Okay, at least I think the writing is going better. I might even be proud of this one. Even the word count was where it was supposed to be.
Still no e-mail message saying “Stop sending us submissions, you ridiculous hack.” Maybe that address is just a black hole no one ever reads, so it’s just some kind of “Waiting for Godot” sort of thing. I could write something about Russia; then maybe David Remnick would read it. If I hear nothing after ten submissions, I’ll create a new personality. I guess something that sounds like a middle-aged man would be good.
I’m not as disappointed every week, though. Now, this is just what I do. Sort of like going to chemo and not liking my hair.
Anyway, the premise this week is that if GWB is “re”-elected, things will be so bad that a lot of people will want to flee the country. Which I think is completely true.
Had a second opinion from a renowned oncologist on Wednesday. He didn’t have a magic bullet, and I didn’t realize how much I’d been hoping for one until I realized he didn’t. He said that the whole thing is game theory: sometimes the cancer advances, sometimes we push it back, but we just have to keep me on the field because it’s plausible that they could have a cure in the next five years. I’m not sure he understands what “game theory” is (he seemed to be talking about football, and I was thinking more like prisoner’s dilemma), and I don’t really agree about finding a cure that soon—maybe within ten or fifteen years. He had a lot of advice, both about non-toxic treatments and keeping MSK honest. But he seemed like a very kind man.
We came home to a message to call my GP, and I knew he was about to tell me exactly what he told me when I got him on the phone: I’m positive for BRCA-2. My GP is the best doctor I've ever had, but he also has ADHD (I’m serious—he wrote a book about it) and so he started talking and talking: “So what does that mean? Should you get your daughter tested? Yes. Should you get your ovaries removed? Yes. Should you have a prophylactic mastectomy on the remaining breast? Yes.” Normally I let him go, both to be polite and because he’s usually entertaining (once he told me about how his friend tried Viagra and was up having sex all night, then paused and said, “Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have sex all night. I’ve got kids, I’ve got patients…”), but this time I cut him off with questions, and just kept thinking, Kylie, Kylie, Kylie.
I’m trying to decide whether this was the worst moment of my life, but there’ve been three, four, five standout really bad moments now, still including my junior prom, so it’s a hard choice. While my GP was talking, all I could picture was bashing the phone receiver against the desk until it broke. I hung up the phone and told Adam I was going for a walk. He asked to go with me and I said no. I was only gone a few minutes. It was cold, and I saw a family coming toward me, with a kid on a bike, and I wondered whether anything awful had ever happened to them and turned around. Adam tried to talk to me when I came back in, but I collapsed in a corner of our room with the phone, still wearing my coat. I told him that I needed to call my shrink. He said I could talk to him, and I told him no, that I needed to say things that I never wanted him to hear.
Adam was trying desperately to do the right thing this whole time, but he finally left. I took my coat off and pulled it over my knees and called my shrink on his cell phone. I talked to him, sobbing uncontrollably, for about half an hour. He said a lot of true and useful things, then said that he wanted me to take some Xanax and write down a list of things I’d done for Kylie or good things about Kylie or something (I wasn’t really listening because he should know by now that I don’t do the earnestly writing things down* routine), and call him back in fifteen minutes. I told him that I’d be all right, but he said that he’d appreciate it, so I said fine.
I hung up the phone, curled into a ball on the floor, pulled my coat over my head and sobbed. It may seem strange or overdramatic, but when I was a kid I liked to hide in closets or behind the Christmas tree. Or not so much hide as just sit. It was quiet and private and no one could find you, and I liked the fabrics of the coats and the smell of cedar.
I looked at my watch after crying for a while, since I didn’t want my shrink to freak out, and realized that I kind of liked it under my coat. It’s an expensive and stereotypically Westchester suburban mom kind of coat that I bought after the second or third chemo treatment, when I was high as a kite on steroids. My theory about these kinds of things is that they’re like a secret handshake. Most people don’t recognize them, let alone the authentic from the fake, but for some reason it’s important to get it right for the five percent of people who do, as a silent signifier that you understand the norms and belong where you are. All of this flashed through my mind as I stared at the plaid lining and felt kind of comforted by it, even though it hadn’t offered me any protection. If you’re wearing the soccer mom coat you’re supposed to have the soccer mom life, right? And the soccer mom’s life is full of babies and dogs and mommy and me classes, not doctors and catheters and scarred veins. It’s like I got the heroin addict’s life only without all the yummy heroin.
After another few minutes I got up and took the Xanax and called my shrink back and told him I was all right (I was scheduled to see him the next day). Then I curled back up under the coat, and eventually went downstairs and pretended that nothing had happened.
* Yeah, I know, I’m writing about it now, in a postmodern meta-memoir David Foster Wallace kind of blah blah blah way.
