Read Chapter One Chapter Two
It was the morning of my first oncologist appointment, and my nerves were on edge. Perhaps, unwittingly, I was squeezing the glass instead of just holding it, or perhaps it was just bad luck. Either way, as I filled it with water from our Brita tank in the fridge, the damn thing broke in my hand, sending water and glass shards raining down over the floor, and ratcheting up my nervous tension another few notches. That particular glass had had a vertical crack in it for some time, but we hadn’t thrown it out, purely from inertia. Really, glass, now? was my first thought—and then a pushy writer’s impulse took over. What a great freaking metaphor!
Was it too obvious? Too facile? Like the glass’s crack, my cancer had been hiding in plain sight—until it busted out and flooded my life. Hm, I could work with that! Before I knew it, I was spinning off into Writerworld, imagining a personal essay that opened (lyrically and beautifully, of course) with the glass breaking. I was all over it, getting carried away. Perhaps my just-revised novel would be bought and I could time the essay to coincide with its release. I could see it in The New Yorker, or perhaps the New York Times…
Whoa, girl, I told myself, get a grip. Right now we don’t even know if I’ll be alive to see my novel get to market. We know precious little. That’s why we’re seeing the oncologist.
“I’ve found someone good for you,” my internist had said over the phone on Monday. “Dr. S is very smart, but also very compassionate.”
“Great,” I said.
“Yes, I think it’s a good match. He emailed me back to say he’d read your reports and was looking forward to meeting you.”
I smiled faintly; that did actually sound encouraging.
An hour after the broken glass mishap, hubby D and I sat in a waiting room the size of two tennis courts put end to end, with a high glass ceiling that made it seem monolithic and impersonal. Around us were people in wheelchairs with IV drips, and others with white, waxy skin and faraway eyes. They all seemed resigned to the tedium, and it made me despair to think that this was my future. Every so often, a nurse would emerge from a door in the corner and bark out a name, and someone would get up and shuffle off behind her.
Not us, though. An hour ticked away, then two. At last, we were called in—only to sit unaccompanied for another twenty minutes. Tiny to begin with, our consultation room was half-filled by a huge table with a large computer monitor on top, so that it felt like an overcrowded dollhouse. A window beyond showed a tantalizing square of bluish-grey sky.
By this time, I was angry: was our time worth nothing? If the compassionate oncologist was so damn compassionate, wouldn’t he make an effort to see a new patient more promptly?
So when he blew into the room a few minutes later, looking overwhelmed and harried—then glanced at us and said, “Which one of you is the patient?”—I almost burst a blood vessel. This was the guy who’d “read your reports and was looking forward to meeting you”?
“I am,” I said tightly.
He had white hair and a white beard—but was younger than those would imply, maybe mid-forties. His head was big, his features open and broad. With some difficulty, he slid behind the desk and wedged himself into the chair, then buried his big head in the computer monitor and began typing. A few minutes later, without looking up, he said, “You’ll have to excuse me. As you know, health care these days isn’t about the patient—it’s about the computer.”
I blinked. There was an awkward silence, then I said, “Well, hopefully it’s still about the patient too.”
He glanced up, his face half-hidden by the computer. “Oh yes—I mean, for me it is. But there’s so much data, and I’m not really a computer guy…”
“Dr. P said you’d seen my records already?”
“Let me just find them. I’m bringing them up now… oh, shoot. It’s not letting me in to the system. Just a moment…sorry…”
It got worse after that.
When he finally got around to taking some history from me, I asked him he’d heard of David Servan-Schreiber’s book Anticancer. I’d been reading it that week and found it very inspiring. Servan-Schreiber was a brilliant neuroscientist who, at thirty, discovered he had an aggressive brain tumor when he put himself into one of his own fMRI machines. Desperate to know what he could do for himself as a patient, he then researched all the ways he could enhance the “terrain” of his body to make it less hospitable to cancer. He lived another twenty years.
“Hm,” the oncologist said after I’d gotten to the end of my somewhat breathy pitch. “Well, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m a bit of a skeptic.” He went on to say that there were boatloads of cancer “quacks” out there profiting from people’s desperation. (Sorry, did I not mention that Servan-Schreiber was a neuroscience professor who did meta-analyses of published studies?)
“But surely…” I stammered, “surely you must think it’s better for me, at this point, to be eating organic vegetables and drinking filtered water than chowing down on cinnamon rolls?”
He looked up and shrugged. “Not really. I eat lots of Pop Tarts and I don’t have cancer.”
I must have blinked ten times, while inside me, hope and respect spiraled away like the smoke from an extinguished candle. This relationship is doomed, I thought. Get me out. He was looking at me earnestly, but I thought I could detect a tiny hint of a smile playing around his lips, as if to say, Don’t worry, I’ll set you straight about these silly cancer books…
Unable to hold his gaze, I dropped my eyes to where my hands were knitted in my lap. At this point in my life, I’ve been around the block enough to know that Western medical training includes next-to-no information about nutrition, supplements and mind-body work. Still, it never fails to amaze me when doctors proclaim that such things have ABSOLUTELY NO role to play in health care. Their certainty often seems aggressive, as though you’ve attacked the core of their integrity rather than suggesting a compatible, complementary approach. Years ago, when I was using diet to help treat uterine fibroids (a strategy that worked), an endocrinologist had told me to “stop torturing yourself with these rigid rules and go enjoy a steak and glass of wine.”
Finally, I found my voice. “We have an appointment at Memorial Sloan Kettering in two weeks,” I blurted out.
“Oh?” Pop Tarts raised an eyebrow. “Who are you seeing there?”
I mentioned a name; he looked impressed.
“Well, he’s more famous than me!”
He then went into a little speech about Memorial, the essence of which was that, while the world-famous cancer hospital was sparkly and had all the latest gizmos, it didn’t always deliver on its promise. “We have gizmos too,” he said, his face turning sad. “We have a precision medicine department.”
“It’s not just that,” I said. “Obviously the doctor is key, but it’s also about the whole experience—things like the waiting room…”
He cocked his head toward the room in question. “You didn’t like the zoo? That’s what we call it, ha ha. I know it can be grim. But once you start coming here you get used to it, and then you’ll start to make friends there, and you’ll barely notice the time go by.” Seeing me look doubtful, he continued, “You had a long wait today–I’m sorry about that. I lost an assistant recently, and things have been crazy–I’ve been doing admin on top of everything else. I’m getting a new assistant at the end of September. Again, I’m sorry.”
I sensed an opening here, some room for truth. “We’ll forgive you if you can give us some hope,” I said, trying for a light tone but hearing my voice wobble.
He looked across the desk, eyes crinkling, seeming to see us as real people for the first time. “Oh yes,” he said, speaking slowly for emphasis. “I expect you to do very well, for a very long time.”
Well, so there was that. But even as I brightened at the words, I couldn’t dismiss his overall demeanor. The uplift was an afterthought, something he wouldn’t have even thought to say if I hadn’t asked.
We stood up, he loomed over the huge desk and we shook hands. I couldn’t alienate him, because his hospital was still doing genetic testing on my liver biopsy, and because I needed him to get me onto medication as soon as possible. But I’m sure my body language was broadcasting it all over the place.
Sorry, Dr. Pop Tarts, but you failed this interview. I’m not going to be one of the animals in your zoo.