Cigar Box Banjo Read Free Page B

pneumonia, exacerbated by my severe tulip allergy.
    When a new doctor, Dr. Tran, came in, he informed me that there were many reasons I might have fluid around my lungs, the most common two being infection and cancer. “Infection is eight times more common than cancer,” he said. He left, then returned a short while later with a tray full of equipment, vials and litre bottles and lengths of tubing and assorted needles. He and an aide made me sit up on my wheelie hospital bed. They placed a table beside it so that I could drape my arms across it and lean forward. Dr. Tran tapped and thumped my back with his thick fingers, marked a spot with a pirate’s X for freezing. “Little sting like a bee,” he said as the needle carrying the anaesthetic pierced the skin. He didn’t say anything before he drove the two-inch draining needle into my back. He didn’t say, for example, “Now it will feel like a rabid wolverine ripping through your flesh to suck out the life-juice.” A warm sensation spread across my back as fluid o’er-spilled the puncture. Dr. Tran showed me a test tube full of light brown fluid. “It looks like this.” He angled the needle again and pushed it hard. Before long he had collected three litres of the stuff, which looked suspiciously like beer. English bitter, of which I have had my share, and for a second I thought that perhaps at some point, in my haste, I had dumped a few pints down the wrong hole.
    As painful as the ordeal was, every second it went on I felt lighter, better. They left the bottles of fluid beside me for most of the evening, and I spent the night in the emergency ward. They asked if I wanted painkillers; although my back was sore, I felt right enough. They asked if I wanted something to help me sleep, but I thought I’d be able to manage it drug-free. I was exhausted, spent. I still couldn’t think of anyone to contact. I text-messaged a woman I’d known, briefly, the previous autumn. “I’m in the hospital.”
    “Yikes! What’s wrong?”
    “If I’m lucky,” I punched out with my thumbs, “it’s pneumonia.”
    I WAS discharged from the hospital, having had, as I say, more than three litres of fluid removed from the cavity surrounding my left lung. What I’d experienced was, to give it an impressive scientific name, a “massive pleural effusion.” The high honcho doctor, head of Respirology, had come into my hospital room to tell me it was “obviously very serious,” but he said it would take them a few days to figure out why, exactly, the fluid had accumulated. So home I went, supplied with some killer antibiotics, and in a few days I was feeling pretty good. Indeed, when my friend Shaughnessy called, checking up on me, I said, “You know what, Shaughn, I’m half-inclined to believe in God. Because, face it, I was kind of at a low point. I mean, there’s no work . . .” (the Canadian television and movie industry, which is where I’d long made my pin money, was moribund, with nothing being produced) “. . . my career as a novelist isn’t going anywhere . . .” ( The Ravine, my last book, had been long-listed for the Giller Prize, but pretty much ignored after that) “ . . . my personal life is a mess . . .” (which was, of course, more my fault than anybody else’s) “. . . so maybe this health scare is God’s way of saying, ‘Hey, fat-boy, you should appreciate what you’ve got.’”
    And that was the attitude with which I, accompanied by Martin Worthy, my dear friend and a founding member of the musical group Porkbelly Futures, went to attend my consultation with Dr. Frazier on May 11, 2009.
    “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
    “I feel terrific,” I said.
    “Great, just great.” Dr. Frazier picked up a file. “Well, we’ve got some answers for you. It’s cancer. It’s lung cancer—”
    (“Hold on, hold on!” I wanted to shout. “Didn’t you just hear me tell you I felt terrific?”)
    “It’s the non-small cell type of