Cancer Free, but Not Free From Cancer

When I walked into the Cancer Center a year ago, I felt out of place. It was so crowded, there was no place to sit. But I was comfortable leaning against a wall, wearing my business blazer, thumbing through my book. After all, I’d been in one just like this 40 years earlier, when I was a young man fighting lymphoma, all hammer and tongs. I was so confident a year ago that I was mistaken for a doctor.

But now I fit right in. I can’t sit up straight or walk any distance without a trekking pole to lean on. Even in what has become an oversized blazer, hanging off me like a lab coat, no one thinks I’m a doctor.

I sit down next to a man my age in a wheelchair. One of his legs seems to have rotted off, and the stump is just hanging there below the knee. We don’t greet each other or even acknowledge one another, which is normal here. In any other place, an observer’s anxiety might stimulate unwanted conversation. But here, he is at home. He casually scrolls through his phone. I open my book and reread the same paragraph, as I’ve done for some time, because I can’t seem to concentrate.

I am here to talk with my oncologist after a surgery that finally cut out the cancer in my abdomen a month ago. I woke up in recovery, and my wife and son were there. I was so happy to see them, but the last time I saw them after surgery, they were hallucinations, so this time I didn’t say anything. The nurses thought something was wrong. They shook me and yelled at me to snap out of it until I laughed. They had no idea what was happening, or where I’d been, that place I was returning from. I thought it was so funny.

“You’re cancer-free,” the nurses said, because everyone is eager to tell you good news. That seemed funny too, because now the oncologist was saying there was more cancer than he expected. I’d already done 10 months of chemotherapy just to get to surgery. He said he wanted me to do another year, just in case they’d missed something.

“Sure,” I said, laughing again.

He reminded me that this was serious. He talked about preparing for everything I’d already experienced, 30 pounds ago, and more than once, which perhaps he had forgotten.

I thought he must be in his 40s, at least two decades younger than me. Did he have children? Is this how he spoke to them? Maybe the cancer would come back, maybe it wouldn’t, we couldn’t know.

After surviving my first go, 40 years ago, I thought I could take anything. That was so naïve. I had nothing to lose then. Those secret places that protected my emotions, my dreams, my hopes for my family. Did he see that part of me, above the rotting remains, just hanging on?

That’s what it means to be cancer-free, but not free from cancer.

A nurse walked me out. You have to check into these specialist places, but you also have to check out because they’ve always got some list of exams or scans to schedule. The nurse sat me down at a desk in front of a small, older woman behind a large computer.

She half stood behind her monitor to give me a thorough look over and said, “You still readin’ an actual book?”

She had noticed my hardcover with its decaying jacket, a 1967 edition by a travel writer long dead, about his slow boat trip down the Ganges on a sacred journey to an unattainable redemption.

“I like ’em,” I said.

“Well, you know I do too, honey, and I don’t care what anyone thinks,” she said, tapping away on her keyboard while asking me about my medical history, and shaking her head as I answered.

“I work my other job down at the Walmart, you know, behind the hospital. We got a donation bin there, and you cannot believe what people think they want to throw away. We got so many books, and they just want to throw them away, and I said, ‘What are you doin’? Give me those books, and I will shelve them proper, and I will sell them, and you will see.’ ”

“How is it Walmart lets you sell those books?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t give them a choice, do I?” she said, tapping away. “I tell them they don’t even know what they got. And I do so love those books.”

She handed me her phone. “You just look at this and see what I mean.”

She had snapped photos of her bookshelves in a brightly lit store, the way other women her age might have photos of their grandchildren. They were stacked with books of all kinds — paperbacks, hardcovers, oversized cookbooks, or children’s books, maybe — all neatly standing side by side.

“How do you arrange them?”

“You go down there and see yourself, maybe buy yourself some more books if you like ’em so much,” she said.

“I will,” I said, because I understood. There were more stories to be told.

She handed me a card with six weeks’ worth of appointments on it. I leaned on my trekking pole to stand up and stretched myself as tall as I could, with a throbbing pain in my gut, and extended my hand to her.

She stood up and said, “Turn yourself around.”

I did and felt her hands adjust the collars of my blazer and shirt, which the oncologist must have messed up when he examined me. Then she turned me toward the exit and gave me a pat on the back.

“Thank you,” I said.

I thought she might say something else. But she just sat down and resumed typing before the next patient arrived.

Ted Olinger lives in Vaughn.