The Post-Machine Joy

This past Monday, eleven years after an epiphany on a day of eights, 8-8-08—that once-in-a-thousand-years infinity day of only eights, when I was paying attention to my body although I didn't know the full significance at the time, I checked into Mass General Hospital in Boston for my annual CT scan to see if I'd managed to stave off the cancer beast for another year.

It's always a nerve-wracking thing, climbing into that machine in a too-big powder blue hospital gown, 5,000 miles away from Hawai’i, with the familiar recorded voice that tells you to hold your breath, and then breathe. It's always a man's voice. A woman, at that moment, would be more soothing I think, but maybe it's not soothing they're going for. Maybe it's some kind of perceived authority thing. Your dad telling you to breathe, because your life depends on it.

This year, in the machine, I conjured one of the Hawai'i mermaids who can hold her breath for six minutes if she's not moving at all. I met her when we writers swam with dolphins and whales just weeks earlier, far away from the freeze of December Boston. Six minutes. She can hold it that long, longer than any singer I know, and opera singers can hold their breath forever. But not six minutes.

Inside the machine, the thing I both dread and await every year, the contrast dye pushed through my body. I've had many CT scans since that infinity day when I first requested one, not yet knowing I had lung cancer but my body knowing something was wrong, so I asked. And the doctor made it clear he thought I was crazy, and he called in his nurse because he didn't want to be alone with me and he told me he wouldn't put it through insurance because it wasn't medically necessary, "So do you still want it?"

After that question I no longer asked, I insisted. I wasn't polite. The same doctor who later apologized when it was cancer after all.

"I've just never seen anything like this,” he said. A 'feeling' with no symptoms. I hope you can forgive me for..." 

And he seemed so much smaller.

This year they ordered contrast and the IV got tangled when I put my arms over my head and they had to redo it, and there was some confusion about the need for contrast so they had to call the doctor while I waited thirty minutes on a cold metal table, remembering relearning to breathe eleven years earlier at that same hospital, on another metal table, after a surgery to save my life.

Inside the machine with its scanning sounds I thought about the two days of writers’ workshops that weekend and stepping out after the second day into the first snow of the season and the whales and the freeze and the words and the yin yang bliss/heartbreak in the writing room and the extreme beauty of the writers and the six minutes and the class reunion that same weekend, "Hey, it's been forty years, how've ya been?" And the meaning of even needing contrast because they were following something the oncologist said needed to be followed, and the technician telling me that the contrast stuff makes your body heat up “and you’ll feel like you're gonna pee, but you don't," and she said this even though she knows I've had so many scans I already knew all of it, and the recorded man's voice saying, "hold your breath," and I did, and then, "breathe," and I did, and then it was over.

Out of the machine, into the light.

They removed the IV and left the room and I sat there, alone, on the side of the metal table thinking about how I found myself there. Realizing that if I hadn't insisted back then, I would have missed everything after age 49. I'd be long gone by now. Most likely I would have.

There's usually an in-between day after the scan and before the verdict but this time the oncologist had to see me the next day, and I sat across from her on Tuesday, in real clothes, no IV in my arm, and she said, "Exciting news! The thing we were following is gone and your lungs look perfect (she used that word), and I'm moving you to every other year."

"Congratulations."

And she danced out of the room to the person in the next room awaiting news of life or death.

There's never been a year since August 8, 2008, without the countdown to the annual CT scan, but here it is.

I bought two years on Tuesday.

So, my friends, insist on what you need to insist on to save your own life. Your body knows what it knows. Don't be polite when you tell them what has to happen if they say no, accusing you without using the words: hysterical, hypochondriac, crazy.

Don't be bullied out of your instincts when it comes to living.

And then, firmly off the metal table, there's every precious moment that comes afterward. That's the post-machine joy.
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Every precious moment.