Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(59)

“Would you like me to outline what will be happening to you?” a technician named Dawn asked.

I told her I’d rather not know the details, and she left me alone to undress and step into a backless gown. When that was done, she arranged me upon the tall bed and introduced me to the anesthesiologist, who held an oxygen tube in her hand and asked if I was allergic to latex.

I answered no, wondering, Am I? She affixed the tube to my nose and was just inserting an IV into my arm when the gastroenterologist came in. Without quite noticing it, I seem to have reached an age when my doctors are younger than I am. This fellow looked to be in his late thirties. “Holmes” was how he introduced himself—just his last name, with no title. We shook, and a moment later the anesthesiologist connected a syringe full of cream-colored liquid to my IV.

“Now I’m going to ask you to go to your happy place,” she said. The back of my gown fell open, and I felt the cool air on my exposed rear end.

“My what?”

“Your happy place,” she repeated. “It’s different for each person. The man I anesthetized before you, for instance, went to the Augusta golf course, and when he woke up he was winning the Masters.”

At first I thought my happy place would be a stage. I was walking from the wings to the podium, excited, like always, by all the attention I would soon be getting, when I changed my mind and revisited the house I grew up in. It was any night in the early 1970s and my sisters and I were sitting around the dining room table, trying to make our mother laugh. I could just see her, head cocked to one side, lighting a cigarette off a candle, when I jumped to a cottage my family rented one summer on the coast of North Carolina, and then to a September afternoon in Normandy. The anesthesiologist emptied her syringe into my IV, and just as I said, “No, wait, I haven’t decided yet,” or just as I thought I said it, I slipped away into a velvety nothingness.

When I awoke some time later, I was in a different location. Curtains surrounded me on four sides, and through a part in one of them I could see a woman folding papers and putting them into envelopes. I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. “Well, hi there,” I whispered.

Never had I experienced such an all-encompassing sense of well-being. Everything was soft-edged and lovely. Everyone was magnificent. Perhaps if I still drank and took drugs I might not have felt the effects so strongly, but except for some Dilaudid I’d been given for a kidney stone back in 2009, I had been cruelly sober for thirteen years.

“Well, that’s propofol for you,” Dr. Holmes would later say. “It’s what Michael Jackson was injecting himself with when he died.”

And who can blame him? I’d give anything to sleep so soundly, and to wake each morning on a cloud of such fuzzy love.

“I’m going to need for you to pass some gas,” said the woman putting papers into envelopes. She spoke as if she were a teacher, and I was a second-grade student. “Do you think you can do that for me?”

“For you, anything.” And as I did as I was instructed, I realized it was no different than playing a wind instrument. There were other musicians behind other curtains, and I swore I could hear them chiming in, the group of us forming God’s own horn section. I’m not sure how long I lay there, blissed-out and farting. Three minutes? Five? Ten? Then I was instructed to get dressed, and someone led me into a room with a newspaper and a Bible in it. There I was reunited with Lisa, who said joyfully, “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Oh, you did,” I sighed. “I just didn’t allow myself to believe it. The next time, we should have these done together. Wouldn’t that just be fantastic?”

I was looking at her, beaming, love radiating from my body like heat from a lightbulb, when Dr. Holmes entered and told me it had all gone beautifully. “Congratulations,” he said. “You have the colon of a twenty-five-year-old.”

I’ll fall for anything, apparently. “Really! A twenty-five-year-old!”

“Actually I’m just kidding,” he said. “All healthy colons look more or less alike.” He gave me some pictures of what the camera had captured, but I couldn’t make sense of them—not then, as I bobbed balloonlike off the walls of the tiny room, or later, at Lisa’s house, after the drug had worn off and I was myself again.

I was just getting ready to go for a walk when my father called.

“So?” he asked. “What’s your verdict? Was it as bad as you’d thought it would be?”

I wanted to thank him for all the years of pestering me, to concede that he’d had my best interests at heart, but instead, unable to stop myself, I said, “Dad, they found something. And Dad…Daddy…I have cancer.”

It’s horrible, I know, but I’d somehow been waiting all my life to say those words. During fits of self-pity I had practiced them like lines in a play, never thinking of the person I’d be delivering them to but only of myself, and of how tragic I would sound. The “Daddy” bit surprised me, though, so much so that tears sprang forth and clouded my vision. This made it all the harder to see Lisa, who was listening to me from the other end of the sofa and mouthing what could have been any number of things but was probably, emphatically, You will go to hell for this.