The Schopenhauer Cure(3)
“Meaning? Come on, Bob, don’t talk around this. ‘Notable,’ four millimeters, ulcerated, five nodes? Be straight. Talk to me as if I were a layman.”
“Meaning bad news. It’s a sizable melanoma, and it has spread to the nodes. The real danger here is more distant spread, but we won’t know that till the CT scan which I’ve arranged for tomorrow at eight.”
Two days later they continued their discussion. Bob reported that the CT scan was negative—no evidence of spread elsewhere in the body. That was the first good news. “But even so, Julius, this adds up to a dangerous melanoma.”
“How dangerous?” Julius’s voice cracked. “What are we talking about? What kind of survival rate?”
“You know we can only address that question in terms of statistics. Everyone is different. But for an ulcerated melanoma, four millimeters deep, with five nodes, the statistical charts show a five-year survival of less than twenty-five percent.”
Julius sat for several moments with head bowed, heart pounding, tears in his eyes, before asking, “Keep going. You’re being straight. I need to know what to tell my patients. What will my course be like? What’s going to happen?”
“It’s impossible to be precise because nothing more will happen to you until the melanoma recurs somewhere in the body. When it does, especially if it metastasizes, then the course might be quick, perhaps weeks or months. As for your patients, hard to say, but it would not be unreasonable to hope for at least a year of good health ahead of you.”
Julius nodded slowly, head down.
“Where’s your family, Julius? Shouldn’t you have brought someone in with you?”
“I think you know about my wife’s death ten years ago. My son is on the East Coast and my daughter in Santa Barbara. I’ve said nothing to them yet; I didn’t see any sense in disrupting their lives unnecessarily. I generally do better licking my wounds in private anyway, but I’m pretty sure that my daughter will come up immediately.”
“Julius, I’m so sorry to have to tell you all this. Let me end with a little good news. There’s a lot of energetic research going on now—perhaps a dozen very active labs in this country and abroad. For unknown reasons the incidence of melanoma has risen, almost doubled in the last ten years, and it’s a hot research area. It’s possible that breakthroughs are close at hand.”
For the next week Julius lived in a daze. Evelyn, his daughter, a classics professor, canceled her classes and drove up immediately to spend several days with him. He spoke at length to her, his son, his sister and brother, and to intimate friends. He often woke in terror at 3 A.M., crying out, and gasping for air. He canceled his hours with his individual patients and with his therapy group for two weeks and spent hours pondering what and how to tell them.
The mirror told him he didn’t look like a man who had reached the end of his life. His three-mile daily jog had kept his body young and wiry, without an ounce of fat. Around his eyes and mouth, a few wrinkles. Not many—his father had died with none at all. He had green eyes; Julius had always been proud of that. Strong and sincere eyes. Eyes that could be trusted, eyes that could hold anyone’s gaze. Young eyes, the eyes of the sixteen-year-old Julius. The dying man and the sixteen-year-old gazed at each other across the decades.
He looked at his lips. Full, friendly lips. Lips that, even now in his time of despair, were on the edge of a warm grin. He had a full head of unruly black curly hair, graying only in his sideburns. When he was a teenager in the Bronx, the old white-haired, red-faced, anti-Semitic barber, whose tiny shop was down his street between Meyer’s candy store and Morris’s butcher shop, cursed his tough hair as he tugged at it with a steel comb and cut it with thinning shears. And now Meyer, Morris, and the barber were all dead, and little sixteen-year-old Julius was on death’s call sheet.
One afternoon he tried to attain some sense of mastery by reading the melanoma literature in the medical school library, but that proved futile. Worse than futile—it made things more horrendous. As Julius apprehended the truly ghastly nature of his disease, he began to think of melanoma as a voracious creature sinking ebony tendrils deep into his flesh. How startling it was to realize that suddenly he was no longer the supreme life form. Instead he was a host; he was nourishment, food for a fitter organism whose gobbling cells divided at a dizzying pace, an organism that blitzkrieged and annexed adjacent protoplasm and was now undoubtedly outfitting clusters of cells for cruises into the bloodstream and colonization of distant organs, perhaps the sweet friable feeding grounds of his liver or the spongy grassy meadows of his lungs.
Julius put aside the reading. Over a week had gone by, and it was time to move past distraction. The hour had come to face what was really happening. Sit down, Julius, he told himself. Sit down and meditate upon dying. He closed his eyes.
So death, he thought, has finally made its appearance on stage. But what a banal entrance—the curtains jerked open by a roly-poly dermatologist with a cucumber nose, magnifying glass in hand, and costumed in white hospital coat with his name stitched in dark blue letters upon his upper breast pocket.
And the closing scene? Destined, most likely, to be equally banal. His costume would be his wrinkled pinstriped New York Yankees night-shirt with DiMaggio’s number 5 on the back. The stage set? The same queen-sized bed in which he had slept for thirty years, crumpled clothes on the chair beside the bed and, upon his bedside table, a stack of unread novels unaware that their time would now never come. A whim-pering, disappointing finale. Surely, Julius thought, the glorious adventure of his life deserved something more…more…more what?