At six in the morning, the night was over. The nurse stole into the room and plonked yet another bottle, the third, of Gwyneth's finest onto the bedside tray and ordered me to finish it within an hour. On the upside, I was allowed to stay in bed and watch the light slowly crowd out the darkness. The view from my room on the eleventh floor of the hospital, due south, is staggering. When the air is clear, the Alps are in touching distance.
View from the top.
With the lack of food now stretching back nearly 24 hours, I was weaker than Gwyneth would allow. I lounged on my bed until they wheeled me down to the endoscopy department, for the charting of my innards with two cameras inserted into orifices usually reserved for the input and output of food. This sounded unpleasant, to put it mildly, when the procedure was explained to me, even if the probes were to enter successively. But it was no big deal. I got drugs in my drip that made the world swirl and then disappear very quickly. When I woke up, I was back in my room and it was as if nothing had happened. Half an hour later, I was permitted my first hospital meal, a half-assed little breakfast fit for a jockey with a weight problem.
The pain started an hour later when the doctor shared with me the diagnosis. It's a bad sign when you're asked into a private office for this, never mind talk about peace and quiet. Her words were grave. I have a tumor in my colon, on the right side where the dull pain that has been my companion for a few months now originates. This makes good sense as an explanation for everything I have been suffering from. As the tumor grew it took the oxygen that I would have rather used on the football field. But it also makes no sense at all. What am I doing with a tumor? What have I done to end up with one? I've always lived and behaved healthily. Out of the blue, this diagnosis feels like my personal nine eleven, and unpredictable catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
At this point the tumor was just a thickening of the colon wall. It was thick enough to impede progress of the colon probe and big enough to have been the target of a biopsy. But it's not a stage-three growth that has already consumed tissue far and wide, large enough to keep organs from functioning normally. At least in the stomach it didn't seem to have done any damage.
And so I cling to hope that is as poorly justified as the despair I feel welling up inside me. I'm only 44. What is going to happen? My children are two and four. What's going to happen to them, poor things? It's too early to build scenarios of the future or draw any conclusions, but how can I not?
Flucha took the news like a champion. She didn't freak out or panic. All calm, she declared she'd take the afternoon off and come here right away. This is good. I need her now, and I will need her a lot in the future. Unless they take me down for a CT intended to identify possible sites of metastasis – writing this almost freaks me out – we'll have some time to discuss this, even though there isn't really anything to discuss at this point when the final verdict is still pending.
By the end of the day, the situation hasn't improved. It's still 11 September. The CT scan revealed an unexpected allergy to iodine and a large number of suspicious lymph nodes next to the cancerous piece of colon. There were also a few near the liver. The organs themselves seemed fine, though the liver might have taken a hit and there was some dodgy signal in the lungs that needs to be studied further. As I write this, I realize that I'm completely fucked and, a second later, that there is no need to panic before the full CT report is in. I think of my children and almost lose it. My world has collapsed from one moment to the next.
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