A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles

by Mary Elizabeth Williams

  It’s just past sundown on Sunday night when we pull in to the Joyce Kilmer rest stop for a turnpike dinner of hot dogs, one last detour before home. By the time we finish, night has fallen completely. As we walk back toward the car through the parking lot, the sight of the New Jersey sky over this dumpy Nathan’s Famous strikes me as one of the most profoundly beautiful things I’ve ever experienced. I remember looking through Jason’s telescope that night in March. This is where we come from. This is where we go. I climb into the car and buckle up, and I’m so moved I can barely speak. It’s like I’ve been hit upside the head with the entire cosmos. Just for tonight, I’m at peace with my place in the heavens.

  “I had a religious experience somewhere around Exit 9,” I tell Jeff later that night. “I was looking up at the stars, and I thought, whatever happens, it’s okay. You’re part of the universe. You’re connected to it forever. It was incredible.”

  “Yeah, well,” he says. “That’s nice that you want to go be a star somewhere in the Milky Way. But I just spent five hours in the car with those kids, and there’s no way you’re leaving me alone with them. You’re not going into the light. You’re not leaving to become a moonbeam. Forget it. I won’t let you. Fuck off.” It’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

  It’s three days later, and I have been abruptly summoned back to Sloan Kettering. I’m sitting next to an old man curled up under a leopard skin coat when I hear someone call for Mary Williams.

  An hour earlier, Dr. Partridge had phoned in the middle of my workday. “Before any procedure like the one you’re having, my colleagues and I get together to review all the patients’ tests,” she had explained. “Last night our radiologist saw something on the soft tissue around your perianal area that we have to check out immediately. Frankly, I was underwhelmed by it, but we need you to come in this afternoon.”

  Well, I’m sorry my rectal scan underwhelmed you, Doc. My friend Shannon always says that as long as you trust your doctor, the only time you need to freak out is when she says she needs you to come in right away. I guess this is one of those times that Shannon would advise me it’d be okay to freak out. This afternoon, I had hastily finished a movie review, hopped on the subway, and hauled myself back to the hospital, where I now find myself again in seersucker, bracing for a whole lot of anal probing.

  Dr. Partridge slowly pulls on her gloves and scours my nether regions with her fingers, checking for moles. She parts the cheeks and looks between them. Then she unceremoniously squirts some lube on her hands and goes in for an incredibly thorough internal exam. As she probes the terrain of my rectum, I wonder if she really needs to do this or she just lost a bet. “You’re in good shape,” she says. “Nothing unusual. No need to biopsy.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I appreciate you checking to be sure.” I also hate her a little right now for the surprise Wednesday afternoon fisting I’ve just received.

  I start to walk through the bright sunlight from east to west, in the direction of the A train. I never take the crosstown E train. No matter how bad the weather, I always walk. I need that buffer zone between my hospital visits and my regular life. I need to listen to Bruno Mars. And right now, I need to talk to Debbie.

  “How’s your vagina doing?” I ask. “Can you open beer bottles with it yet?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she says. “Pickle jars.”

  “Well, I can do that with my anus after the exam I’ve just had,” I tell her, as I proceed to unspool the events of my afternoon. I’m expecting some of the jokey Debbie I love to distract me out of the pissed-off mood I cannot seem to shake.

  Instead, she says, “I am extremely not okay with this.”

  I stop walking, right there in the middle of the busy sidewalk on 53rd Street, and I tell her the truth. “I’m extremely not okay too,” I admit. “It’s all great they can do these miraculous things, and I’m glad they’re going over me so carefully. But I am so tired of feeling chipped away. They got part of my head and my hair, they got lymph nodes, they got my thigh. Now they’re going to take out part of my lung. I know you can’t always go through life with everything you came in with, but I’m starting to feel like the Black Knight from Holy Grail. What are they going to lop off next? I’m slowly being robbed of my own body, and I can’t even hold a candle to you, Deb—you’re basically hollow inside now. You probably rattle when you walk.”

  “I know,” she sighs. “A huge team of people took a piece of my abdomen to rebuild my vagina. My doctor is writing an article on vaginal cuff evisceration, thanks to me. I’m doing okay, but I feel like, how many more times can I get on that table? How many more times can they take something out of me? I want this thing to leave us alone now.” I want this to leave us alone too. All of us. Debbie and Mike and Jeff and the girls and Mom. It turns out that after a pop rectal violation, sometimes you just hit the wall.

  Two days later, a package arrives. There’s no return address and no note. It doesn’t need one. Inside is a black T-shirt with the image of an armless, legless, bloody stump of a man. Emblazoned across the front are the words: IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Storm

  August 25, 2011

  The morning of my surgery is muggy and still. It’s a quietly menacing sign of the hurricane currently brewing off the Atlantic coast.

  This time, Jeff comes with me to the hospital. “It could be a lot of things,” he says as we ride downtown. “I’m still going to assume it could be benign. There’s no reason not to maintain hope.” I pat his hand and stare out the window.

  The kids finished up summer camp a few days ago and are already at Jeff’s mom’s. The plan is that they’ll stay with her while I have my procedure, then we’ll all meet up at the house and go to the Cape on Saturday, just as we’d originally scheduled it. Jeff and I ride up the elevator together to the same floor I was on a year ago, where the man at the front desk had jokingly told me not to come back. I’m back. Back walking down the hallway to the waiting area, past a row of “consultation rooms” for patients and their families. Each one has tissue boxes scattered conspicuously around. I wonder if this place has a Yelp rating as one of the top buildings in New York City for copious weeping.

  When the concierge comes to escort me back to pre-op, he introduces himself politely. “I’m Tom, Ms. Williams. How are you today?”

  “White-hot terror and dread, Tom, thanks,” I reply.

  I know the routine this time, the placing of my clothes in the garment bag, the donning of skid-proof slippers, the uncomprehending gazing at the pages of the new Lev Grossman novel. This is everything I’d feared when I first came here. It’s home. A young doctor comes in with a clipboard full of paperwork and asks if I would be willing to donate the tissue they remove from me for a study they’re doing of melanoma. I happily sign my tissues over, satisfied at the thought that my evil cells are serving science, and only somewhat paranoid that I’ll be responsible for the melanin-fueled clone army that eventually enslaves humanity.

  My anesthesiologist Paula, dark haired and surprisingly smoking hot, drops by to ask some questions and check me out. “Open your mouth,” she purrs in her Milanese accent, and I unhinge my jaw like I’m trying to swallow a rabbit. “Wide. Wider. Great.” I shut my mouth and she looks ridiculously pleased. “You’re an anesthesiologist’s dream,” she says. “You’re thin and you have a large mouth.” Trust me, I think, in my 20s, that combination didn’t just make me popular with anesthesiologists.

  An hour later, an orderly comes to escort me to surgery. “I’ll see you on the other side,” I tell Jeff, and walk once again down the long, cold corridor into the operating theater. It’s just a little surgery. It’s just two dots in my chest. It doesn’t have to be cancer.

  I slide onto the table and the doctors cover me with blankets. Paula is there, smiling. I turn my head to see the drip by my arm. There’s much bustling now, but I’m calm. I slowly lower my eyelids, and when I open my eyes again I
am in post-op. “You’re all finished,” a faraway voice says. “Here’s your button if you need pain management. Jeff will be here soon.”

  Based on this thick stupor of postsurgical anesthesia and happy dopiness I’m enjoying, Paula must have really gone to town on me. I close my eyes again and open them when I hear the scrape of a chair. Jeff is sitting beside me; one bleary look at his forlorn, weary face and I know. I’ll be needing some more reality-obliterating opiates to handle what he’s going to say to me now.

  After the surgery, Dr. Risk, still clad in his surgical blue scrubs, had come out to where Jeff had been waiting and ushered him into one of those small meeting rooms with the boxes of tissues, and had told him how it had gone and what he had seen. Jeff had sat with him, trying to fathom the enormity of what the surgeon was telling him and to remember it correctly so that he could then turn around and tell it to the mother of his children. Jeff had stood up and said, “Thank you.” He had watched me for a while, asleep on a gurney, had seen my eyes flutter open expectantly when he sat down next to me, and he had asked himself how he was going to speak to me without getting upset.

  “The procedure went well,” Jeff says. “They got the one spot out of your lung, which is great. The doctor says he’s 99 percent sure it’s malignant. The other was too deep. He’s going to talk to the immunology team about drugs to shrink it, and you’ll go from there.” He tells me it all in a cool, soothing voice.

  I am flat on my back as the tears begin to roll down onto my neck. “I’m sorry,” I say over and over again. “I am so so so sorry.” In all of my fear over the past few weeks, I’d still clung to foolish hope. I’d entertained the fantasy of hearing Dr. Risk tell me it was just some benign growth and, whew, what a crazy scare that was, huh? The truth is that I am such a failure. Such a cause of anxiety in my family’s lives. I tried, everybody, I really did. I feel the morphine kick in and dreamily assess the situation. Metastatic melanoma. The optimism of the past few weeks floats away in an opiate fog.

  Soon, the nurses roll me into my room, where the bewigged woman in the other bed is currently belting out “Together, Wherever We Go” from Gypsy with assorted family members. “With you for me and me for you, we’ll muddle through whatever we do, together!” they sing. Her name is Juliet. She’s a cabaret singer. She has lung cancer.

  “Are we bothering you?” she asks.

  “No,” I say sleepily. “I was just wondering if you take requests.”

  When the nurse brings me lunch—a tray of strawberry Jell-O and broth—I ask if I can get help going to the bathroom. I can barely move on my own yet. There’s a drainage tube coming out of my back and an oxygen tube coming out of my nose.

  “Not yet,” she says. “You’ve got a catheter. You can get up when we remove it at midnight.”

  “Midnight?” I ask. “Is that when the catheter fairy comes?”

  All afternoon, Jeff sits with me while I drowse uncomfortably and press the round, red button that delivers measured doses of happy juice. Do I, at some point in all of this, talk to the girls? Do I attempt a perky-voiced, “Hi, it’s official: Mommy’s got more cancer!” conversation or do I leave the bad-news breaking entirely to Jeff? I don’t know. Of the many, many traumatic things that have happened in this cancer odyssey of mine—and of all those still yet to come—this is the place my mind goes forever resolutely blank. I remember Juliet and her show tunes. I remember watching Bring It On through a narcotic haze. I remember dropping off to sleep and waking up in intense, rapidly amplifying pain, repeatedly. I remember dark clouds rolling in the sky outside. Yet of how my daughters learned that their mother’s cancer had returned and metastasized, I have nothing at all. My mind refuses not just to remember it but even to imagine it. I think my mind probably knows what it’s doing.

  Eventually, after they’ve polished off the pizzas they have brought in from Patsy’s, Juliet’s family takes off, and Jeff has to as well. For a few minutes there’s no sound in the room except the rhythmic drone of monitors and machines. Then Juliet turns on the Weather Channel. She falls asleep immediately, so I spend the night in and out of narcotic rest, lulled by the escalatingly frantic reports about how Hurricane Irene is galloping ever closer to landfall. We were supposed to go to Cape Cod Saturday. Now the mayor is evacuating parts of the city, and I am here with cancer in my lung. It’s a fitful night.

  In the morning, Jeff is back at my bedside when Dr. Risk stops by. “The surgery went well,” he says. “The other growth is small, and because of its delicate location, we think the best plan for you now is to treat this systemically. There are some very exciting new drugs available now.”

  “I wasn’t really looking for excitement,” I say.

  He pretends he didn’t hear that as he continues. “We’re fortunate—ten years ago we probably wouldn’t even have been able to find the tumor at this size.”

  Fortunate me, I have just a speck of malignant, metastatic cancer. “When you come back in a few weeks,” he continues, “you and Dr. Partridge will talk more about your course of treatment. In the meantime, you go home and enjoy your vacation.” The last time a doctor suggested I go enjoy myself, I wound up getting fisted by my oncologist.

  Later, they roll me down to x-ray and park me in the waiting area with the rest of the lung cases. We sit together in our hospital socks and awkwardly tied robes, clicking our buttons when the sensations of our bodies trying to knit themselves back together become too difficult to bear.

  It’s still early in the day, but the whole floor is buzzing with activity. “They’re evacuating NYU Hospital,” my nurse tells me. “They’re sending oncology patients up here. Anyone who can go home, they’re discharging now.” I’m doing well and my oxygen levels are stellar, but this new GTFO plan is not the leisurely recuperative day I’d envisioned. The nurse untethers me from my beloved morphine button and hands me release papers, a spirometer to help me exercise my cancery lung and to gauge how successfully I’m breathing, and three bottles of pills: a jumbo portion of Percocet, stool softener, and laxatives. Good times. All we need to do now is get uptown and then out to Mom’s. During an exodus.

  Once outside, Jeff flags a taxi. Its air conditioner is broken, and the combination of Friday afternoon traffic combined with the Hurricane Irene stampede makes the streets barely passable. My meds are wearing off quickly now, and my freshly operated-on lung is asserting its irritation with the situation. I sit in the backseat, increasingly short of breath in the humid heat and car exhaust. By 145th Street, I’m in wrenching pain and can barely breathe. I suddenly have only one panicky thought now—that I cannot stay in this car a minute longer. So, at a traffic light, I grab the door handle and abruptly jump out. It’s possible I’m not thinking too clearly here.

  Jeff thrusts a few bills into the driver’s hand while I gasp frantically on the sidewalk. I feel like an animal. I cannot even speak; I can only make desperate wheezing sounds. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. I look helplessly at Jeff while passersby flutter to my side, asking if I need a place to sit down. A grandmotherly woman even offers me a hit off her asthma inhaler. I wave them all off as Jeff guides me into a Starbucks, where I sit in the chilly artificial air, shaking as I try to get my breath back. Jeff manages to procure a small paper bag, the kind they usually slip those nice vanilla scones in, and hands it to me. “Breathe,” he says. I’m not sure I remember how.

  When I’ve cooled down and am breathing somewhat regularly again, we get another cab, this time with air-conditioning, and I immediately doze off in the backseat. Even without the hurricane, I don’t think a five-hour car ride to Wellfleet tomorrow would have been in the cards. Instead, Jeff, the kids, and I will spend the weekend at Mom’s, watching the storm howl around the house while we all remain cozily bunkered inside.

  August 27, 2011

  “What’s this fun little thing?” Lucy asks, turning over my spirometer curiously as I sluggishly try to follow the plot of an old Friends episode. It is two da
ys after my surgery.

  “I have to blow into it to practice breathing,” I reply. “I try to make the blue thing go up as high as I can.”

  “Ooh, can I play with it too?” Bea asks. They haven’t enjoyed any of my cancer apparatus this much since the elf caps.

  “Sure,” I tell her, “but I know you’d beat me in getting to the highest line.”

  The time passes like a dream—a narcotics and Sandra Bullock movies on cable TV–fueled dream, where the reverie is only occasionally shattered by the sound of a falling tree or Mom’s radio downstairs, full of news reports advising people whether to stay or leave the area. Underneath it all, there’s the constant hum of not what’s outside but what’s inside—the pain where my body was opened and the realization that I do indeed have cancer in my lung. We have to make it to Wellfleet. This may be my last chance.

  The kids sense it too. Lucy will later tell me how that weekend, as the wind whipped outside their bedroom, she admitted to Bea, “I’m scared about Mommy.” She will tell me that she wanted Bea to know that they could talk about it. She will say that Bea had answered her, “Me too.”

  On Sunday we sit together at the table after dinner, eating brownies that Mom has made for us. They are extraordinarily child- and person with cancer who might want to eat her feelings-friendly—thickly frosted and covered in round candy sprinkles.

  I am wearily biting into mine when Lucy has a question. “I’m confused,” she says. “If you had surgery, why do you still have cancer?”