Everything Changes

in litigious times and you need to cover your ass’ kind of way, or is it more like a ‘that mass looks like it may very well be a malignant tumor, and procedurally, a biopsy is the next step in diagnosis and treatment’ kind of way?”
    The doctor turns away from the screen to look at me. “Listen, Zack, I understand your concern. The odds are highly against someone your age, with your medical history, having bladder cancer. But what I see in your bladder is something that shouldn’t normally be there. That concerns me, and we need to figure out what it is. I’m sorry I can’t give you a more concrete answer right now. As hard as it is, you’re going to have to just believe in the odds and wait to see what we find out.”
    “I understand all that,” I say. “But off the record, what’s your gut?”
    “My gut?”
    “You see this stuff all day. You must have a gut reaction.”
    Sanderson exhales slowly. “My gut is, I shouldn’t be seeing something like that in someone your age and I’ll feel better when I know what it is.”
    “Thanks,” I say. “That wasn’t remotely helpful.”
    “Even if it does turn out to be a cancerous or precancerous growth, you should be advised that in most cases it’s highly treatable.”
    “Great.” For a guy who’s been doing this as long as he has, he is staggeringly clueless. I don’t want to hear “treatable,” because “treatable” means it’s something, and even if it can be cured, or removed, or whatever the term is for cancer, it won’t change the fact that it was there to begin with, that my body betrayed me by allowing this to happen, that I’ll never feel safe in my own skin again. Where’s the silver lining in that? I’m like Craig Hodges and his stupid purple swooshes, donning my blinders when it comes to reason and rationale, only interested in hearing that the problem isn’t really a problem.
    He performs the biopsy right through the scope, cuts a microscopic piece of tissue right out of me. I feel another hot pinch, this time in the depths of my belly, and the slightest convulsion, and then it’s done. Now that the scope has been in me for a while, I’m dreading its removal, imagining the slow, sickening drag as he pulls it out, but the anesthetic is still working and I barely feel a thing. Afterward, I piss for what feels like five minutes, the stream vibrating oddly through my numb instrument. There’s a lot more blood now, but I’ve been warned by the doctor to expect that for a day or two after the biopsy. I dry off with a towel and get dressed again. I examine my genitals carefully, but everything seems to be just as I left it. The doctor warns me that in addition to the blood, I might experience a mild burning sensation when I urinate over the next few days. If the pain or bleeding continues after that, I should give him a call. He’ll have the results of the biopsy by Friday, and I should try not to worry about it. “Statistically speaking,” he tells me again, “the odds of someone your age having bladder cancer are very slim.”
    Maybe so,
I think as I ride down in the elevator.
But do those odds still apply once you’ve already established that there’s a biopsy-worthy mass lurking in there?
Somehow, at this point I think we’re dealing with a whole other set of stats, and while I’m not interested in hearing them, I’m fairly certain that they would be somewhat less encouraging.

    The instant I turn my cell phone on, it starts to beep and flash the message icon. I have three urgent messages from clients who need to hear back from me first thing in the morning. When you’re a middleman, everything is always an emergency. The last message is from Hope, wondering where I am. Since it’s just about six, I decide to surprise her at her office. I cut over to Fifth Avenue and then downtown through the Fifties, to Rockefeller Center. The sidewalks are swarming with the after-work crowd, grimly staring ahead, talking on cell phones, or taking in the questionable merchandise in the hodgepodge windows of immigrant electronics shops.
    I wait in the lobby at Rockefeller Plaza, leaning against the wall as I watch the exodus pour out of the elevators, the men in their upscale, corporate-casual outfits, the women looking as if they’re all headed to an audition for
Sex and the City,
dressed to titillate in aggressively short skirts, expensive haircuts, and designer shoes that clack authoritatively against the marble