The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic (19 page)

“Why is the nature of order connected to the nature of the self? What is the relationship between the two? … You gradually have to come to grips with the fact that when you make something, it has the ability to open a little trap
door on the essence of things. You can catch a glimpse of that through the order of an object. That something you catch a glimpse of is the place where self and matter are one thing.”

As Ann and I sat by the creek, I thought about what it had been like before and after the restoration. Before, many of the same things—water, plants, banks, a tree—had been in place. But it had been a dreary place. Trash, beer cans, plastic bags, bedraggled weeds. People were not drawn to it; no one sat beside it.

Now, the same: water, plants, a bank, a tree. But it was completely different. I looked down at pool of water and the damp brown sand. The creek was waiting, I felt, for the fish to come back. It was part of an order, waiting to be more alive.

I did not feel so isolated there, behind that glass wall. I felt planted on this earth, mirrored in a wholeness or a grace or another inadequate word.

I lay down at home. Almost immediately my mind filled with images of the chemotherapy room at the Cancer Center, the people sitting in lounge chairs hooked up to IVs.

Then something swam into my head. It was a pool of water, deep, and gracious. It arrived out of nowhere. As this pool filled my thoughts, I realized that if I crammed all the space in my mind with anxiety, every nook and cranny, every corner, then there would be no room for that water to flow.

“Grace fills the empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it,” Simone Weil said. “And it is grace itself which makes this void.”

Grace itself both creates and fills the void
. Then I saw that the image of a pool of water that came into my thoughts originated in the pools of water in the creek. The creek had fed my imagination. Having searched for the right words for prayers, this
prayer
did not begin with words, certainly not with rote prayers from a prayer book. It began with water. The order of the creek was speaking to an order in me.

On Monday evening of Valentine’s Day, Dr. Wright called. “I’m leaning toward waiting,” he said. “Three months. Then we’ll do another CT scan.”

I asked him if we could do another needle biopsy at another place. He said yes. “Cottage Hospital is good, but you were so miserable the last time.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “but less miserable than I would be with an open lung.”

“We can do that if it’s grown in two months,” he said.

“What about the lymph nodes?” I asked.

“I think it’s calcification. Likely benign.”

“If it’s not cancer, what is it?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of granuloma. Inflamed.”

Henri Nouwen said you live either in the house of fear or in the house of love. Henry James said we are either anxious or comatose. The Nouwen was a bit sentimental. The James, a bit cynical. But what they both understood was that the two states are separate, distinct. You are either in one or the other.

I lived in one, and then I lived in the other. I imagined
that precious time was being wasted, the cancer was growing. Then, briefly, I lived in another house, in which Dr. Wright and Dr. Mesipam knew what they were doing, and what mattered was the bough of the tree outside my window that seemed to sway whether there was a breeze or not.

I gave a dollar to a man at a freeway exit in his rain poncho who sang out to me, “Be careful driving,” and I thanked him and told him I’d take care of myself, doing the best I could. And I felt much less like Lady Bountiful than like this man’s companion, in need of his good wishes.

Vincent and I told Dr. Wright we agreed with him—we wanted to wait. A month. Possibly two. He said that was fine. But I did not know how I was going to live through it.

Other people, alerted to this new possibility, went into action. I saw that cancer causes a lot more excitement than an autoimmune disorder. When Dr. Rao talked to me about the PET scan, he held my hand the entire time. I saw later that he was not only comforting me, he was modeling behavior for his two residents, who stood near the door. Dr. Mesipam’s quiet nurse was quieter. Dr. Wright answered my e-mails immediately. But one afternoon I called a friend who had just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer—a “mild” form of cancer, her doctors had said.

“I remembered when I terminated analysis,” Andra said. “I had thought it would be a huge day, full of insights. It was not the fireworks I thought it would be, but just another day. And I thought yesterday that maybe death is like that. Maybe it’s just another day, not such a big deal. My mother watched
Jeopardy
a half hour before she died. And she enjoyed it.”

I lay on the window seat looking up at the tree outside, its branches swaying in the imperceptible wind.

For the briefest of seconds, I understood and accepted that death is part of the order of things. It is not separate, distinct, unreal. And then: the bigger we are, the harder it is to die.

I had been made small by being sick, and in that smallness I saw the order of the creek. I saw the man by the freeway, the blind woman in the restaurant, the man in the train station. We are vulnerable, all of us: the creek, the others, and me. It is the order of things to be vulnerable. The disorder is imagining that we are not.

A few days later I couldn’t stand waiting any longer.

I asked Vincent: “Would you go back to the Mayo Clinic with me to have another needle biopsy?”

“Yes,” he said.

I called Mayo and sent them the PET scan. Dr. Stevens, the neurologist, set up an appointment for a needle biopsy and another one, with the pulmonary division, for a breathing test and a consultation.

We flew into Minneapolis and were driven down the next day in a shuttle in a sweeping snowstorm that rose and fell with the hills between the two cities. We did not want to rent a car this time, figuring in March in Rochester we might not want to go on excursions. We had to save money.

March at Mayo was quite different from October. The two ladies on the scooters and the woman with the cat
were nowhere to be seen. In fact, there was almost no one on the street. The streets, as I watched them through the window of the Kahler Inn, looked like frozen iron. Vincent jauntily went out for a walk after we arrived and came back in a matter of minutes, his face red. He put his hands under the blanket on the bed. “Cold,” he said.

Staying in the hotel on our floor was a girls’ basketball team, and so in the elevators, whenever we went up or down, there was usually some tall girl in sweats, her hair lank and loose and her body in a feverish excitement. Every time I saw one of them, she cheered me up.

The next day, Wednesday, our first appointment was with Dr. Stevens. The receptionist, in Mayo style, told me that he was in the lab, but she would text him to tell him we were early and ask him to come over. I sat in his waiting area, watching a young woman manage to walk from her wheelchair to the reception desk with a smile of triumph on her face.

A nurse led us to an examining room. Dr. Stevens arrived in his customary tweed, blue this time. His brow was furrowed. He washed his hands at the sink and shook hands with both of us. He told me that I would get the schedule at his front desk and then return to see him when I was finished. When I told him that I had tested positive for antiretinal antibodies, he picked up the phone and said, “A lot of that research was done here, so I think I’ll call the retinal people.” He waited. He pressed down a button and dialed another number. “Hum,” he said. “I wonder where they are?” He tried another extension. “All in a meeting?” And then another. He hung up and said, “I wonder if they’ve gone to the moon.

“Talk to Dr. Leavitt about this,” he said, “and if she isn’t
able to help, talk to me again before you leave.” He wished us well, his brow still creased, and I couldn’t tell whether the lab was preoccupying him or he was worried about me.

We picked up the schedule at his front desk. The next day, Thursday, I was to have a chest X-ray, a “pulmonary function test,” and a blood test.

On Friday I was to report to St. Mary’s Hospital for the needle biopsy.

We moved from the Kahler Inn that afternoon to the Kahler Grand, just around the corner. Despite the basketball players, the old Kahler had felt more depressing than in the fall. We needed a change of scene, Vincent said. Our new hotel was pretty spiffy by comparison, not much more expensive, and it had a swimming pool on the top, under a big glass dome, where I could swim, then lie beside it in steamy warm air, looking out on the cold sky.

In a cozy restaurant downstairs with a Dickensian name, Vincent ordered a glass of scotch, and I declined a drink. The waitress gently said, “The bartender has figured out a nonalcoholic drink, a sort of juice thing I call a prom fling.” She hesitated. “For those people on meds.”

“I’m on meds,” I said, “and I’ll take one.”

On Thursday, during my breathing test, the nurse asked me who I was seeing in pulmonary. Looking at my sheet, I said, “Mr. Holland,” registering for the first time that he was a Mister, not a Doctor.

“He is very good,” she said. “Excellent.”

I Googled Mr. Holland when I returned to the hotel and found that he was a physician’s assistant. I felt cheated.

At some point in the early afternoon, I either became
anxious about the needle biopsy or I had a moment of clarity. I called the pulmonary desk and asked them if they could check with the doctors—would a bronchoscopy work as well? They said they would call me back. When they did, they told me, “The needle biopsy is canceled for now. Cart before the horse. They have rescheduled a CT scan for the morning. You can pick up the new schedule at the pulmonary desk.”

I was surprised and relieved and also disappointed. I had been gathering my energy for the biopsy, and now, I told myself, it was just going to happen later, and I’d have to gather up my courage again. But for now, it made more sense to talk to pulmonary before the biopsy.

After I picked up my new schedule, I was walking past the Center for the Spirit on my way to the subway to the hotel when I turned around and went back. The etched-glass door slid open. The prayer wall had many pieces of the cream paper on it, slipped in here and there. I stood in front of them and tried to think of writing a prayer for others, but all that came out was “Help me.” I pushed it into a slot, then wondered who cleaned the prayers out and whether the person read them. The prayer cleaner. I hoped that person had been one of us, a resident of Oz. I wanted the someone who removed my prayer from its place on the wall to be a person who knew what it was like to be afraid of leaving this world. To know the meaning of the word
befallen
. I wanted the prayer cleaner to have had a spot on his or her lung. To have sat across from a doctor who said, “If she were my wife, I’d take it out.” To have heard a radiologist intoning on a tape, “The area appears to be malignant.” To have heard a doctor say, “Our radiologist is alarmed.” I wondered if Jesus had not only crossed over
into the land of suffering, when he took the blind beggar by the hand, but had stayed there. Maybe Jesus was a prayer cleaner.

That night after dinner, on our way back to the hotel, we walked past a small city park. Hundreds of crows were gathered in the trees. They covered every tree, muttering to each other, and occasionally one or two would fly from one tree to another. They must have been trying to keep warm by some combination of gathering and flight. Neither one of us had ever seen so many crows in one place, and we stood watching them even though we were cold. The fear that had been sitting farther out on the fringes of my mind (in a warm restaurant with a friendly waitress) moved into the center. I was just a small thing in a bleak landscape of cold and gray. I stood there while the birds fluttered and cawed, and a few of them moved from tree to tree, and through my coat, the cold seeped in.

In the morning, I took the subway into the main clinic building, then into the lobby of another building that had a strange funeral fountain in it and a pool that people had turned into a wishing well, with coins on the bottom. A vase with flowers only made it worse.

I took the elevator to the second floor where, hanging on the wall, was the beautiful rug with horses dancing across it. The patients waiting were watching the tsunami in Japan on TV, waves flooding into houses, over and over again.

The nurse asked me if I was wearing any metal, and when I assured her I was not, she believed me. I did not have to change into the awful nightie. When I walked into the room with the scan, the technician looked doubtful.

“Any—” he began.

The nurse held up her hand. “She’s home free.”

“Great,” he said. “We’ll have you out of here in no time.”

It took three minutes.

Vincent was surprised to see me back at the hotel. “Did you do the CT scan?”

“Yes, I think I did,” I said.

Our appointment with Mr. Holland was at one o’clock, so we had an early lunch in the hotel, which was directly across the street, and then walked over. I carried my bag with tests, scans, and reports that went with me everywhere like the packs on a horse. And my small black notebook with the lists of questions. In this case, I really had only one.

In the clinic lobby, a man with a long beard and an angry red face crossed and almost stumbled with what looked like a new prosthesis. Two men were sitting at the piano, one playing and the other wearing that open expression that meant he was about to sing. They were both in their late sixties, I guessed, and as I watched them, I saw a family resemblance. They might be brothers. As we passed them on the way to the elevators, I happened to look down and saw that the man playing had only one leg.

I girded myself as we rose in the elevator. A young man dressed in black leather, with light, floating tattoos of birds on his arms, got in on the second floor and moved to the back. I heard a mechanical, fuzzy voice say, “I think it’s floor ten.” I turned, and the young man was holding a microphone to his throat to speak.