How to worry

Monday, May 3rd, 2010.

Laying tile: days of tape-measuring, table-sawing ceramic squares into triangles, egg-beating thinset mortar in a five gallon drum, leveling. We've gotten better at this business, but we're sick of it. Everyday we push and pull at these cream tiles, trying to make the joints precise and all the angles perfect.

Since it is our first time, everything takes longer. Tiles laid once have to be set a second time. Concrete has to be chipped off the cement board because we forget to clear it while it is wet. Now we worry the joints--we have left too much concrete in them. The grout will not set well if we leave things like this. Or so we've read. We're trying to do everything by the book--a tile book.

So Trudi and I have been on our knees all morning, each armed with an orange-handled chisel and a hammer. We bang and scrape, scrape and bang. My laptop plays some music we can hardly hear under the shrill clangs of the hammers that make my ears ring lightly but steadily. The dogs watch us from the doorway for a few minutes, but soon they are bored and walk off to the front room to rest.
We don't talk much except to offer little tricks we painstaking discover along the way. "Forget the razor," I say. "It's better with just the chisel."
"Yeah, I found that too," Trudi says. "I'm just working in a line." I look back at her, and feel good--we've come to the same method separately, and feel assured by our mutual discovery.

"Call again," Trudi says after a long silence.
I have forgotten about the test results, losing myself in the rhythmic thumping of the hammers. I lean back, and give my aching back a rest.
"They said they're getting the results later today," I say. I rub the edge of the chisel as I speak, using my nail to clear away scraps of concrete. "I'm sure they'll call when they get them."
"Call them, Frank. This way they know you're waiting and they'll call you back as soon as they come in."
I am bothered by her pushing. This is a personal issue--the years I lived with my father and step-mother often drove me to madness. Their son, my half-brother, fell out of a high chair when he was a baby. Since that day, the two of them have lived in perpetual panic. I was not in their lives at the time of the accident, and so was did not experience the trauma directly, as they did. To them, Everything is an emergency. I grew to detest their panic. While I empathized with their anxiety, I couldn't help but find it needlessly dramatic. So for me, nothing is an emergency. I deny worry unilaterally.

I examine Trudi's logic for a flaw, so I can prove her wrong. But once I think about it, I realize two things--one, she is right about them calling me back sooner. And two, she's much more worried about this test than I am. Getting the results right away will be doing her a big favor, and wouldn't really cost me anything. I swallow, take a breath. "Ok," I say as I dial the office, and only after I start dialing do I realize that I am more worried about this than I've been letting on.

The message my doctor leaves on my voicemail is awkward.
"He really is new," I say to Trudi after listening to it.
"What makes you say that?" she says.
"His message. He was like, 'So, I got your test results, and uh, well, you can call me, and then we can, yeah, talk.' You know, very start and stop. It's like he doesn't know the protocol for doctor-patient messages." I found this to be cute, and sort of sweet. The doctor had told me when we met that he was new to the office and didn't have a lot of patients there yet.
"Interesting," Trudi says.

It's not until the doctor calls me back a bit later and tells me to come into his office that I begin to ask questions.

"It's a bit weird, right? Him asking me to come in today?"
Trudi shrugs, but the redness about her face belies her attempt at nonchalance.

"Whatever," I say. "I'm sure it's fine," and we both go back to chipping away at the concrete.

I drive to the Doctor's office. Trudi is gnawing away at her fingers. I take her hand and pull it from her mouth, place it in her lap. "Sorry," she says.
My cell phone rings--it is Trudi's mother, Penelope.
"It's a bit weird, his asking me to come in," I say.
"It's totally normal," she says. "You know, no doctors will give results over the phone."
"Yeah, you're right," I say, but it occurs to me that I have no idea if this is true. Then I think--if it isn't true, Penelope is probably not misinformed about this. She's trying to make me feel better. It's the first hint of what's to come, of what it's like to be the sick one: People behave towards you how they think you need them to. Even when it is the best way, you know it, and all the caring duplicity can make you feel very isolated.
"That was your mom," I tell Trudi. "She says it's normal, that doctors don't like to discuss results on the phone." I say this confidently, and Trudi nods, reassured by her mother's factualness. We both nod and try to focus on this.
We drive on for a while, not speaking, listening to NPR tell us about the mammoth dome they're building in the gulf to prevent oil from killing everything in sight. Trudi turns the radio off.
"I have to say something. Nothing that happens in there will change how I feel about you. Nothing they tell you will cause me to not want to be with you." She puts her hand on my shoulder. Nothing."
"I know, I know," I say, pushing her hand off me. "I'm sure it's fine," I say, and pat her hand onto her thigh, then give it a squeeze.
"I know," she says. "I just want you to know that."
I look out the window. It occurs to me, again, how wonderfully lush Kentucky is. We've been living in the south western and Californian desert for so long, the green of Louisville spring feels Eden-like.
"It's weird, though," I say. "It's one of those moments where everything can change."
"I think that's wrong. I think it's a common mistake people make, about these types of things. That somehow you become a different person because of being diagnosed with an illness. No matter what they tell us, you're still the same person."
"I know what you're saying. But it would change you. If I go in there and they tell me I'm going to die or something--how could that not change me? All experiences changes us. Everything changes us, every moment. Especially something as dramatic as, you know, near-death stuff."
"Well, yes, I know that," she says. "It's just not going to change who you really are."
This is a common trajectory for our conversations--we start off in the real world, and fly away into philosophical fancy, getting more abstract, and often landing in the same disagreement we took off from. This conversation is still mostly theoretical. Just another opportunity for us to bounce our views of the world off each other.
but as I play out this scenario, this is as serious as I imagine it. Trudi and I would imagine our worst case scenario for a little while, have our little death-fantasy, try to learn something about it. Then we would go inside, get the results, and we would find out--as one always does--that their worst fear was nothing more than that--a fear. This conversation would stay an abstraction, and we could go back to happily worrying about our tile, about our dogs, about getting the rest of the house in living order. We could laugh at our silly fears, and maybe find ourselves closer together for it.

I think about this car ride a lot these days.