Last Dance, Last Chance

on herniated cervical disks to stabilize my neck.”
    Anthony ignored her pain. “We were hardly speaking to each other,” Debbie remembered. “He was just never there. Not for me and not for the kids.”
    Debbie’s neck injuries were extremely painful, and her orthopedist prescribed painkillers. When she needed them, however, she noticed that there were far fewer in the container than there should have been. There was only one explanation: Anthony was taking them.
    At that point, a more sophisticated wife than Debbie Pignataro might have recognized the classic signs that her husband was having an affair. His new red sports car was one, and the frequency of trips away from home was another. His obsession with his own appearance increased. He’d already had his nose reshaped with plastic surgery, but now he got cheek implants. He had eye surgery to correct his vision, and he bought the most expensive toupees. All were indications that Anthony was trying to impress someone—but not Debbie.
    “After winning several collegiate boxing tournaments,” Anthony wrote in his book in his odd third-person voice, “the doctor was very principled in the virtues of exercise and diet. His medical school education served to reinforce his commitment to personal training. He often referred to exercise as a form of mental therapy. Medical science has proposed the ‘endorphin theory.’ To Dr. Pignataro, this was not [just] a theory…He struggled to find the time to work out. He would skip his lunch break to make it to the gym four or five times a week.”
    In truth, not all of Anthony’s habits were healthy. He drank pitchers of tequila margaritas, and he sometimes seemed so out of touch that Debbie wondered if he might be on drugs—more drugs than the pills missing from her own prescription vials. Certainly, he was working very hard, and he had a lot on his mind—far more than she realized. He had to do some fancy time-planning to keep enlarging his practice, to preserve his sacred Wednesdays for research and invention, and to allow ample time to court the elusive Moira. Often, he came home only to sit in his recliner and drink until he fell asleep.
    Debbie, who had weighed 110 pounds when they were married, had gradually put on about 40 pounds. It didn’t seem to matter whether she dieted or not; Anthony would always find something to ridicule about the way she looked.
    When Debbie was recovering after one of her neck surgeries, she was given steroids that made her face puffy. Anthony stared at her and said, “Look at you. Who would want you?”
    Little by little, he wore down her belief in herself. Even so, she kept trying harder to please him and make his life more comfortable.
     
    Things got worse in the spring of 1996. They could both see that Anthony’s father wasn’t well. As Anthony himself wrote—back in his third-person voice: “The doctor’s world began to crumble.”
    Dr. Ralph Pignataro had always been brilliant and sharp, Anthony’s example and hero, the one person whom Anthony continually tried to impress. He was the man who had never had time for his son until Anthony, too, was a physician. In a sense, he defined Anthony’s world. While Anthony’s mother had pampered him, his father was the god he never quite lived up to. But given enough time, he was sure that his father would be astounded by what he could do. His father was the audience Anthony played to, and it was Dr. Ralph’s ultimate approval that would assure Anthony that he was finally a man and a doctor of great excellence.
    That was not to be. Gradually, the family had to acknowledge that Dr. Ralph was often confused, fumbling for words, and forgetting things that had been second nature to him. He had always possessed a mind fully capable of handling myriad details. Now, they realized that he was trying to hide his symptoms, which had become so profound that they could no longer be concealed. An MRI scan showed what Anthony had feared: his father had a large tumor in the frontal lobe of his brain. Always a very heavy smoker, Dr. Ralph also had many tumors in his lungs and liver. Buffalo area specialists gave him six months to live.
    Anthony researched all the advanced treatments for the type of cancer from which his father suffered. He took charge and strongly recommended that his father travel at once to Houston for treatment. Dr. Ralph refused. He knew that he had only months to live, and he wanted to spend them in Buffalo with his