Wait

I knew something had to change.

I have spent the first half of this year on an almost absurd winning streak. Business is booming. My marriage has recovered from my being unfaithful; my endeavors seem blessed in every way. I was unfaithful, but my mistress was alcohol. I was so far removed from that mentality that I rarely had a thought about the bottle anymore, let alone had a craving.

There was a stern, cynical voice in the back of my thoughts. It took in all this success. It noted my freedom from alcohol, and it seemed to say to me, "You just wait. "

It got me thinking about hard times in my life and how, ultimately, the only answer was to wait it out. Eventually, the hard times phase out, and the pain goes away. Time heals all wounds, as they say.

Eventually, you get to a place where the hard times are a more distant memory, and you can say things to others whom you see struggling, such as, "It takes a little pain to punctuate the beauty in life, else it would get boring. "Or that old line, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger. "

Better advice would be to wait it out because life can't be all a shit sandwich all the time, can it? Surely, if you don't give up and keep sucking in the wind and making turds every day, then, eventually, that which is making things hard will go away and leave you to your happy times and good friends, right?

Right.

In January of 2024, I began to notice changes in my body.

It was easy to dismiss it, to deny its reality. But I could wait no longer and took myself fearfully to the doctor.

Tests were ordered, and a CAT scan showed an abnormality in my bladder. 

The doctor called me and informed me that the wait was over. I now knew what the next hard time would be like. "I hate to rain on your parade, "he said. I know you said you don't have time for lunch, but you have to make time to come in right away for camera work. "

I know two things about doctors: it's terrible if they are urgent about anything. And, if they say something will be "slightly uncomfortable, "it will be torture.

The discomfort was much as I expected, but it was bearable after the camera was inserted and the doctor pumped my bladder full of water to expand it for viewing.

The image on the screen looked out of place. 

It had the texture of a wart and stood in stark contrast to the rest of my bladder, which I was viewing on the screen next to the examination table. 

"There it is, "the doctor said.

He then took me on a quick tour of that part of the inside of my body. There were bubbles and a slit that he said was the portal to my kidneys. He showed me the healthy flesh. It reminded me of when I was a kid and used a flashlight up against my cheek with my face close to the mirror and my mouth open. You can see the veins and muscles through your skin. It was like that: the walls of my bladder looked the same until the camera focused in on the evil-looking interloper.

It was like a wart. It protruded from the wall of my bladder, popping in to view on the screen in high-definition horror, like a maniacal jack-in-the-box. Underneath it was a spot that looked like a raw wound. That must be where the blood was coming from.

I blurted out the obvious question.

"Is it cancer? "

The doctor smiled and said confidently, "I can't tell...but most likely! Either way, I'm going to cut it out. "

* * *

Just like that, I am in line for surgery. He explains that they cannot diagnose or use any of the scary terms like "stage___ "until they do the surgery. They cannot see if it is just the surface or growing into the wall; what they can see is that it is close to my kidneys, and that is less than optimal.

Like a choose your chapter' book where the story unfolds in different ways depending on which part of the book you select ( or have selected for you ), he describes the various scenarios that might play out. My choices are a quick surgery followed by regular camera work because it is likely to return, a long surgery where they have to put a stint in my kidney, to the Grand Voyage of cancer, the dread metastatized death march, where it already spread through your bones and such. The odds are low, but so are the odds of getting bladder cancer at 55.

Such a thing strips away the many layers of denial that your mind erects like the bulwarks of a fortress. It is easy to wish away and convince yourself there is no problem.

I walked out of the office in what felt like slow motion. My legs felt heavy. My internal voice was stern and declarative: I have cancer. 

This unleashes a torrent of emotions. Is disbelief an emotion? Is shock? They are loud and present. Also, life flashes before my eyes—not my own, but my children's. Will I really not be able to guide them? Will I know my grandchildren? All drama aside, the fact is what I have would be fatal within two years if untreated.

All of the facts and statistics, the five-year survival rates are at my fingertips, thanks to the internets. The odds of the disease reoccurring are high. So, this is my new reality. I will most certainly die of cancer, and much sooner than I expected. 

I have a man cave. Well, it's really more of a storage unit. But it is my space where I store my things. One side of my cave is all of our Christmas decorations. The other side is music and climbing gear, my tents and misc. Tools. There is a shelf where I store gifts I have started to box for my siblings in my storage. I come from an absurdly large family. It's a story unto itself. I am the oldest of my father's kids, and boy, did he have a lot of kids. He had so many kids he apparently ran out of name ideas, and I have a younger brother with the same first name. 

I know it's rather morbid, but as I am the oldest, I had the idea to make something special for each of them, as I'm likely the first to check out. I couldn't give one a pinball machine and the other a Tiffany Clock. I wanted it to be artistic, as I've always believed that works of art absorb some of the life energy of the artist. I gave them part of myself by giving them a piece of my art. Some I do not know. It's always been a source of distant pain in my heart that I could be at a grocery store checking out, and the clerk could be one of my younger siblings, and we would not know each other.

I decided to use the main thing I'd used to get sober and survive the boredom of mindless COVID lockdowns as my gift to them all. I started building each of them a small model airplane. They would be as detailed and involved as you could imagine, and each one could take a month or two to build.

In my space, I looked at those Christmas lights and the paltry two gifts I'd managed to box, and it hit me.

I looked at the Christmas lights, wondering if I would install them this Christmas, not because they are annoying. The idea of building another twenty-nine models for my siblings ( yes, I have that many siblings ) suddenly seemed an unlikely proposition. I have them all stacked up and ready to go—a stash, as it is known. 

Now the thought was to boxing them and selling them, while I still could, because there is no possible way, my own rather terrified internal voice calmly pointed out, I would live to build them all.

Suddenly, that feeling is crushing.

All of these things, these toys...my guitars and sporting goods, my books and toy airplanes and music gear all were bought with the purpose of filling my free time, to be there for me when I had leisure time. Time to waste. I was looking at a room full of things meant to make passing my time easier and funner. The decorations were there to be put up to mark the passing of more time as a family.

Now, it all seems so silly.

Just yesterday, I had time. Now, time was a siren blaring, an alarm clock sounding that it was time to conclude unfinished business because the buzzer was about to ring as the time clock ran out.

Such news makes one instantly compile lists, both mentally and in practice.

Okay, I tell myself, it's time to get busy.

I found lists of things I would NOT be doing. should I have a death sentence. No more painful dentist work. Back taxes can wait. News had no more real estate to occupy in my brain, and all the political nonsense and shrieking college kids got evicted in a hot minute.

I would make peace with anyone I could think of who I'd wronged (thankfully, this is a pretty short list) and do whatever I could to set my wife and kids up to be...without me. 

The surgery came. There was no pain of any sort, but I left the hospital with a catheter. Fun stuff.

Now, I wait for the lab results to tell me if I have cancer. This is the worst part so far. It ratchets up the anxiety level to new heights.

Some things are not going so well after surgery. Some indications of complications. I call the doctor to report the scary stuff, and I'm told to wait for a return call. The time comes and goes with no call. Do I wait some more?

What fantastic technology our medicine is. One only appreciates it once it's needed; up until then, it's just an abstract. I almost convinced myself again in the days leading up to the surgery that I didn't need it, as I had no obvious current symptoms. 

I entered the operating room on my feet. I thought it slightly funny that on the surgical bed, there is a pan built into the bed, and they place your bottom right under it, just in case of unforeseen discharge. I couldn't help but think of convicted inmates being strapped in for lethal injection as they spread my arms out. The mask goes on, oxygen flows, and you smell alcohol as it flushes your veins. The doctor says, "See you in recovery, " and instantly, from my perspective, I am awake again. 

Now, we are waiting for normal bodily functions to return and, more importantly, for the biopsy results.

My daughter has won the boyfriend lottery. He is a saint, and I almost feel like asking him to marry her because I no longer have time to wait. I want a grandchild, I realize now. I keep this to myself, of course.

My son has been working for our family business, and I have no choice but to pressure him to get the credentials I never needed. He has no time to wait or waste. I loath myself for wanting him to run a business, which has been difficult, but he was working at a grocery store and majoring in video games instead of college, so I decided this may be the best opportunity for him. 

Now, as I wait for the word on whether I have cancer or not, I can't really sleep. I hover in a twilight where short dreams come. I am a ghost in one of these, looking in on my daughter. I felt that when my father died, I thought that he came to look in on me. I was in a financial crunch at the time. I felt him say, "You've got this. " And, I did have it. Ten years later, I am well known and respected for what I do in San Diego, reasonably well paid, and my life feels stable ( current political shitshow aside ).

The waiting sucks.

There has been a lot of time to think about the life I've been living. Some parts have been really hard, but in retrospect, I wouldn't change much. The complex parts make the good parts more meaningful. There has also been a lot of time to take inventory of my beliefs and evaluate my relationships. I cannot wait to be better to my friends and loved ones; this starts now. Not that I was terrible; I was just a tad harsh. I had to survive a rough childhood, and it left me with an edge and a tendacy to be overly quick to anger sometimes. My feeble attempts to apologize were usually met with acceptance and statements of love. Maybe I wasn't the shithead I had long thought of myself to be. Nobody wants me to die, despite that grim internal voice that suggests they be better off with the life insurance money, instead of me. My wife wants her husband, my kids, their dad. My employees wish for their boss, and my bandmates want me back on guitar before a microphone. Nobody, it seems, is encouraging me to ride the disease to the grave, as my own grim internal voice sometimes suggests.

Death can wait.