CROSSING STREAMS

I’m in the endoscopy suite, about to get my first sigmoidoscopy. Sure I’m a little young for it, but it’s never too early for cancer.

The suite is a bit large, like a post-surgical recovery room. Or maybe it just feels super-sized because I’m lying on a table with my back side exposed.

The gastroenterologist has a peppered beard. I don’t know him but he fits the part. His assistant is a surgical resident (you can just tell) who looks comfortably familiar somehow.

The gastro doc does his preliminary rectal exam. His gloved fingers have lots of lube and they’re surprisingly thin. Double happiness. Maybe that’s the intravenous sedation talking. Then something is wrong.

“Hmm. This is the largest prostate I’ve ever felt,” the GI doc says and motions for his assisting resident to check as well.

“Are you taking any medicine for this?” the familiar surgical resident asks me as if I should already be under treatment.

They’re both extremely concerned. I know what they’re thinking. The sigmoidoscopy is cancelled due to the prostate mass obstructing my bowel.

Oh my God. I’ve got cancer. No. No. I’m too young. I’m not even thirty five yet. How could I … I’m sounding like my patients now.

In retrospect, the symptoms look back at me like malevolent red eyes in fog. The weight loss this year – I thought it was from jiu jitsu. The fact that I have to urinate every couple hours – I thought I just had a small bladder. I guess frequent masturbation isn’t all that preventative for prostate cancer after all.

My life as I know it drops out from under me. My mind blown away leaving only the barest essentials floating in empty white space and numb grey matter. How will Amy manage financially? What about sweet Sun Su? Ooseung?

Maybe if I work every day I possibly can, I can store up enough money to last Amy a while after I’m gone. She’ll have to move into her parents house.

I shake and sob in fetal position, still on the scope table. The doctors aren’t around anymore. Tears drive them off like holy water on the undead. I should know.

Maybe I’m dreaming. It’s the sedation for the sigmoidoscopy prep. Wake up. Wake up. I close my eyes and open them. A monitor above me shows me my vital signs as real as my heartbeat.

This is real life. Millions of people go through this everyday. How long did you think you could just be a spectator to all that pain and suffering? Just sitting ringside to that struggle between living and dying. What would you score this bout?

There were things I wanted to do. All of it cut short now. I won the wrong lottery, the bad one. 

The chemotherapy makes me listless. Everyone moves at hyperspeed in comparison.  Radiation therapy scars my insides together. The hospital becomes a hotel I check into ever more frequently, until it becomes more home than home.

Sun Su my sweet boy, this is so unfair to you. I feel that chunk of soul being ripped out of you, right about where your liver should be. You can’t understand why I won’t answer you anymore when you call out for your appah. That hurts me the most.

I double over and howl out in despair. Hopelessness. Out of time. I wish it was a dream. Too late. It’s all too late. Late.

I wake up and shoot out of bed. The digital clock says 7:12 AM. I turned the alarm off almost a half hour ago. It was a dream, a half hour dream, but I never dream. Now everyone’s asleep except for me. It’s not a dream. It’s someone else’s life, someone else’s reality. Transposition of cerebral cortexes. Volvulus of two astral cords in The Dreaming. Don’t cross the streams, Dr. Venkman. I walk across the bedroom carpet but I still feel like my insides have been scooped out. This world doesn’t feel as real. It’s the Disney version of the life I just came from. Give me the blue pill, I’m stayin’ here.

Later that morning in the hospital.

One of my new patients is a 38-year old man diagnosed with relentless ulcerative colitis four years ago. He has six inches of bowel in his gut and he’s here to get the rest taken out. The psychiatrist’s note says he is a newlywed and that he has had two episodes of bowel incontinence while asleep in bed with his wife. This has bothered him tremendously. I think about that for a while.

He tells me the pain meds don’t seem to last long enough, but he doesn’t ask me to change it.

I increase the frequency of his pain meds, even though he didn’t ask. Many doctors wouldn’t at the dosages he gobbles up. He knows it and I know it; that’s why he didn’t bother to ask.

Maybe I’ll be a comfortably familiar face in someone else’s bad dreams until they wake up too.

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Belated thank you's for insignificant reasons:

Minla the Utopian
Jenna the Savage Jiu Jitsu Queen
Doug - The Manimal with the Stamina
The people at Igoo.com and Skyhigh