you in the court docket of the damned. They, like you, have been tried and found guilty of hope. The sentence is despair. They don’t look at you, lost in their own visions, their own hells. Their cold hands grasp at your ankles to pull you down into the muck with them.

I have often said that, if we live long enough, we all learn more about the medical field than we wished. I have some experience, at the lowest levels and many years ago, but my education is advancing apace. I now know such terms as Estrogen and Progesterone Receptors, HER-2 proteins, and most of all, Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. I have only a layman’s notion what they mean; this indicator is good, this one bad. I am now not only your intrepid reporter, I am also Company Medic, Chief Pill-Walloper, and all-around Head Bottle Washer. I can handle it.
    So now, instead of closing the book and putting it on the shelf, we have turned to another page. It is one we would as soon not have to read, but like the original invitation, it cannot be turned down. That way lies destruction. We will be engaging battle on another field soon, at one of the premiere cancer centers on Earth, in Tampa, Florida. I will be reporting once again from the front lines. In the meantime, remember: never put all your eggs in one basket.

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens