Short Stories, Long Odds

In 2000, I went to the doctor for the first time in a few years. I had been going quite a bit in 1998 and 1999 for my hands. I was a percussionist as a first career - the kind you have from the age of 5 to 19 - and my dedication to it had the unfortunate side effect of ruining me from the elbows down. Every doctor I saw examined me, read my chart, and then suggested I take some pills. Forever. After 18 months of that I’d had enough.

So when something else happened and I needed to go to the doctor, I avoided the pro shops and serious endeavors and dealt down to the minor emergency clinic at the university. Whatever was wrong with me at the time required me to take off my shirt and the clinic physician drew in a sharp breath when he saw my back.

“There’s a… thing back here you oughta have looked at,” he said.

“A thing? Is that the official diagnosis?” I asked, wondering what he might be talking about.

“This mole looks really ugly. I would have it looked at it by a dermatologist as soon as possible,” he said.

“There wouldn’t happen to be one at the clinic, would there?” I said.

Clinic Howser MD just laughed. Going to the clinic cost something like $12 dollars, which I could afford. Going to a real doctor cost more than that, which immediately put it out of my price range.

Being a student and lacking a real job, I decided it might be time to quit the coffee shop and get some employment with health insurance. In the space of four months, I taught myself HTML, designed some websites, and got a job at a banking software company in Carrollton, Texas. They had health insurance, and as soon as I got it, I went to the dermatologist.

Well, that isn’t exactly right. It took me about two months to get into see a dermatologist. Referrals were hard to come by for some reason, even if you had something serious brewing under your skin.

My initial exam went about how I expected it would. My new dermatologist looked at everything and determined that the mole in the middle of my back had to go. He wouldn’t tell me if he thought it was a melanoma or a dysplastic nevi, which is the medical term for a mole that isn’t deadly yet but has ambition and moxie.

As I was getting ready to leave after my incision a few days later, my doctor says, “We’ll call you if the test comes back and there’s more we need to do, but if everything is okay you won’t hear from us.”

I said, “Won’t that just make me paranoid for like a month?”

He said, “It won’t take more than two weeks.”

So I went home to wait.  To say that it was “the longest two weeks of my life” or something would be cliche and untrue, but it wasn’t fun. Diana was working and I’d moved to contract work so I was at home alone all day. Finally, in the midddle of the second week, the phone rang.

“Hello?” I said, seeing that my ghetto AT&T Caller ID box clearly bore the name of my doctor. Clearly, something was wrong. Clearly, I remember thinking, “Oh, shit,” as I picked up the phone.

The voice on the other end was inquisitive and business-like. “Josh Berthume?”

“Yes?”

“One sec…” Muffled noises on the other end. My caller told someone she would be right there. “Look,” she said. “Your test results came back and you’ve got cancer. Someone will… okay, someone will call you in half an hour or so to tell you what that means and the rest of it.”

“Wait, what? What do you mean I’ve got…”

Dial tone on the line. Whatever the hurry was on the other end, it had claimed my source of information about the new knowledge that my largest organ was actively trying to kill me.

For about 5 minutes, I sat alone in the tiny three room apartment where Diana and I lived and was mute, in voice and mind. All I could hear was the loud hum of the blood singing in my ears. There was no sound, no solace, no distraction, no quarter.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call my mother before I had more information. As a cancer survivor she would probably be less freaked out than I was, but as my mother she would be worse. We also share an immediate need for as much information as can be had in a crisis situation, and she would have questions for which I had no answers.

I could, however, call Diana, and I did. I don’t remember the exact details of how it went, but even if I did I don’t know that I could write about them. Mortality is a decidedly intimate thing, a prospect that immediately rearranges almost every aspect of your life in bare, raw seconds.

This was finding out I had cancer the hard way. Obviously, it has worked out in the long run. The cancer was melanoma but it had yet to start causing any trouble that cutting sizable chunks of skin out of my torso couldn’t fix. I’m still here, chasing dogs I didn’t have that day around the yard and living in a house with my wife rather than an apartment with my girlfriend, though both are the same woman. Eight or nine years into the future and I make my regular pilgrimages back to the dermatologist two or three or four times a year, depending on how rambunctious my latent melanin levels get.

The hard way was hard enough but it also offered me a unique vantage point on life, the ability to know down to the second when everything in my life changed. It wasn’t an overt change, one where all the buildings were damaged and the street layout was irrevocably shifted; rather it was something down deep that changed my approach to my interpersonal relationships.

I had hoped it would change my approach to life in general, and sometimes that has been the case. Sometimes I live the way I truly want to live, taking the line that life is too short and doing what I want to do. Other times, I settle for just trying to be a good man, knowing that life requires a certain amount of brazen certitude, as it comprises a universe full of things you either learn the hard way or don’t learn at all.