The Thing That

I had the biopsy on Wednesday. Another comedy of (t)errors that I need to blog about when I have a moment. More importantly, though, I just got the word: I don't have cancer.

Thanks to everyone who sent their best wishes and to the rest of you too. I am so relieved I'm gonna wet myself.

This is how it begins, with a routine visit to the dentist. Perhaps not so routine since it has been two years since your last checkup, but you’ve always had good teeth, no need to worry, it’s just that you never floss and you barely brush, just enough to make the mouth minty, so you know that eventually you’ll have to worry about gum disease but you’ll wait until the dentist says definitively, absolutely, you must do this NOW or you will lose your teeth.

This is how it begins, a visit to a new dentist, reclining in an unfamiliar chair, an unknown Asian woman blasting the buildup of tartar on your molars with whirring, spitting devices, preparing you for the inspection by the dentist, another Asian woman, as it happens, who looks tooth by tooth and rattles off an unknown code to her assistant. Here is the admonition to floss, to brush properly, but you know there is still time, that you can continue your bad habits for at least another six months without too much worry.

But here comes worry that you had not foreseen as your dentist pokes and prods around in your open mouth, your jaws straining to provide ever greater access. Here are some tissues that are the wrong color, white when they should be pink, hidden away in the back of the mouth, you certainly had never noticed nor, even if you had, would you have thought anything about them. White when they should be pink, who would know what color they should be? And the dentist says, calmly, almost nonchalantly, so that it is not until you are stepping out of the office that you really think about what she said: You should have a biopsy, this could be early stages of oral cancer, nothing to worry about but you should have a biopsy nonetheless, here is a specialist who is one floor below, as it happens, you can walk in there now an make an appointment. And you don’t realize as you leave the dentist and take the elevator one floor down that you have stepped into the labyrinth and that it will not be a simple matter of descending one floor and having the tests and being told in a matter of days or hopefully less that everything is okay.

For when you enter the specialist’s office you are told that you must get a referral from your primary care physician, that doctor, whom you chose somewhat at random, who works out of the downtown medical center, whose picture looks friendly on the Group Health website, who decides what treatments you can have and where you will get them. So you go to work for it is now 9am, your dentist appointment having been at 8, and you arrive at your desk only a half hour late, though late is relative since you are lucky enough to have a job where no one monitors your comings and goings. You call your doctor to get the referral and are told the nurse will call you back within the hour and when you hang up the phone it really hits you for the first time, words start to sink in, like they have taken on weight and are really sinking into the soft foundation of your brain, words like tissues and biopsy and cancer. And here you are, working in a cancer research center, and oh the irony if you were diagnosed with it now, isn’t life just like that, ha ha ha.

You think of your coworker, a woman in her late 50s who happened to mention at lunch only last week how she had been diagnosed with throat cancer but they couldn’t find the tumor, they knew it must be there but they couldn’t find it so they blasted her throat with radiation, a scattershot approach and they killed it, they beat the cancer, but she was left without saliva glands, and your first thought, you are ashamed to admit it, was that this would put a crimp in anyone’s sex life and now you try and imagine yourself trying to lick, to taste, your mouth perpetually dry…and this result was a victory for the doctors, the alternative is far worse they must have told her, far worse.

You are on the edge of tears now at 10 in the morning waiting for the nurse to call you back and you stay in this state through a solitary lunch that is tasteless and when it is after 1 you cannot wait anymore and you call the doctor’s office back, trying not to sound as desperate as you feel, trying not to scream at the nurse who does not seem to understand the gravity of the situation only that they can’t possibly refer you to that particular specialist because he is not on their list but here is another name, another specialist, conveniently located in the same building as your doctor and they should have the referral within one week. So now you will have to wait one week and then you will have the referral and then you will be able to see the specialist and have the biopsy and then you will have to wait for the results, perhaps another week, so in two weeks, at the minimum, you should know whether or not these wrongly colored tissues in your mouth are cancerous and you haven’t even thought that, if they are not cancerous, then what are they? Some other cause for alarm?

At least there is some action you can take. You call the new specialist and schedule an appointment for just over one week from now, explaining that you hope to have the referral in time and that, if by some unfortunate sluggishness on the part of your doctor’s office you don’t receive the referral in a timely fashion you will cancel the appointment with an appropriate amount of warning so as not to disturb the presumably busy schedule of this new specialist.

You go home that day, finally, you have managed to hold back the tears all day but now, home, in her arms, you cry and cry and get it out of your system and now there are no more tears and not even any worry because you know that everything will be all right, everything will be all right.

And you barely think about it for a week, you are preoccupied with another, more real illness, a nasty cold that leaves you drowning in your own snot and keeps you home from work for several days and then you realize that it’s been a week and you haven’t heard so you call your doctor’s office and are told that your referral was denied. Denied? Why? Because, of course, there is no need for you to see the new specialist, these tests can be performed in the Ear, Nose and Throat department. You are stunned because, of course, it was the doctor’s office that proposed the new specialist in the first place and now you have waited a whole week for nothing. You are too stunned to scream this into the phone instead you make an appointment to see ENT, as it turns out on the following Monday, the same day you would have seen the specialist, whom you will shortly call to cancel, only first thing in the morning, 9am, instead of later in the day.

Monday, still full of snot and now coughing up phlegm, sick of being sick, you haul yourself out of bed and wait for a bus that doesn’t come and then give up and walk quickly to the downtown medical center where your doctor’s office is, where the X-ray dept that checked to make sure your lungs weren’t shredding back when you had pneumonia only a few short months ago is, where the pharmacy that gave you cream to cure your athlete’s foot that, though it is much much better, still itches sometimes is. You get there minutes late, wheezing slightly as you check in, saying you have a 9am appointment in ENT. ENT? asks the nurse, Ear Nose and Throat you explain, struck that you have to explain their own initials to them, what is your member number? You give her your card and she click clacks on her keyboard and says, but ENT isn’t here, it’s at the hospital up on Capitol Hill. And you look at her, stunned again, and of course it isn’t here but how were you to know that? Did anyone tell you that? No, of course not, and since all your medical history since you began working six months ago and been covered by insurance had taken place in this building of course you assumed that it would be here and besides, as has already been noted, nobody told you where else it would have been.

She points you to a phone and gives you the number and tells you to dial 9 first and soon you are on hold, you are sitting in a medical office, flipping through an outdated Time magazine, while on hold to talk to medical staff and thus you are simultaneously experiencing the two most common ways of waiting for medical help, waiting squared one might say. At least the woman in ENT is friendly when you say that you will not make your appointment today for which you are already almost ten minutes late and, anyway, you have no idea how to get to the hospital or even exactly where it is and she reschedules you for two days to come, early in the morning on the next Wednesday and you write down the address of the hospital and exactly where the ENT department is and even where one can park and now there is nothing to do but go back to work, to start another week of work, this is not the way that you would prefer to begin your week.

And now it is Tuesday and tomorrow morning at 8:30 am you will finally have your biopsy, you hope, unless some other unforeseen obstacle rolls into your path. They will scrape some cells, it shouldn’t take long, you are aware that you work in a cancer research center and yet really have no idea what this biopsy entails but you have talked to your coworker, the one who survived, and she says that it’s no big deal, the biopsy, it’s the waiting for the results that really gets to you. You will wait, you tell yourself, you will wait as long as it takes to be told that everything is going to be okay.