It Takes a Worried Man (5 page)

It is time for Kirsten to get her hose put in. This is something Dr. J told us about. Basically they will be pumping so much stuff into her veins and removing so much blood that it is just easier for everybody to have this two way hose hanging out of her instead of searching for a vein to jab an IV in every time. Her mom stays over so she can take Rowen to preschool in the morning, and Kirsten and I head over to the day surgery unit at the hospital.

Now, this particular hospital is the product of a recent merger, and one “campus” is the old Jewish hospital, and the other “campus” is the old Methodist hospital. And I do not presume to make any sorts of sweeping religious judgments by this, but everything on the Methodist side is just a little older and shabbier. The dingy MRI suite and subterranean cafeteria are on the Methodist side, while the gleaming oncology suite with the bird’s-eye view of bad field hockey games is on the Jewish side. Before you leap to the “Jews with money” conclusion that, if you’re honest, you know is on the tip of your mind right now, I should tell you that the whole beautiful building that houses the oncology suite is currently up for sale and this hospital as a whole seems to be in financial trouble. Here’s hoping they stay open long enough to cure Kirsten.

Anyway, we get to the day surgery wing at the shabby Methodist campus. It is six-thirty in the morning. There are a couple of old people in the waiting room. And this waiting room makes the MRI suite look like the halls of Valhalla. First of all, it is about the size of a gas station men’s room.  While it is significantly cleaner than a gas station bathroom, but it has significantly worse reading material. At least in a gas station bathroom you can usually read some witticisms about people rolling their shit in little balls, or a big marijuana leaf with “SMOKE POT” emblazoned on it, or times and numbers for rendezvous for furtive homosexual activity, but here there is nothing. They taunt us with an empty magazine rack. This fits the pattern I have noticed of the more serious places having worse reading material, but it worries me a little. We are not yet to the most serious phase of this treatment, and already we are at zero for reading material. I don’t know what the negative side of the magazine graph looks like. Do you have to give the nurse a magazine in order to be allowed to wait in the most serious places? I guess we will find out.

The lucky thing is that we don’t really have to sit there very long before they call Kirsten to the back. I go with her. The nurse is nice and says I can’t stay, but she allows me to go back to the desk with Kirsten and kiss her goodbye. The nurse asks if I want to be called when the surgery is done, just for my peace of mind. I say yes, and she makes sure she has the correct number. I give Kirsten a hug and a kiss, and the nurse says, “We’ll take good care of her.”

“You’d better, ” I say. It is still early, so I decide to walk to work. It is only about a twenty minute walk, which makes me rethink my whole trolley-taking path. I feel sad, and not just because I am listening to the Carter Family as I walk. This is just one more thing that makes it all seem real.. Just as I am about to hit work, I come to this song called “I Never Will Marry,” which is a really haunting tune with this chorus:

           I never will marry

           Or be no man’s wife

           I expect to live single

           All the days of my life

           The shells in the ocean

           Shall be my deathbed

           The fish in deep water

           Swim over my head.

Yes, it is another song about a jilted lover taking her life, and though the whole “all the days of my life,” doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense in the context of someone about to throw themselves in the sea, it nevertheless moves me to tears. I listen to it three times in a row.

While I am at work, Kirsten is put under conscious sedation (which I had when I had my wisdom teeth out, and which is a really wonderful high, and which I would be administering to myself nightly right about now if I could get my hands on those wonderful wonderful drugs) and this hose is implanted in her chest wall. The hose has this mesh collar that is designed so her tissue will grow into it and really anchor it in there. This becomes important later.

By now it shouldn’t surprise me, though it kind of does, that the jackasses never call me when the surgery is done. I check my voice mail kind of frantically all day and finally decide that while they don’t give a shit about my peace of mind, they probably would have called if she had died on the table. But why the hell did they say they would call?  

The hose is problematic immediately. First and most important, it is very painful to Kirsten, and it pretty much disables her. She can’t reach over her head, which means she has a very hard time getting dressed, and she’s not allowed to lift anything, which Rowen takes kind of personally, and which, overall puts a lot of limits on what you can do. We can’t, for example, really hug her anymore. We can sort of gingerly place our arms around her while she winces and goes, “watch out for the hose!” but that’s not really the same.

Also, psychologically it is tough. Up to now, Kirsten, except for having a fatal disease waiting to take over her whole body, has not been sick at all. She is now pretty obviously in pain and unable to do things she used to do, and I get this, “Oh shit, here we go” feeling.

She is supposed to have these visiting nurses come out to tell her how to flush out the lines and everything, or possibly to do it for her, and there is some kind of colossal mixup on the first day, but the nurse eventually arrives and gives Kirsten a five-minute and terribly confusing tutorial on how to draw some blood out, pump this anti-coagulant in, and keep it all fine and dandy. Kirsten is game, but soon one of the lines is filled with blood, and this isn’t supposed to happen, and this is on a Saturday, so she calls Dr. J., and Dr. J gets another visiting nurse to come out, and this visiting nurse is male, which does sort of disconcert her at first, but he turns out to be much kinder and more helpful than the first nurse. He is patient and professional and explains things clearly and in detail, and he flushes out the hose.

Kirsten gets her initial doses of chemo through the hose, and then, a few days later, it fills with blood again. She goes back in to the hospital, and they determine that the hose is actually broken, and they apparently root around the back room looking for parts so they can fix it and find that the parts are on order from Korea or the Philippines or wherever they pay some kid twenty cents a day to put this piece of shit together, so they have to remove it. Kirsten is in the hands of the day surgery people, so Dr. J is not actually there, and apparently the doctor, whose name I have but guess I should not write since everybody else in this book gets a pseudonym, is a total asshole. “Well,” he says to Kirsten in this annoyed tone, “I have another
scheduled
one in a few minutes, so I can do this now, but if you really want to have the
drugs
, you’re going to have to come back
late late this afternoon
,
 and
maybe
we can
try
to
squeeze
you in…” you get the idea. This is one of these “choices” they give you that’s really no choice at all, because you are already there, let’s just get this over with, so they give her a shot of Lidocaine, which is I guess like Novocaine–some kind of local anesthetic, and these are famously ineffective on Kirsten–she usually needs three times what the dentist thinks is a reasonable amount in order to really get numb, but clearly Dr. Mengele here is not really concerned about getting her numb, so he shoots her up and yanks the hose out, and you may recall that the hose is designed so that your tissue grows into it, and so it is incredibly painful, and Dr. Mengele is an asshole about it, and she is in pain and sad.

I find out all this when I get home that day, and I am ready to go down to the hospital and raise hell about Dr. Mengele, I can’t believe they ripped this thing out of her with a shot of a crappy local anaesthetic (and, later on, other medical professionals will also be incredulous), but Kirsten says there’s really no point, it’s not like he did anything wrong; he was just a dick. I think that is doing something wrong, but it’s not, you know, the kind of thing that you usually get a lot of satisfaction complaining about.

Except complaining about it right now is pretty satisfying, and if there is any justice in this universe at all, which I have come to doubt pretty severely, this guy will at some point become a torture victim and I’ll do a reverse Amnesty thing and write to his captors telling them to keep up the good work, and mail them car batteries and bamboo shoots and whatever else they need to keep this motherfucker in pain.

The last weekend before Kirsten starts her chemo is our anniversary weekend. We do not plan to do anything romantic, mostly because Kirsten has this hose dangling out of her and feels kind of crappy. We decide to head down to her parents’ house. They live a block away from the beach about an hour from here. We spent many weekends down there this summer when we were afraid the Troll was really going to flip his lid and do something scary.  We all got very comfortable down there, and it’s a big enough house that we can be down there without everybody feeling like they are on top of each other, which is important.

So we all head down there and have a very nice, relaxing weekend. Sort of. The thing is, Kirsten’s impending treatment is sort of hanging over the whole weekend. What we want is just to head down there and hang out and forget everything, but Kirsten’s parents seem to want to make this a special weekend for us, and while we appreciate the impulse, it does get kind of strange, and their desire to make it special keeps reminding us that it is special, that after this weekend all the shit starts. They decide at some point that we should take the canoe out and do some canoeing. I am game, but Kirsten seems kind of lukewarm. She says something like, “I don’t know if I really feel like it, ” but apparently this is not sufficiently negative, because the next thing we know, the canoe is strapped to the top of Kirsten’s mom’s car, and her dad keeps saying things like, “hey, you guys ready to take the canoe out?”

Kirsten eventually has to bite her parents’ heads off to make them understand that she doesn’t want to canoe. I feel bad about this whole thing. We are both kind of depressed–we have just lived through the week with our epic meetings with Maryann and Dr. J, and I can totally see how her parents want to do something that will be special and fun, but they are being so solicitous that it keeps reminding us that this is not just a normal weekend, which is all we really wanted.

Still, it’s nice to hang out. We go to playgrounds a lot, I get my skates, which I have used about three times since I bought them, out of the trunk and do some great skating on the traffic-free streets of this sleepy rich sailing town in the off-season. I also start writing this in a notebook that Kirsten’s dad gives her. The sense that the shit is en route to the fan casts a pall over the whole weekend, though.

One notable thing that happens is that we are at this playground with Rowen, and we are playing this game where she drops me of on one play structure and says, “Okay. You have a good day at school, honey, I have to go to work now,” and then runs over to another play structure for a minute, then comes back and “picks me up”so we can go to our “home,” which is a third play structure. and I see this very attractive woman jog up with her jogging stroller and toddler, and I am kind of admiring the whole look–you know, attractive young mom all sweaty and spandex-clad–and about five minutes later her much older husband comes wheezing up to the playground. He is also decked out in jogging gear, but his wife was pushing a stroller and beat him by a solid five minutes.

I immediately judge the guy, which I am sure I will pay for eventually, and I am seized by a desire to kick him to death. I mean, when a guy in his fifties shows up with his twenty-years-younger wife and toddler, you just know there’s a fifty-something ex-wife and kids just barely younger than the trophy wife somewhere. Right? I mean, I am sure there are exceptions, but this is the rule.

And I just get so fucking mad at this guy. Now again, I don’t know his specific situation–maybe his first wife was an abusive drug addict or something, or maybe he’s even widowed, but I can’t help feeling that he has a perfectly good wife somewhere that he threw away because she got old. And all I want is for my wife to get old.  

When we moved in to our new house, it became clear that it was infested with mice. We have baseboard heat, and under all of the radiators were lines of turds. Behind the oven and washing machines was the telltale blue-green of mouse poison and, of course, a ton of turds.

We occasionally see the mice running through the halls at night, and I always find turds on my stove and countertops in the morning. I love to cook, and I therefore do basically all the cooking. I like it because it is creative–take a bunch of stuff and mix it together to make something wonderful–and it’s finite. You chop some stuff up, you cook it, and you eat it. Done. This is incredibly unlike teaching, where nothing is ever complete. You do get kids coming back years later and saying you changed their lives, which rarely happens after you’ve cooked even a really fantastic meal, but you very very rarely feel at the end of the day or even the end of the year like what you wanted to do is done. There’s always more to do. This is not the case with cooking.

So cooking is very therapeutic for me, and I take it kind of personally when mice shit in my frying pan. Or on my countertops, or all over my industrial size can of sesame oil that I made a special trip to the Chinese supermarket for. So when we first move in, I buy a bunch of poison and scatter it throughout the house. Of course, it doesn’t work at all. This is probably more a comment on our housekeeping than anything else. I mean, if you are a mouse, are you going to go for poison or for some succulent crumbs of last night’s dinner that are here, there, or everywhere?  It’s really no contest.

I am doubly concerned because we are landlords now and have a legal obligation to keep the building vermin-free, which is easier said than done. So I go for the glue traps. It has been my experience in the past that the flip traps don’t work at all, so I buy the glue traps even though I have a very traumatic memory of catching a mouse in a glue trap when I was about 10 years old and flipping this screaming mouse into a bucket of water. It was horrifying.

But I’m not ten years old anymore, so I figure I can deal with it. At first it looks like it’s not even going to be an issue because they studiously ignore the glue traps. One mouse even manages to shit in a glue trap without getting stuck. I am convinced this is the mousy way of saying “fuck you.”

But I stick with it because nothing else is working, and one night I hear a loud squeee squeee squeee, and I see a mouse caught in the trap I have wedged between the garbage and the countertop. I will come to call this “the money spot,” because while the mice will continue to ignore every other trap in all of their favorite locations, I will catch at least six more in traps put in this exact spot.

When I hear this squee squee squee, I put my plan into action. I go to the rag bag and grab a rag, which I place over the mouse. I then go to the bookshelf and grab the giant hardcover French/English dictionary I have had since high school. I hear the voice of my ninth grade French teacher echoing in my head, going, “people, spend the extra money for the hardcover dictionary! You’ll be glad you did!”

I drop the dictionary on the mouse, and boom–he’s gone. I pop the rag-covered corpse in the trash, and I’m done. I feel like I should seek out Monsieur Stirling and tell him, but I guess this probably isn’t the use he had in mind.

At first this is kind of fun. I feel good about giving the mice a more humane death than they get from poison, and I feel good about getting some revenge for that shit in my frying pan. It does not bother me at all.

And then Kirsten is diagnosed, and the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And suddenly I feel kind of bad for doling out death, especially when we are trying like hell to fight against Kirsten’s. It seems like bad karma. But what the hell am I going to do? They can’t stay here, and while you can ask them to leave, they don’t usually comply. So I have to kill them. But I start to hate it. What makes me incredibly sad is that they stop screaming before I drop the dictionary on them. They stop screaming as soon as they are covered in the rag. Does it comfort them to be covered up? Or do they know that it’s pointless to scream because their situation has just gotten hopeless?