What Now!?

My hospital visit in Nashville got off to a shaky, administrative start; they had to call upstairs to reorder the CT scan, I think I was injected with contrast solution one too many times (you can tell because upon injection, a metallic taste begins from the back of your mouth), the chest X-Rays actually went smoothly [a nurse, one of those short, very cute girls that I desperately need to learn more about, kept adjusting my poison ivy-ridden shoulders (oh yeah, I also had horrible poison ivy from going on a random camping trip where I fell into a tree hole after drinking a bunch of whiskey and going for a pitch-black naked swim, and apparently, the tree hole was also lined with poison ivy - oh, and I may have gotten fleas from the trip too, but there were only two fleas that I knew of, and both are now stuck to a piece of tape which has been floating in my partially full bathroom sink for days {fleas are notoriously hard to crush between your fingertips, and the little bastards can jump})], a well-meaning-but-completely-wrong front desk lady told me my mom was waiting in the hospital lobby after the chest X-Rays, I walked around the hospital aimlessly for fifteen minutes while finding out at a back desk that my blood work hadn't been scheduled, I eventually found my mom, and we arrived for my Urologist appointment about an hour and a half late.

Other than just having written the longest sentence of my life, there wasn't too much else to this shuffling of feet, papers, and medical equipment. The rite of passage to any Urological office is peeing in a cup; I spaced out while doing this and came to when the rising, yellow tide was about two millimeters from the cup's top. And then, I waited in a back room and itched. I had managed to catch the black blade that had spun three times (there were a few trials where I caught the flat of the blade after two and a half spins but thankfully, never the tip, and I found out that the ceilings weren't high enough for me to catch the blade standing, so I had to catch the handle on the third spin in a kneeling position, but I still caught it so that meant - shit, I'm doing the unnecessarily long sentence thing again).

At some point, my Urologist came in with a different haircut but the same small, strong hands. He told me that both the CT scan and X-Rays looked excellent; he also said that there was a 1% chance of any spread appearing in the retroperitoneal area and a 7% chance of the cancer appearing in my chest area or blood vessels. He ordered bloodwork for me as a mere formality, and he checked the lump on the top of my SuperBall.

"Oh yeah, that's small," he said. I assumed that he was talking about the lump, and that word "small" made my months of worry and uncertainty sound dramatic. The fact that the lump wasn't directly attached to the testicle and felt fluid-filled probably meant that it was a spermatocele in the epididymis. I'm having an ultrasound done this afternoon as another mere formality.

Relief... but a sick, troubled part of me was disappointed. You mean that's it? Where's the climax? What the fuck happened to all of my foreshadowing? How much longer until I get my in-spite-of-not-because-of happiness?

What about me, Me, ME? Perhaps there has been a spread, undetectable by medical tests, a self-absorbed slavery. And, dammit, if I ever want to be a worthwhile writer, I'm going to have to learn how to look beyond myself more often:

The day after the medical tests, I traveled up to Columbia, Missouri with my parents to visit my Grandpa Don on my mother's side for his 90^th birthday.

Don's back is bent and his skin mottled, but his mind is still sharp behind twinkling blue eyes. He was a gunner in the Navy in the Pacific, and he always used to tell me the bullets were the size of bananas. He also fathered seven daughters, six of whom still survive.

My Grandma Eloise is shrinking by the year; she is closer to four-and-a-half feet than five now. She makes dolls; there is a kiln in the basement, and every corner of the house has clusters of well-made dolls, but their metropolis is located in the basement. There is a small guestroom down there, where I used to sleep, that had dozens of dolls in cribs and on pedestals along the walls. I used to joke about how it creeped me out, but it was actually comforting to wake up with so many lifeless bodies watching over me. In the two years since I've been there, the number of dolls in the basement has reached the hundreds. Unfired doll parts also wait patiently in cardboard boxes. There is no more room for grand kids, but that's not an issue, since most of us have grown up.

“Go get my gun. It's in that pink purse you brought in,” Eloise says. I'm no longer in the basement – I, my grandparents, my mom, and three aunts are visiting my aunt Donna in the middle of pleasant nowhere. Eloise had given me a purse to carry inside after we'd parked. I had taken the rattling inside of the purse to be pills, since old people usually have several bottles on them at all times in my limited experience, but the rattling came from a full metal jacket of .22 caliber bullets. The purse also contained a small pistol with a five round clip.

“OK, grandma.” I had known that the highlight of going to my aunt Donna's house would be shooting firearms off their newly designed porch at targets in the yard below; I just hadn't known that we were bringing some of the firearms with us.

FOX news plays in the living room, and aunt Donna's husband, Gary, has military pictures of himself as well as a framed case of medals from Vietnam on the wall. There's a Purple Heart among them, and I don't know him well enough to ask for the story behind that. Gary supervises the shooting on the porch; everyone shoots except my mom. Eloise has a soft bandage taped over one of her eyes because Gary has assured her that it'll allow her to control her dominant eye as she blasts away at the target below. She doesn't hit the target very many times with her small pistol, but she's unruffled after having emptied several clips into the yard.

Don gets to shoot an aunt's .380 Bersa pistol, a noticeably nicer gun. He hunches over the rail and takes aim.

Blam! Blam! “Don, pull that front finger off the barrel just a bit,” Gary says. Blam! “Hey Don, hold'er up and back your finger off.” Blam! Blam!

“Aw shit,” Don says as he put the safety back on. There's a black, bruise-like smudge on his forefinger, a powder burn. The last two bullets made a single groove along the porch railing and blackened the earth-brown wood. Despite this, he has still managed to hit the target twice. He claims that he pulled the gun down because there was too much recoil, and we either agree or say nothing.

Later that day, as aunt Sylvia, the second-youngest of the aunts, is driving me and my mom back to our hotel, she tells me about the day that aunt Mary, the youngest, was born.

Sylvia was five and riding on the back of Don's big lawnmower with several of her sisters. The lawnmower was also pulling a metal-bladed plow behind to further churn up the yard. Sylvia's dress caught in the lawnmower's back wheel, and it pulled her under. Don heard the little girls on the back of his lawnmower screaming in time to stop the mower before the trailing plow cut up his youngest daughter. However, the back wheel of the mower had run over and broken both of her legs.

Don rushed her to the hospital, where they didn't believe the story at first and tried to write him up on child abuse charges. He was at that hospital while Eloise gave birth that day to Mary at another hospital. Don had never been much of a drinker, but he may have gone to a bar for a drink or two later that night.

Sylvia says she doesn't remember much about the actual accident, but she remembers being really proud of these clunky, olive-green shoes that she got to wear after the accident. They weren't hand-me-downs and were weighted to help her readjust to walking normally, since the crushing wheel had also damaged some tendons. Once she was well enough to go back to school, the kids made fun of her shoes. She was mortified, until Terry, the oldest sister, convinced her that the teasing children were just jealous.

Terry, the oldest, the sister who taught all the other sisters how to put on make-up and all about whatever it is that girls talk about when guys aren't around, is the one of seven not around to laugh at Don and his bullet grooves. She died of ovarian cancer in 1988, and Sylvia tells me that she was the only one in the hospital room when it happened.

And that's when Eloise, who had possessed some interest in doll-making before, started churning out dolls by the dozens.

And perhaps that's why I visit the cramped basement one more time before we drive away on Sunday, to be reminded of the beauty of stories that tell me about myself without ever having involved me.

I'm getting ready to drive to a local hospital for my double-check ultrasound, another assurance that I no longer have a cancer card to carry. I'm also planning my route to Detroit before this month's close; I don't know anything about the city or anyone there, and perhaps that's why I'm drawn to it. My question “Now what!?” still verges on panic, but I don't think it'll be difficult to answer with so much out there that is not myself. And I'm still chewing over the word serendipity.