Chapter Six
I told the nurse I wouldn’t go anywhere. I told her I wouldn’t go for a run. I did not tell her I would sit down. Under the best of times, I am rarely successful at stillness. This may not have been the worst of times, but it was clearly not the best of times.
Cath sat in silence as I wandered the exam room. I became expert with the warning signs of skin cancer, as advertised by surgical instrument company posters on the walls. I memorized the labels on the drawers. I investigated the suction canisters hanging on the walls. I admired the heft and feel of the curtain which could be pulled around the exam chair. I was reading the warning label on the sharps container, my back to the room, when I heard the shuffle of many feet in the doorway. I did a quick hop, a 180 degree turn. There was a cadre of folks standing in the doorway.
“Oh, hey! Hi!” I said.
Hail fellow well met, I faked good cheer and happiness. The group was led by a tall, sturdy man, mid-thirties, quite handsome in an ‘I rowed crew as an undergrad’ sort of way. Four or five followers stood behind him.
“G’day, mate! How are you today, Mr. Stanley?” he said, in a perfect Down Under accent. “I’m Dr. Ludgate. Matt Ludgate.”
“What part of Oz are you from?” I asked.
“Oz? No, mate. I’m Kiwi, through and through. Auckland. Don’t ever make that mistake again.”
He laughed. There was laughter, in a world-renowned cancer clinic, in my exam room. I took this as a good sign.
“You’re one of Dr. Barkey’s patients. He’s one of our best referrings.”
Doing my best Clint Eastwood, I squinted up at him. From my 5’6”, it was quite a distance.
“Best referrings? There’s that much work? Well, crap.”
He laughed again.
“C’mon, mate. Lighten up. I mean, when Barkey sends us a patient, we get always get a great report. Good history, spot-on labs. He’s a good man, Barkey. That’s what I mean.
“Lots of sun exposure, Barkey says, when you were younger? Raced bicycles, spent lots of time in Texas? I rode a lot, mountain bikes, to keep fit for rugby. Played a lot of rugger at school. Fly-half, that was me.”
The fly-half position, near the scrum, the central moving hillock of players, is a bit like the quarterback in American football. The fly-half is typically the orchestrator of the offense and the director of defense. He’s called upon to sprint, tackle, pass, and think in the midst of rugby madness. I also chose to take this as a good sign.
“I played a bit of rugby in college; scrum-half,” I said. “Do you still play?”
He looked like he could still play.
“Not really, mate. Weekend laughers is all. I’m busy. Can’t you tell I’m in demand?” he said as he waved his hand at his acolytes.
He laughed at himself.
This Ludgate bloke was good. I was calmer. He had “established rapport.”
“I know Dr. Barkey has explained what we’re going to do, but I’d like to go over it again, just so I understand that you understand. Be patient with me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“Here ya go, mate. Have a seat,” he said and pointed to the end of the exam table.
I hopped onto the end of the table whilst Ludgate settled himself in a rolling chair. I glanced at Cath in the room’s padded armchair. She was quiet.
Dr. Ludgate caught my glance. He turned.
“I’m sorry. Mrs. Stanley? I’m Dr. Ludgate. I should have introduced myself straightaway. My apologies.”
He smiled. His teeth gleamed. Cath smiled back. He was handsome.
“Not a problem, Doctor. Don’t let me stop you,” she replied.
Ludgate turned back towards me.
“Right, so off we go. You have a 1.5 centimeter recurrent lesion just in front of your left ear’s tragus, that little nub in front of your ear canal. See, I did read your chart this morning.”
We both laughed.
“It was biopsied, came back positive, and removed as in situ, which is good, last year. But it returned, in the same spot, and not, not, hmm, in situ, one year later. This, you know, is not a good thing. Today, we are going to start the work for a square procedure. What we do is, we scribe, well, we scribe a rough square around the lesion. Each side of the square is a tissue sample 1-2 millimeters wide and about 4 centimeters long. We color-code each side by squirting a bit of tattoo dye into the biopsy area and then stitch you up. We use blue and red. I’ll alternate colors we can tell which end goes where.
“If you’d like something else, something that might match your wardrobe or hair color, I’ll see what we have. The tattoos are temporary anyway. The surgeon who does the final procedure uses my tattoo lines as his guideline for the removal of the lesion.
“We’ll send the tissue samples to the lab and they’ll read them off, see if we have clean margins, no signs of cancerous or pre-cancerous cells. Dr. Barkey explained how melanoma sends out little runners, little threads, mate, of pre-cancerous tissue?”
I nodded.
“He explained how, untreated, melanoma can create brain metastases, yes? I’ll bet he said ‘melanoma likes to go home to the brain?’”
I laughed and nodded.
“Exactly. That’s exactly what he said.”
“Well, it’s a pretty accurate phrase. That’s why melanoma in your location is potentially, remember, I’m saying potentially, without treatment, so dangerous?”
I nodded again.
“Excellent,” the doctor said.
“Right-o, mate. So, we hear back from the lab. If a side is clean, we leave it alone. If we don’t have a clean margin, we scribe that side again, longer this time, and further away from your original lesion…”
I interrupted. “But, how do you know how far away, how long…”
“Exactly, Mr. Stanley. Good point. That’s what I get paid for. Partly, it’s my experience. I do these a lot. I’m in my second year post-doc here. I do six or eight of these every day, three or four days a week. That’s why I’m here; to do as many as I can. I compare final margins with initial margins, so I develop, a, er, a sort of feel. That and sometimes just blind luck, mate.
“So, anyway, we keep bringing you back until we establish four clean margins. We could hit it straightaway, but I’ll be honest, that’s rare. It’s usually two or three tries ‘til everything is clean. Once we’re clean all around, we send you to the derm surgeon who specializes in these. You’ll have a consult and then he goes to work.
“All told, today’s biopsy will run about an hour. We have to do another? They run a bit shorter, yes? We’ll have less cutting to do. The final surgery? That’s up to the surgeon, but figure 3-6 hours, depending. He’s not just good at clearing out the cancer, this guy, but he’s a top shelf plastics guy, too. You’ll look pretty when he’s done.”
The doc tilted his head and looked at me a little cock-eyed. It was his turn to squint hard now. He looked over at Cath; my wife, an RN, BSN, MSN. She was sitting over to one side, completely silent, taking it all in.
He smiled from ear to ear at her. It was a very winning smile.
“Well, Mrs. Stanley, he won’t look any worse. Promise.”
He turned back to me.
I suspect I still looked like I’d seen a ghost.
“Geez, mate, I mean, Mr. Stanley. Lighten up. You got this. It’s early. We’re good. You’re gonna be fine.”
“Let’s get this started.
Chapter 7
“I’m glad he’s confident,” I thought. “Easy for Ludgate. It’s not his face.”
His crew looked up at him. Feet shuffled. Papers rustled and shifted in this pre-iPad chart era.
“Okay, Mr. Stanley…” he said.
I interrupted.
“Dave. Let’s go with Dave, okay? We’re going to be kind of intimate, right? What with you breathing in my ear and invading my face with a scalpel and all? We should probably be on a first name basis.”
“Right. Good idea. Let’s begin again. I’m Matthew Ludgate. Matt.”
He towered over me as he drew himself to his full height. He stood at attention, arms tucked at his sides, chin in, chest out and announced in a stentorian voice, “Dr. Ludgate, sir. I’ll be doing your biopsy today.”
We both burst out laughing. I heard Cath’s laughter.
In his normal voice he said, “It’s time to get started. I need to check on a patient in the next room. Be back in ten minutes and we’ll get going.”
He waved and walked out.
The nurse gestured to me.
“Okay, Mr. Stanley. Time to do this. I’ll prep you, numb you up, and then buzz Dr. Ludgate. Okay?”
My blood pressure went from normal to redlined in 1.6 seconds.
“Whoa, Whoa, Whoa! Numb me up!! You’re a nurse. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve worked in hospitals, I mean, anesthesia? That’s a doctor thing. I’m sure you’re really good at derm nursing, but I’ve been stitched up and had a lot of surgery, and doctors always…”
She smiled at me. It was a sympathetic smile. I seemed to get a lot of those smiles on this day.
Cancer; it gets your adrenalin running. At this moment, mine had me three seconds away from a 50 meter dash out the door and down the hall to the stairwell.
“That’s true, Mr. Stanley.
“Are we on a first name basis, too? Dave, you’re right, every other hospital I’ve worked at, docs always did their own anesthesia. But here, because of the way the patients flow through the clinic, nurses do the biopsy anesthesia. It was Dr. Johnson’s idea, you know, the clinic director. He had to sell the Board on it.
“He convinced them by having a few of us numb him up at a Board meeting. Good move, huh? Look, he was just around the corner. I’ll grab if him for you, if I can.”
She held up one finger.
“Don’t go anywhere, okay? Promise? Be right back.”
She smiled, and darted out the door.
She walked back in with the clinic director, Dr. Tim Johnson.
He walked over to me and stuck out his hand.
“I’m Tim Johnson. They kind of let me run this place. I hear you’re one of Walt Barkey’s guys. Walt and I go way back. Tell me, he still have that red Audi Cabriolet? Nice car.”
I nodded. I tried to smile.
I blurted out, “Yes, he does. You’re right. Nice car. Hey, I’m wondering…”
“Right. You’re wondering about your anesthesia.”
He nodded at the nurse.
“They’re good. They’re better, than any resident that ever worked on you in an
ER, I promise you. They had to be, for me to sell the Medical Practices Board. They’re all great nurses, and they know how to give injections. I trained them, along with a couple of our anesthesia guys who work with our clinic. After we were certain of their skills, I took them into a meeting. They numbed my arm. We did a little biopsy, just like the one you had. Then another nurse numbed a different spot. One of the post-docs did a little incision, like the one you’re having, and then stitched me up. Look, I still have the scar.”
He pushed up the sleeve of his lab coat. He had a scar, three-quarters of an inch long and a millimeter or two wide, on his forearm. I looked at his arm, then up at him. He smiled with pride.
“The Board was pretty shocked, I tell you, when we did that. But our nurses are good. They’re really good. They don’t work here, otherwise.”
He smiled again.
The nurse glowed.
I smiled.
“Where’d you get this idea?” I asked. “Don’t people think it’s weird? I mean, I’m fine with it. Now, I mean, after you’ve explained it, but I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals. I’ve never seen this before.”
“Not so much. Health care providers notice. People like you- people who spend a lot of time in ER. You guys notice. But this way, our clinic is way more efficient. The docs practice better medicine. They see more people. We use more of our nurses’ skills, too.
“Look, we’re going to take good care of you. All of us. I promise. Tell Walt I said hi, wouldja? Tell him I checked in on you.”
I breathed deeply and lay back, on my side, in the exam chair. It was not uncomfortable. The nurse leaned in and looked at the side of my face. Her breath was cooler than Ludgate’s. I could smell her hair.
She stood back, flipped through my chart and asked me to re-state my allergies.
I sat up.
“Biaxin, Ceclor, and bee stings,” I said.
She nodded.
“But no allergy issues with local anesthesia?”
“Well, I’m pretty sensitive to epi.”
Epi, short for epinephrine, is adrenalin-the ‘fight or flight’ hormone. Epinephrine is often added to local anesthesia as a vasoconstrictor to slow down the rate at which the local anesthesia is absorbed. In short, it makes the anesthesia last longer.
“What happens to you?” she asked.
“Well, if I just need a couple of stitches, or whatever, it’s no big deal, but like if need to have a wisdom tooth pulled, when they shoot the Novocain in, I could pretty much run a 40 second 400 meters, you know? I found out the hard way a few years back. My oral surgeon liked to use a lot, and it hit me all at once, and man, I tell you, it took all I’ve got not to rip the arms off his dentist chair, and maybe the dentist, too. So, um, yeah…kind of a problem.”
Even thinking back to my last wisdom tooth removal was enough to get my panic level back to Defcon 2.
“Let me note that,” she said. “We need to use a lot, too, so, well, um, we can use the epi-free solution. The epi, you know, helps hold the Novocain in place, and you’re going to have a pretty big field, so we’ll probably have to give you a few extra shots along the way. If that’s okay with you, then that’s what I’ll do.”
“Better a few little needle sticks, I think, than you needing to put me in restraints, so, yeah, epi-free sounds great.”
I leaned back, breathing deeply again.
The nurse reached behind her, towards the counter, and took down a Sharpie and a small flexible, plastic ruler.
“It’s how we mark the edge of the margins. Dr. Ludgate wants to start with a 5 centimeter square around your lesion.”
I felt first the ruler and then, the Sharpie, as she traced a square, two inches per side, around that odd freckle directly in front of my left tragus.
She turned to the counter behind her, reached for a bottle of anesthetic and began to draw the first of several syringes of the clear liquid. I watched her. She inserted the last needle into the bottle. She watched me watching her.
“Nervous?” she asked. “About the anesthesia, I mean. I know you’re nervous about the biopsy and melanoma and all.”
“Nah, I’m good. I’ve had lots of stitches,” I said. “Novocain’s no big deal. Gotta like the epi-free version, though. I’ll be asking for that at the dentist, that’s for sure.”
She laughed as she leaned in.
“You’ll feel a needle stick, a little sting, right? You know how this goes. After the first stick, I work out from the numb spot so you won’t feel the needle sticks from then on. This will take a few minutes.”
Slowly, from a spot down near my left earlobe, past my tragus and up in front of my ear, across the base of my sideburn, down the margin of my zygomatic arch; the bone that articulates with the back end of the mandible, and then back up to my ear lobe, I felt a cooling numbness in the shape of a trapezoid fill in across the side of my face. I reached up and touched my cheek. Wooden.
I heard a scuffling sound in the doorway. I didn’t think I should move so I rolled my eyes up a bit in my head so I could catch a glimpse of the door. Ludgate and his entourage were back.
“Dave-o,” he announced, “I think we are ready.”
He put on a mask. He was already wearing a surgical cap. I noticed his crew was standing well behind him. He took a pair of gloves from the counter and pulled them on. As he interlaced his fingers to set the gloves fully on his hands, the gloves squeaked like kids playing with balloons.
He sat himself down at my side, near my head. I could see him, if I strained my vision, reach for the parallel-bladed biopsy scalpel.
He turned to his nurse.
“Perfect. This looks perfect. Nice work.”
He turned back to my cheek.
“Okay? Okay,” he murmured.
As the scalpel pushed through my skin, I heard the sound of a kitchen cleaver being dragged across the plate glass window of my skull.
Chapter Eight
I was ready for discomfort. I have been poked, prodded, splinted, and stitched in emergency rooms and operating room suites across North America. Admittedly, when I get a cold, I am a giant sissy. However, as a ski racing goalkeeping bicycle racer, I proudly take my lumps and come back for more. Every scar is a story. Every lump left behind from a broken bone is a badge of honor. I am out there; taking risks and living life. As Patrick Swayze’s character Dalton says in Road House, “Pain don’t hurt.”
The shriek of that scalpel cutting through my face, however, was a sound effect for which I was entirely unprepared. It was, in the most visceral fashion imaginable, utterly terrifying. It was the slam of a prison cell door for a crime I didn’t commit. It was fingers on a blackboard. It was grinding teeth. It was the squeak of a knife against a china plate at 110 decibels in a dark, cobwebbed room. It was an explosion on a jet liner as oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. It was dread.
Until that moment, I tried to be rational with my cancer. I viewed it as an outsider. The research said this intruder was easy to handle. In my analytical brain, I described the procedure to the rest of my mind, and put matters, I believed, to rest. With the sound of the knife cutting 1-2 millimeters, the thickness of a dime, down into the skin of my face, directly in front of my ear, my reptilian brain let out one gigantic “What the fuck is going on here?”
I believe I paled. I know I paled. I may have gasped. Or shouted. I gurgled as I desperately tried to avoid vomiting into the back of my mouth.
Dr. Ludgate stopped cutting for a moment.
“Dave-o? Everything okay?”
“Okay? Um, yeah. No. Er, I don’t know what…”
“Take a few deep breaths, wouldja please? You’re scaring my nurse. Kinda bothering me a wee bit, too, if I tell the truth.”
His students lined the wall behind him. I could see their reflections. They stood stock-still, like the terracotta warriors and horses sculptures that depict the armies that even in death protect Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. I took a few deep breaths. My lesion was directly in front of my ear. I understood what was happening: bone conduction. While it is true that much of our hearing results from sound waves causing deflections in the eardrum, a sizeable amount of hearing also results from bone conduction. The sound waves strike the skin and bone of your skull. Much like a drumhead, the slightest tap echoes within your ear canal.
Have you ever placed your ear against a wooden 2 x 4 and had someone very gently scratch the other end of the 2 x 4? You hear it quite clearly, don’t you? In fact, sound travels nearly ten times faster through wood than it does through air. The skin and bone around your ears are also quite good conductors of sound. Bone conduction – the barely audible sound of scalpel gently cutting through skin was being amplified, like a drum head, through the skin near my ear, and rocketing into my ear canal. It was as if South Africa had won soccer’s World Cup and all that country’s vuvuzuela horns went off in my head at once. I sorted all this out in a few moments. Rationality didn’t help.
“Hey, um, Matt? Kind of need a moment here, okay?”
“That hurt?” Dr. Ludgate asked.
He sounded surprised.
“Oooh, no. It’s great. I’ve had lots of stitches, surgeries. We’re good there. She did great. You’re doing great. No, I just need to, ah, catch my breath for a second. Right?”
“Well, what’s up then? Maybe I can, you know, help things along?”
“Well, Matt, I’m not sure how, I mean, how to say this, but um, it sounds in here, you know, inside my head, like the top of my head is getting cut off with a chainsaw. I’ll, uh, cut to the chase here.”
Deep breath.
“Matt, it’s scaring the piss out of me.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, that makes sense, mate. I mean, I am working right in front of your ear. Right? How about if I just chat with you a bit while I work, and you, well, I can’t really have you answer much, your jaw wiggles when you talk and I am working near your T-M joint, so I’ll talk and if you need a moment, just hold up a finger and we’ll take a quick break. Sound good? Any pain? No? Good. Let me know if you want more local. Without the epi, the local wears off quicker. Okay? Good. Here we go.
“So, you said you played soccer?”
Back to work for Dr. Ludgate.
Back to Zen breathing for me. One. Two. Three. Four. And again.
As he finished the careful extraction of each strip of skin, Ludgate placed it in a glass tray filled with preservative. In my histochemistry classes at Michigan State, I had worked for a professor doing research on testicular cancer. I had done much the same procedure to lab rats. Dead lab rats.
He stitched as he went, carefully joining the sides of his 2 mm wide, 2 mm deep and 5 cm long incisions. As he stitched, I could hear the squish squash of the tattoo dye bottle as he marked his work with either red or blue dye.
“That’s it, mate. We’re done. Good on ya’! Made it. Want to see?”
“Yeah. Sure. Lemme see.”
Now that we were finished, my rational brain was back in charge.
Dr. Ludgate’s assistant held up a tray which held several small glass containers. In each were the ultra-thin strips of skin he had just removed; all labeled for location and all color-coded in red or blue.
“Nice,” I said. “That is very cool.”
“Can I see my face?”
“Sure. We need pictures anyway. Sit up a bit straighter. Don’t move. Smile. Just kidding. Don’t smile. Smiles’ll move your skin. Hold it.”
Hummm. Click.
“Done.”
He held out the camera. I had a 2 inch square scribed on the side of my face, outlined in alternating red and blue dye, directly in front of my tragus. His stitchwork was small, neat and precise. The square looked pretty cool, aside from the fact that it was on my face, and it outlined my cancer. On the other hand, it also outlined the sector of my cheek the surgeon would remove as he prevented the cancer from eroding away my face.
Dr. Ludgate said, “Here’s what we do. These samples go the lab where they are read by a skin cancer specialist. That’s all they do, read samples from skin cancer biopsies. Our pathologists are very good. Very good, indeed.
“If a margin, an incision, is clean, no cancerous and pre-cancerous cells seen, then we’re done with that side. If not, we get instructions from the lab on how far back we should push the next margin, if we should lengthen the margin. And we repeat the process. This way, we have the best chance to get all of the cancer and pre-cancerous cells in one swoop.”
“How do they know,” I asked, “how far back to move the margin?”
“Right,” Ludgate said. “About that. If they see a large number of pre-cancerous cells, they tell me to move it back a fair amount. If just few are seen, histologically, then they tell me to move it back just a bit. Experience, mostly, Dave. They do these a lot. We’re pretty busy. They see a lot of cases and they can track their recommendations against their outcomes. Data, mate.”
I reached up and tapped the side of my face. I could feel the little brush-like projections of his needlework. The stitches felt familiar. Without thinking, I tapped my tragus in front of my ear. Ludgate saw me.
“Yes. Your ear. I don’t know, at least until we get the labs back, how far back the pre-cancerous cells might go. My gut tells me that your ear is probably safe. Probably. That’s not a promise. I mean, you have melanoma near your ear.”
I interrupted.
“My ear. Right, I get that. But what about my hearing? What’s the likelihood that, even if everything goes pretty well, that I might lose some hearing? Or even all my hearing? I mean, I like my ear, but it’s not the outside I’m all that worried about. What about the inside stuff?”
“That, Dave-O is something I can’t tell you. With where we are now, as far as your lesion and its possible damage is concerned, I really don’t know what might happen with your hearing itself. I am slightly concerned about the aesthetics of your outer ear.
“But your hearing itself? You know that most of your hearing is deep inside the skull, right? So, if, and this is an enormous if, you do suffer some hearing loss as a result, you’re going to have plenty of other issues on your plate. Again, no guarantees mate, you know that, but based on my experience, and the literature on melanoma in this location, I have no reason to believe your hearing is at risk.”
I nodded. I knew what ‘plenty of other issues’ meant. It meant my lesion had metastasized and become lesions, plural, in my brain. Brain mets, in the medical vernacular.
“So don’t worry about that. Try to not worry about your external ear, either. It’s too soon to worry about it. When I tell you to worry? That’s the time to worry. Right?
“Normally, we get the labs back in a few days. Your skin has several days of prep work ahead of it before the pathologists can read it. We’ll be in touch by the end of the week, latest.”
We packed up and went home. I drove. Now laden with nervous energy, it would have been wiser to bring my bike and do a fifty mile training ride from Ann Arbor back to Flint.
I had been cautioned about not training hard.
“Don’t let your heart rate get up there too high,” Dr. Ludgate had said. “We don’t want a lot of blood pumping through there with all the cutting we’ve done. Ride. Lift. Run. Whatever you do, keep doing it. It’ll keep you sane. But, and I can’t stress this enough; Mate, you gotta take things easy. Get it?”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard Cath from across the room.
“He’ll take things easy, Dr. Ludgate. I promise.”
“Thank-you, Mrs. Stanley. I worked hard on this. We can’t have your husband messing up my work.”
In the car on the way home, Cath, a pensive look on her face, also urged me to relax.
“You need to take this as it comes. You can’t just go into your frantic hyperspace mode here. This is going to be a long process. I know you. I know you’re going to try and out work this, stay ahead of it, somehow adrenalize this thing out of your system. You know that won’t work. So try to be a little mellow with this, okay?”
She was 100% right, of course. I, however, had no ability to heed her advice.
Immediately upon returning home, I decided I needed to do the grocery shopping.
Cath sighed.
I was standing in the cereal aisle, choosing which Chex cereal we needed, when an older woman pushing her cart with a boy, perhaps 6 or 7, in the kid seat, came down the aisle. They stopped near me.
The kid was looking at me. He was holding a small stuffed dinosaur.
I looked back at him.
Stand-off.
I waved.
He looked down at his dino. He looked back at me.
“What’s wrong with your face?” he asked.
Not loud. Not rude. Truly curious, with the innocent manner that only small kids can be curious.
I reached up and touched the side of my face.
Grandmother shushed him.
Loudly.
“You mean this?” I asked.
I touched my square.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
He was staring, jaws agape.
I looked at his grandmother.
“Can I talk to him?”
She nodded.
“I have cancer on my face. That means some of my skin isn’t working right. So, the doctors will remove the bad skin and good skin will grow in its place.”
“It’s blue,” he said.
“True enough. That’s so the doctors know where to take away the bad skin. It’s red, too.”
“Hey, yeah! That’s cool!” he said.
True enough, I thought.
In the check-out line, I noticed a woman stealing glances at my ear. She leaned forward and, in a half-whisper, said, “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Can I ask; square procedure?”
“Um, yeah, how did you…?”
She slid the top of her T-shirt away from her neck. There was a nicely healed wound, about four inches by two inches, running under her bra strap and out to the edge of her shoulder.
“I was a lifeguard.”
She shrugged.
“You must be at U-M, right? You’re going to be fine. They’re really nice down there. I’ll pray for you.”
“Thank-you,” I said. “That’s very nice of you. I appreciate it.”
As we stood in the check-out line at Kroger, she reached across and patted my arm. Her hand was warm on this June day. I wanted to hug her. I didn’t. I should have.
Standing in line with this kind woman, I didn’t feel the need to state that I didn’t believe in the power of intercessory prayer. What I got was a warm feeling, that it wasn’t just me and Cath and the family in this. It was everybody. All of us are touched by cancer. Some 600,000 US citizens die of cancer every year. Another fourteen million of us, every year, live with cancer. In Kroger, inside of fifteen minutes, I was reminded that from kid to grown-up, it’s a fight we fight together. Like Red Green says on his PBS television show, “Remember, I’m pullin’ for you. We’re all in this together.”
At dinner that night, Aaron asked, “So, how’d it go?”
“Not bad,” I said. “I’ll find out in a few days if I need another biopsy.”
“Not bad?” said Cath. “You did great.”
With a glance at Cath, I related to Aaron the story of my two meltdowns and the biopsy procedure.
“So, Dad, pretty much normal, then?” he asked.
“Yessir, pretty much normal.”
Several days later, the phone rang.
“Mr. Stanley. This is the U-M Melanoma Clinic. We have your lab results back. Two of your margins are clear. The other two are not.”
“We have several openings next week for your next biopsy. Do you have your calendar handy?
