The Six-Month Exam

This was the big one, they’d told me. Both Dr. Shocker and Dr. Howells had surrounded the six-month exam with aura of import, and I expected the skies to open and some Angel to tell me something which would bathe my ears in pure majesty.

Yes, I still have difficulty swallowing, though that gets better as time wears on. Slowly. The pain of the past is fine where it is: the past. The weight gain has been slow. Yeah, things were looking upward, though cancer be not an upwardly-mobile disease or doohickey, and I expected a decent report.

On a beautiful afternoon, my beautiful wife – who had a tooth pulled this morning – and I went in to the office in the medical center across Howard Avenue from the hospital. (Note: The church I attended as a youth, Fourth Evangelical Lutheran, is located a few blocks down on that selfsame Howard Avenue.)

There was a man leaning on the wall outside the entrance. He was a drifter, I could tell, who vaguely resembled Zach from All My Children with a moustache. I feared that we would be robbed violently, but we slipped past the drifter and made it in safely. The otolaryngologists, including Dr. Howells, share a waiting room with the audiologists, so I had my hearing aid’s tubing fixed while we saw Dr. Howells. The original otolaryngologist is no longer on the masthead, but the woman who fitted me for my hearing aid several years ago, and got a huge glob of molding foam stuck in my ear canal which had to be removed (painfully) by an otolaryngologist named Higgins, now runs the place. I approached her with quite a bit of trepidation, but she was pleasant enough. I stopped shaking in my New Balance sneakers, the ones which had been place on my feet when, unconscious, I was whisked to the hospital eight years ago for another sudden ailment.

Life’s been good to me so far. Yes, really.

We waited for a while in the silent, cool Room 8 after the nice girl led us back. Diane heard my wrist watch tick on my wrist until Jared Henry, the physician’s assistant, walked in to have the old look. To give me the once over twice. I had worn the same Yankees shirt I had on my torso when he told me last August that my pain might be caused by cancer, and he actually noticed what it said. I’ve worn the shirt – Yankee blue with scripted, white lettering – every time I’ve been there for an exam or for test results, and now he notices. And he tells me that he’s a Red Sox fan. Nervously, I wish Papi the best.

I told him about the swallowing. After a moment of other conversation, he asks me if I’m drinking lots of fluids. I did not tell him, “Gee, I never would have guessed that you’re a Sox fan.” Nope, I explained that I drink as much as I can, what with the trouble I have with swallowing liquids.

Jared has been wonderful throughout this. Unlike Manny, he does not take steroids.

*He examined my neck and he stuck a tongue depressor in my mouth and made me be Fonzie — “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” – while he looked in with a mirror and a light. He said he saw nothing, but Dr. Howell’s would also take a look, maybe stick that tube up my nose. He left.

After a while, Jared Henry returned with Dr. Howells. Dr. Howells felt up my neck and did the same thing with the mirror and the light and the tongue depressor. He said that he saw nothing, but that I still have a good deal of mucous back there. I almost asked him if it could instead be a mucous-like substance, but I was happy not to have a tumor.

And no tube up my nose.

Two words not spoken during this exam: tumor and cancer.

I asked Howells about the swallowing, and he said that it might never be as it was, but it is too soon to say that this is how good it gets. He said that it is good to hear that it is still improving. He told me to keep eating: use it or lose it.

And that was it. There were no spectacular pronouncements, no one to cast the Urim and Thummim to let me know how this ends. Of if it ends.

We went to the grocery to buy some soft foods for my wife’s temporary diet, and I bought my first two packs of Topps baseball cards in a very long time. (They package the bubblegum almost separately these days.)

When we got home, I spun some grooves from trumpeter Kenny Dorham, realizing that one cannot spin an mp3 file. I see Dr. Shocker, the radiation oncologist, later this month, and he’ll set up the 6-month PET Scan. So far, so good.

When this began with the preliminary diagnosis late last August and I knew that I had cancer, I had HOPE that my condition would CHANGE. It was through this HOPE that my life CHANGED. I called it, “HOPECHANGEHOPECHANGEHOPE.”

Never mind. Thanks for reading.