Piecework

So I paid to have blood taken from my arms, to breathe into various machines, to swallow and be injected with chemicals. The good doctors and the excellent technicians hadn’t devised the system of stand and deliver, of course; it must have evolved over the past few decades in the grand republic we all share with the boys from HUD, the S&L’s, and the Medellin Cartel. Nobody else I told was surprised. But all of this was new to me. I’m one of those fortunate human beings who are almost never physically sick. Over the previous thirty-five years, I had been in a hospital only three times as a patient: for the repair of a broken hand and then a broken cheekbone (both sustained while serving my apprenticeship as a young idiot); and finally for the removal of a small cyst over my right eye. As a reporter, of course, I’d been in dozens of hospitals, in pursuit of the usual portion of human folly and calamity; over the years, I’d served emergency-room death watches on shot cops and raped nuns and wounded presidents of the United States. But such duties were really only paid tours in the region of melodrama. The attendant pain, fear, and odor of death were part of my craft, but not my life. Now I was on a private tour.

“What are you looking for?” I asked at an early point in this process.

The doctor shrugged, smiled, and said: “The truth.”

He meant the truth about the spot on my lung, of course, not some grander insight into the meaning of the world. But even this limited truth wasn’t easy. The spot was the size of a bread crumb and it was high up behind a rib. There were four possibilities: i) lung cancer, caused by smoking an estimated 780,000 cigarettes over the previous three decades; 2) a fungus unique to the American Southwest and northern Mexico, both regions that I’d visited in the past two years; 3) a tumor caused by the asbestos I’d worked on for two months in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when I was sixteen; 4) tuberculosis. I am a fatalist about most things. Naturally, I was certain it was cancer.

“I don’t think so,” said my wife.

“Well, we’ll soon find out.”

It wasn’t that easy. For all of the modern technology, the various experts couldn’t decide precisely what was in my lung. They did one test to see if I’d been exposed recently to tuberculosis; the result was negative. The same was true about the fungus. The asbestos remained a possibility. So, obviously, did cancer. The big possibility. But, still, the doctors weren’t certain. They wanted …the truth. They asked me to undergo a bronchoscopy. This meant I’d stay overnight at the hospital, and then, with a local anesthetic, a tube would be passed down my throat into my lung to get as close as possible to the Thing. I agreed.

In the hospital for the bronchoscopy, I noticed something odd about myself: I had no fear. I’m no braver than the average man, but none of this made me tremble or weep or fall into pools of self-pity. I lost no sleep, either to a runaway imagination or to bad dreams. Of course, a bronchoscopy was hardly a major operation, but it wasn’t a day off either. And it might tell me that I had cancer, a word that seems to fill most Americans with dread. But instead of fear, regrets, or remorse, I found myself living almost entirely in the present tense: This happens, this happens, and this happens. If anything, the lack of fear made me sad. A lifetime of reporting had done its work; I’d been cheated of a basic human reaction.

Early one morning, I was wheeled down corridors on a gurney. I held my wife’s hand before vanishing into the operating room. I gazed up, seeing faces distorted by my point of view and by drugs. They entered my throat. I woke later from an exhausted sleep.

“We couldn’t get close enough,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”

“You mean the bronchoscopy was for nothing?”

“Not exactly. But -”

“But you still don’t know what’s in my lung…”

A pause. “Yes.”

“So…”

“I want you to see a man …he’s the best thoracic surgeon in New York.”

“You have to operate?”

“Maybe.”