Anticipation

Tomorrow we go back to see the doctors--"The Brain Trust" is how I like to think of them--and get the biopsy results. Tonight, I cannot sleep.

I do not imagine tomorrow. I don't have to push this out of my mind. Instead, I have been awash in self-distraction. (I have always been good at self-distraction. This has spared me a lot of pain and caused me a lot more. There is no point in adding this up, because no one I know has a calculator for such things.)

Today's distractions? I stood in our mess of a kitchen and said to Trudi, "What can we do today to at least make us feel like we're getting somewhere?" And so we spent the day like we had been spending most our days before this tumor nonsense took over--on our hands and knees.

Trudi pulls out staples from the recently uncarpeted wood floors with some pliers and a chisel while I sweat and hammer the end of a crowbar under the thin strips of tack-board that are nailed to the floor all around the corner of the room. Clang, clang, clang, then push down on the crowbar and up pops a few inches of strip. Wedge it in again and clang, clang, clang, then push down and up come a few more inches. I move faster and get sweatier. "Are you alright?" Trudi keeps asking. I am both grateful for and annoyed at the tenacity of her concern. I wipe my forehead, over and over, careful not to touch the wound.

I work this way, rhythmically, thumping, popping, pulling along the edges of what we call "Room 2." We call it this because of its sequential location from the front of the house. Calling this "Room 2" was Trudi's idea--an idea I, at first, scoffed at. Now I recognize its concise genius. It's a family tradition: we had just finished a nine month life-transition-limbo phase, living with Trudi's parents out in Tucson, Az. That wonderfully bright and airy desert house had a "Room X", "Room Y" and a "Room Z". We have "Room 1", "Room 2", and "Room 3."

I found more distractions. This morning, a short and friendly salesman with an African name come to my door and so by this evening I had a surly installer without an African name also come to my door and then drill and wire until we had cable television with a HD-DVR box. Everything moves with such speed, MRIs, endoscopes, DVRs.

TV! I spent the evening watching Being John Malkovitch. The First 48. A documentary about Castro. I did not think about tomorrow.

But the hours rolled on, it was twelve, it was one, it was two. I went to bed, not because I was tired, but because I knew Trudi wanted to cuddle me for a while. I would like that as well.

In bed, once again, I didn't think about tomorrow. I thought about last week, last Saturday night in the hospital. I went over that night, narrating it to myself in the dark.

I would be lying if I said I have not imagined tomorrow at all. I have. Briefly, just in flashes, here and there. They catch me off guard. Sometimes in the shower. Sometimes when I'm hammering.

Here's what I see:

Me, Trudi and the Brain Trust sit at a long and very beautiful conference table. It is dark, but there is some late afternoon sunlight coming in through the windows. The shades are a very offical but mellow seeming dark-blue, and this is the same hue of the darkness. There are several chairs, seating a handful of doctors. I can barely see their faces. They have file folders they finger slowly in front of them. I hear words and phrases about the tumor, most divorced from faces and meaning. I catch something about its "marginality"--how much it sticks to the surrounding brain matter. This is important; it will determine my functioning and suffering. I hear the word "surgery." In my fantasy, this tumor is benign, and this makes me cringe.

As my fantasies tend to go, this is remarkably vague. There's no plot, dialogue. It's all setting. It is a still, not a scene.

Benign: I have imagined the most likely scenario. It's quite practical of me--always go with the better odds. But perhaps I am imagining it because it is the one I am more afraid of. I don't want the fast but risky and painful option. I'll take cancer and its slower, less dramatic chemo and radiation buffet treatments. I can deal with six months of the slow rather than the opening up of the skull. I think.