In the Body of the World Read Free Page B

palliative care unit. The waitresses are grief counselors. They serve you hamburgers and hold your hand as you weep for your son, daughter, mother, father, wife, or husband. All the sales people, the street cleaners, the airport shuttle drivers have an eye out for the wounded. Thereare wig stores on every corner. In the one upscale restaurant you see people in wheelchairs hooked up to their IVs having dinner or sitting outside stealing a smoke on the street. In the Marriott Hotel every room is filled with a sick person or a person hoping not to be sick. If you have been in massive denial up to this point about illness and how many people, for example, have cancer, this would be the end of your denial. If you were afraid to take in the inevitability of illness visiting your body, this would be your “holy shit” moment. I cannot say if cancer town was a comfort or a horror. Like everything in America it was huge and consuming. I was wary. It reminded me of going to Disney World and dropping acid. Things were going very smoothly until I suddenly realized that we were inside a totally perfect consumer bubble and that even the horse’s shit was being collected in little pans before it hit the ground. All unpleasantness had been removed so that the people could be happy, happy, happy. On acid I began to panic that I would be forever stuck in this happy land and that just entering it meant they had laid siege to my mind. As I began to have the worst bummer trip of my life I remember feeling grateful for the anxiety because it defied this world of Pluto and Donald Duck, this world of animated automated amputated America.
    But I was not tripping now in Rochester. The diagnosis was so out of the blue, so shocking it had propelled me unwittingly into a kind of trance, and as I made my way through the homogenized, sanitized, Muzak-singing world I was grateful to be overwhelmed by beige.

SCAN

DR. HANDSOME
    The most handsome doctor in the world comes in to examine my rear end. What else, of course? I am obviously shell-shocked. I lie on the table, my underpants around my ankles, and think this is it. This is what the end feels like. The most handsome man in the world knowing that I have some horrible tumor inside my colon or rectum or uterus and that he has to feel it. I have already died from the humiliation and terror that are now merged in a cocktail of sweat and nausea, and I am curled on the table, hoping he will not see me, that I will disappear, and at the same time all I want is for him to see me and for this to be part of what it means to be human, and at that moment Dr. Handsome walks from one side of the examining table, where he is facing my back and naked ass, around to the other side, and he looks me in the eyes and says, “Before we begin, I want you to know how much I admire you andall you have done in this world for women and all you have written and all the ways you have made the world better. It is a privilege to care for you and I will do my very best.” I feel like a little shaking dog picked up by a stranger in the rain, and this moment makes everything that follows in the next days bearable, and I know I can trust him with my body and I bet he will save my life. Doctors never believe how simple it is to give patients dignity. It takes a sentence. It takes a short walk around a table.

SCAN

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW GOING INTO SURGERY
    Whether it’s in my liver. How many nodes are involved. Whether I will need a bag—that is, an ileostomy bag. Whether the bag will be permanent. Whether they will be able to find it all or get it all.
    They don’t say: We don’t know whether you will wake up, or have a bad response to all that cutting and bleeding and anesthesia. They don’t say: We don’t know if you will ever be the same, or what it will be like when the scar tissue forms and feels like rawhide under your skin, or how well you will handle the abscess that may follow the operation.
    I try to imagine what it